hardware

Where regular desktops fear to tread

Have you ever marveled at how fast desktops and laptops start breaking down, even under normal working conditions? Try putting a desktop on the floor of a plastics manufacturing facility. You’ll be lucky if you get a week out of the desktop before something fails, said Kunal Patel, IT director at Nina Plastics USA in Orlando, Fla.

The production facility at Nina Plastics performs a process called plastics extrusion, which releases all manner of dust and grime into the atmosphere, clogging up fans and power supplies, and settling down on hard drives, Patel said.

At first, Patel’s staff would try and fix the broken desktops, which production workers used to log their job start and stop times. “But it became too much of a hassle for IT to constantly fix stuff,” Patel said, so the company eventually gave up on trying to computerize its production facility.

“We shouldn’t be maintenance men,” said Patel, who also oversees application development for the firm. “We all went to college and should be working on more important problems.”

However, that was before Patel, with a handful of administrative staffers, spearheaded a virtual desktop trial using a combination of VMware virtualization plus thin clients from Pano Logic.

By going with virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), Nina Plastics derived all the usual benefits you’d expect: faster desktop provision, easier patching and upgrading, simplified troubleshooting, etc. At the same time, Patel also found that the Pano Logic devices were robust enough to withstand the harsh conditions of the production floor. “There’s no CPU, no memory, no fan. There’s really nothing in there to break or get old,” he said. The company has since reintroduced computers into its production facility, giving customer service staff real-time visibility into the status of a particular job.

Patel also plans to add touch-screen monitors to the Pano devices, a feature v and supported in the Pano Virtual Desktop Solution (VDS) 2.5 software.

Patel had lots of other interesting stuff to say about his VDI deployment, but for now, suffice to say that he’s a fan. “It’s easy to fall in love with, especially when you have suffered so much,” Patel said. “I have fewer gray hairs, fewer lost girlfriends, and a lot of time given back to me because of virtualization.”

Making a P2V conversion: Driver cleansing

Successful physical-to-virtual (P2V) conversions revolve around getting the virtual environment correct before presenting the actual workload to the new VM. In this video blog, Rick Vanover discusses some conversion tasks that can help a VM function optimally as the workload goes virtual from a driver perspective.

Xen version 3.3 enhances performance, scalability to open source hypervisor

Xen.org announced the release of a new version of the project’s open source hypervisor, Xen 3.3 today, with enhancements to security, performance and scalability.

The release is now available for download from the Xen.org community site and is the product of a distributed development effort by senior engineers from more than 50 hardware, software, and security vendors.

The new Xen 3.3 release provides users with the new features including:

* Power management in the hypervisor
* Hardware Virtual Machine (HVM) emulation domains for better scalability, performance and security
* Shadow pagetable improvements for the best HVM performance ever
* Hardware Assisted Paging enhancements
* Device passthrough enhancements
* CPUID feature levelling that allows safe domain migration across systems with different CPU models (within the same vendor brand - Intel or AMD)

Xen 3.3 provides virtualization for x64, IA64 and ARM-based platforms, and through close links with CPU and chipset vendors in the Xen project, Xen 3.3 also supports the latest hardware virtualization enhancements, like Intel Virtualization Technology (Intel-VT).

With Xen’s memory ballooning feature, the hypervisor can reallocate memory between guest Virtual Machines (VMs) to guarantee performance and allow greater density of VMs per server. Xen 3.3 also offers CPU portability to allow live migration of VMs across different CPUs, active power optimization to reduce server power consumption, and significant security enhancements.

Simon Crosby, CTO, Virtualization and Management Division, Citrix Systems, said in a statement, “In just two years, Xen has rapidly gained share in virtualization, much as Linux did in operating systems - and in the same period Xen has driven the price of competing hypervisors to zero, allowing any vendor to include virtualization for free.”

In addition to its growing development community, Xen hypervisor is the standard virtualization platform used by cloud computing providers like Amazon.com. It is also used in virtualization products from Citrix (XenServer), Fujitsu, Novell, Oracle (Oracle VM), Sun Microsystems (Sun xVM), and Virtual Iron, and is available as an embedded option in many x86 servers.

VDI process selection revolves heavily on the endpoint device

Selecting a VDI environment is a daunting process. As I begin to evaluate technologies for VDI design and implementation for an upcoming project, the first step is often to identify the requirements from the end-user perspective.

Administrators frequently get wrapped up in the server side of a technology that the experience end of the solution may be overlooked. Two specific pieces of functionality such as screen resolution and dual monitor support can be incredibly important to the endpoint experience, and may make an implementation fail if it does not meet the requirements of all applications involved. By comparison, other topics such as USB device support, printing and sound are more of a policy decision rather than a device selection process decision.

