Virtualization

VMUG: Tech Data in Clearwater, FL.

Attended my second VMware User Group Meeting (VMUG) today. The first meeting that I attended was held at the Southwest Florida Water Management District’s office a couple of month back. Today’s meeting was sponsored by Tech Data and held at their Clearwater, FL headquarters.

First up was VMware which gave a presentation of upcoming features in View 4.5. Numerous alpha/beta screenshots were displayed which showcased numerous improvements and new features. We were asked as group not to share the exact features as this is still a work in progress so I will end that there.

Next up was IBM with a more hardware CAPEX/OPEX oriented presentation. Some of the hardware that was discussed was really impressive, things like 2TB of system RAM, blade enclosures, and 1.8″ SSD “flash packs” that cut costs and push IOPS through the roof.

The final presenter Qlogic, was pretty interesting. The presentation included 8Gb FC, fibre channel over ethernet, and 10Gb copper.

After the presentations everyone broke up into groups and went on tours of the Tech Data Solutions Center and then into discussions with each of the three presenters.

See you at the next VMUG.

–Himuraken

VDI. Who Will Win?

The VDI marketplace has been heating up. VMware’s recent launch of View 4 seems to have sparked more interest overall.
Microsoft has further cemented its partnership with Citrix to provide virtual desktops. Microsoft has also simplified (and reduced pricing) on using desktop OS in a virtual environment.
Recent promotions by Citrix (and Microsoft) are geared towards taking customers away from VMware. Citrix, which has a large installed base in the remote access arena, should do well with the XenApp to XenDesktop trade-in.
Red Hat has just announced that it will offer desktop virtualization based on KVM.
I expect many companies may wait until their next desktop refresh cycle to implement VDI. Moving to low-cost thin and zero clients certainly makes sense from an administration perspective.
This is an exciting time for anyone involved in virtualization!

– habanero_joe

Hyper9 GuessMyOS

This falls under the category of Fun Apps. I recently installed GuessMyOS by Hyper9 (who make several virtualization management apps). This is a plugin for VI3 and vSphere4 client. GuessMyOS replaces the generic VM icons with OS-specific for Linux and Windows. Personally I like seeing the penguin.
This is tied to the client so must be enabled for each client instance.

Hyper9

– habanero_joe

VMware View 4 Evaluation

After attending the VMware View 4 Launch tour in Tampa a couple of weeks ago, I loaded up the evaluation to give it a good field test.

NOTE: I recommend reading the documentation BEFORE installing…

A few points to consider prior to rolling out the product:
1) View Server requires a MS Windows Server (2008 is not supported yet) that is a domain member.
2) View Composer requires vCenter Server and is installed as a service on vCenter.
3) So far only Windows desktop OS is supported.
4) There is a 32-bit Open Source client available (Google it).

Note: View Composer is not required to evaluate View but it is worth the slightly extra work to see it in action. Composer certainly makes it easier to rapidly create multiple desktops from a single template.

Observations after a couple of weeks:
After the initial set up, I have not had to do anything other than reboot the View Server after it became non-responsive. This caused a seemingly unrelated error when trying to connect with View Client.

My next steps are to get the Open Source Client working and hopefully to get a PCoIP “zero client” device to test. My initial thought is why would I connect to a Windows desktop from a Windows desktop?

More later…

– habanero_joe

The Beauty of Being Hardware Agnostic

We can all agree that virtualization has numerous benefits. One of the obvious benefits is that virtualization makes systems hardware agnostic. This is one of my favorite features of going virtual. I am responsible for the network operations of many businesses and being able to forget about hardware compatibilities on the OS level is a major advantage.

We experienced the benefits of this ourselves today while upgrading one of our servers. We added additional RAM and changed CPUs. The memory was no surprise, it is rarely an issue. When it is, it is a hardware issue not an OS one. CPU swaps are generally more complex. I have seen many Windows systems become unstable after increasing or decreasing the number of processors/cores.