We strategically arrive at determining device capabilities to match the requirements. At that point, we can then ‘back into’ various backend VDI solutions. Take for example the Sun Ray 2FS Virtual Display Client, which offers two DVI-I (digital video interface) ports that can provide a resolution with one monitor at 1920 x 1200 resolution, or two monitors at 3840 x 1200. Among VDI devices the standard offering is a 1600 x 1200 resolution which will satisfy most resolution situations, however. The dual DVI-I monitor may seem like overkill for a VDI-based thin client, but for many systems that perform archival by scanning documents, the high resolution and dual monitor functionality may be a requirement. Just ask any accounts payable clerk.

Some of this functionality may be circumvented by the use of existing devices, specifically VDI solutions that allow a Windows or other operating system PC to connect to the VDI broker. In this regard, if there are a very limited number of systems with requirements that may not be accommodated with standard endpoint devices, the typical PC can be used to provide the VDI connection from a full install PC. While not ideal, it is a decent stop-gap measure and a way to use of existing equipment.

AMD Opteron powering top servers on VMmark list

AMD’s quad-core Opteron processors powered the top three performing servers on VMware Inc.’s VMmark virtualization benchmark for 16 core x86 servers.

Hewlett-Packard’s (HP) ProLiant DL585 G5 with AMD’s Opteron processor is the top performer for 16-core systems on VMmark’s list. It is also used in HP’s 32 core, eight socket Proliant DL785 on VMmarks list, which achieved a score of 21.88@16 tiles or 96 virtual machines.

These results from AMD based systems aren’t surprising, since AMD Opteron’s virtualization assist technology has received high praise from VMware. One VMware engineer called AMD’s Nested Page Table (NPT) technology the answer to virtualizing large workloads.

Rapid Virtualization Indexing (RVI), a feature of AMD’s third-generation Opteron, includes NPT, is designed to offer near-native performance of virtualized applications and allows fast switching between virtual machines (VMs.)

Intel Corp. has announced a technology similar to NPT, called Extended Page Tables (EPT), which will be available in its next-generation eight-core microarchitecture, code-named “Nehalem.” Nehalem is slated for production later this year

VMware helps hospital reduce data center power, increase performance

Palo Alto, Calif.-based VMware, Inc. announced that Rochester General Hospital(RGH) deployed VMware Infrastructure 3 to scale and manage its growing IT environment.

RGH, a community-based teaching hospital, has an IT infrastructure supporting business applications and patient-critical systems as well as massive amounts of data storage that is growing exponentially.

“We started using virtualization to address power and space issues in our main datacenter. We quickly adopted VMWare ESX as our standard platform for new projects and consolidated existing servers,” Tom Gibaud, an IT manager at RGH, said in an email. “It allowed us to continue business as usual and we experienced no delay in completing projects on time. Today we are way below our power threshold and gained about 50% of our floor space even after we doubled the amount of Windows Servers.”

In VMware’s statement, VMware Infrastructure has improved application performance and availability, and strengthened the hospital’s disaster-recovery capabilities. “Before going virtual, our datacenter power supply was maxed out. We couldn’t plug in a toaster. Now, with less hardware, we have capacity to handle whatever comes our way,” Gibaud said.

The hospital now runs 50 virtual machine hosts running 400 Guests with a mix of large and small workloads including terminal services, Gibaud said. In all, RGH has virtualized about 95% of its Windows-based applications, including Exchange, SQL Server, the ClinicalCare portal that physicians and nurses use to access electronic medical records, and RGH’s billing system.

In the initial phase of the virtualization deployment, Gibaud said the hospital used IBM Bladecenter servers (HS20, HS21, LS20). “This allowed us to condense many servers is a small amount of space. With VMware and IBM Bladecenters we were able to consolidate over a 150 Servers into one rack,” he said. “Today we use IBM x3850 and HP DL580 G5 to handle larger server workloads.”

In addtion, the hospital is running 200 Windows XP desktops using VMware’s Virtual Desktop Infrastructure on just two IBM x3850’s.

More on optimizing virtual hosts

Eric Siebert’s recent post on optimizing the host environment is a very important concern that may frequently be passed aside in the interest of reducing implementation time for virtual environments. In this blog, I would like to pipe in with a few of my own tips related to the host environment. These strategies are applicable to many virtualization platforms, and will transcend products as virtualization advances.

DNS configuration for the hosts
Having a correct DNS environment is important for all systems, not just virtual environments. Pay particular order to the suffix search order, as the first result for queries should be consistent and timely across hosts. Also, consider host entries for fixed systems, with an entry for the host itself, all other hosts, the management system and any other relevant systems with which the host would need to communicate. A specific issue is VMware’s DRS functionality, which can have issues with incorrect DNS configurations.

Time configuration for the hosts
For platforms that are Windows based and members of an Active Directory domain, this concern is somewhat eased. But for Linux systems, you want to have an automated mechanism in place to manage accurate time across hosts. For ESX and VirtualCenter, Eric again has covered this well over on SearchVMware.com with a tip.

Also decide whether you want guest virtual machines to sync time with the host via the driver software (VMware Tools, Guest Additions, etc.) This will relieve issues that go with multiple time zone support as well as separate issues in time synchronization.