So when we got the chance to upgrade one of our ESXi servers from two dual core processors over to two quad cores we had to test it. In true anticlimactic fashion everything worked perfectly. The VMware server booted flawlessly and now shows the additional cores and RAM.

So if you can get your hands on upgrade parts or new servers all together, go for it!

*Update* We have since bumped the server up to 32GB of RAM, great stuff. We plan to upgrade the CPU’s again in the near future. It just keeps getting better.

–Himuraken

VMware View Launch Tour

Woke up nice and early this morning in lovely Tampa, FL for the VMware View Launch Tour. I have been playing around with various virtual technologies for quite awhile now. What I haven’t used at all is any form of VDI or Virtual Desktop Infrastructure. In my ever evolving quest to learn all that I can, I signed up for the View Launch Tour so that I could learn more. The event was informative overall, even though the presentations from VMware and Dell contained the usual sales pitches. VMware focused on View, ThinApp, and related technologies while Dell gave a full demo of the Dell EqualLogic SAN. This is the third or fourth time that I have seen a demo on the Equal Logic and I am always impressed with the simplicity of the system. Anyways, desktop virtualization is a rapidly expanding sector in the virtual world and is well worth a look.

You can find additional information on the tour here: VMware View Launch Tour

–himuraken

3ware 9650se and ESXi 4.0

Of course the first thing that I did tonight after receiving my 3ware 9650se was to install it in my ESXi 4.0 server and get it going. There are a few caveats that I expected and a few that I didn’t. Hopefully this post will help a few of you out there.

Here are the steps that I performed:
1. Physically installed card and drives.
2. Built the logical unit / volume on the card.
3. Booted ESXi and noticed the card / array not showing up.

I expected #3 from my pre-sales madness research, yeah I’m that bad about pre-sales. There is a driver for ESX 4 that enables the hypervisor to be installed onto the array. For the rest of us with ESXi 4.0 however, the array can only be used as a datastore. This isn’t an issue anyways since the critical files are on the array not the single disk or USB device that we install the ESXi OS onto.

This led me to 3ware’s support site to find the exact article regarding this. You can find the article titled “I need support for VMware ESX/ESXi 4.0 and ESX/ESXi 4.0 update 1 for 9650SE and 9690SA. Is a certified driver available?” here. Basically, the top half of the document applies to ESX while the lower portion is dedicated to ESXi.

First off, the fact that 3ware has this and other great articles is excellent, they seem like the “get it”. On the other hand I found something difficult to do, and not for technical reasons. They instruct you to find the file “offline-bundle.zip” on the included driver CD. I searched all over the provided driver CD and had no luck locating it; I couldn’t help but think that there ought to have been a download link as well***. After locating the file I proceeded down the list of the well written how-to. Unfortunately for me, after running the perl vihostupdate.pl -server x.x.x.x -username root -password "" -b c:\offline-bundle.zip -i command I received zero feedback from the CLI. I restarted the ESXi server per the documents recommendations and upon reboot, no RAID array. Hrmm, I didn’t get any errors or feedback. After shorting the name of the original file to offline-bundle.zip and re-running the command, I did get positive feedback in the form of this message: The update completed successfully, but the system needs to be rebooted for the changes to be effective. Delicious! Now were are working the way we ought to. Restart the ESXi server and enjoy.

*** – Clarification and special note: At the bottom of the page you will see a download link for a file named: vmware-esx-drivers-scsi-3w-9xxx_400.2.26.08.035vm40-1.0.4.00000.179560.iso.. This ISO image contains the offline-bundle folder. The file that you need for the upgrade/upload is named: AMCC_2.26.08.035vm40-offline_bundle-179560.zip. The process would not succeed until I renamed AMCC_2.26.08.035vm40-offline_bundle-179560.zip to offline-bundle.zip.

Happy virtualizing!

–Himuraken