Get environment agent notifications right
For virtualization hosts on the server level, all hardware failure notifications should be configured to the fullest extent possible. This can be device alerts (Dell DRAC/HP iLO), SNMP alerts, agent configurations or even blade server management software. With the scope of the virtual environment, maybe even use multiple notification mechanisms.

Single hypervisor per platform
This is more relevant on desktop environments, but it goes without saying that you should not install two products on a single system. Even though it may be tempting to have the functionality of multiple platforms, it may complicate the host environment. Take VMware Server and Sun xVM VirtualBox as an example, they theoretically could exist on same systems because of the VMware Bridge protocol binding and the VirtualBox explicit host adapters able to have their own configuration. This is one of those just-because-you-can-does-not-mean-you-should scenarios.

Host configuration is an area ripe for configuration procedures and policy enforcement to ensure consistent behavior among host systems. The procedural investment can usually help present the virtualization solution with more credibility as well.

Considering external-facing virtual machines

One of the more overlooked placement discussions that happen within the design or re-engineering phases of virtualization projects involves systems that are on an external network.

The placement of external systems can be addressed many different ways, including the use of virtual private network (VPN) authentication servers, web servers or remediation systems for network access control. Consider the following architecture diagram where larger virtualization hosts contain all types of systems within the virtualized environment:

While the networking of these virtual machines may be configured with the same protections as their physical counterparts, there are some concerns with this configuration. This can become even more of a concern in the event where the firewall is a virtual machine as well in the same environment. An architecture that can better protect the internal and external workloads would be to have a separate environment with connectivity and workloads only to the external interfaces. Consider the figure below for the same workload:

In this manner, more hosts may be needed for the same workload to account for maintenance mode and other factors when separated. These additional hosts may be configured with smaller hosts and smaller processor inventory to not incur any additional costs or licensing for anything that is licensed by processor.

If firewall or other core network appliances are virtualized, their placement requires a little more thought because they may have a footprint on both the internal and external networks. In the case of shared resources of internal and external workloads, an outbreak type event on an external system may have resources consumed at the expense of the internal workload. By having the internal and external workloads separated, the risk of attacks within the operating system or an attack that targets virtual machines would be initially contained by internal and external workloads.

This strategy can be applied to all virtualization products, and can also be applied more specifically to network and storage configurations to protect in the same fashion. 

Test virtual environments make for better server upgrades

Given that virtual environments for x86 servers are relatively new, most lack direct experience in performing major in-place upgrades. While there are many ways to approach a key upgrade to a virtual environment, we’ll take a look at one example of a server virtualization upgrade: VMware ESX 3.5 and VirtualCenter 2.5 to the Update 1 release of both products. This release resolved some major issues, putting the spotlight back on the new features of ESX 3.5, namely Storage VMotion.

Maintaining version control on a virtualization platform is in the best interest of ongoing administration. With VMware environments, this situation is illustrated by the sequential upgrade tasks with older versions of ESX and VirtualCenter. The first step in making a successful upgrade is to go through the release notes and scour the Internet for existing resources that can make this task less daunting. One particularly helpful resource is the RTFM Education ESX and VirtualCenter upgrade guide by Mike Laverick which goes through many scenarios with specific, step-by-step guides on almost every topic of the upgrade.

Having all of the resources in the world may still not be enough to ensure a smooth upgrade of the virtual environment. This is where a test environment for the upgrades can prove critical to a successful project. Provisioning an accurate test environment can become increasingly expensive, but can provide a beneficial test ground to ensure there are no surprises during the upgrade. Consider the test environment shown in the figure below:

This test environment is a smaller, yet representative environment of the larger environment in that it may have the same storage system, base drivers on the host systems yet simply providing a smaller workload. This environment can be an adequate test environment for all of the basic functions involved with an upgrade. As for provisioning the environment, there are some tricks available such as using the systems in an unlicensed or evaluation mode, reducing processor inventories or taking resources from the live environment if the loss can be sustained.

Planning and testing are the best defenses against an upgrade failure. Furthermore, because the scope of a virtual environment is so broad, the investment in testing and planning should be a no-brainer.

Intel Premier IT Professional series provides virtualization resources

New vendors, strategies, technologies and capabilities seem to present themselves daily to the virtualization administrator and manager. One resource that can help is the Intel Premier IT Professional (IPIP) community.

Today I had the opportunity to attend the IPIP event here in Columbus, Ohio. The meeting provided a great vendor-independent view of virtualization products that revolve around Intel technologies. Planning your virtualization hardware environment is critical to the decisions that will be made in your current and future virtualization implementations.

Between now and the end of the year, Intel is conducting ten more of these events throughout North America. The agenda of these events includes sessions in the following areas:

• Intel product roadmap
• Client virtualization strategies
• Consolidation efficiencies through virtualization
• Application virtualization strategies

One important advantage to attending the events is that you can have access to non-disclosure information about the processor product line, a key planning part of virtual environments. But the live events are only the tip of the iceberg. On the IPIP website, members can access case studies, presentations, videos and white papers anytime. Also, every page on the IPIP site has a popularity tag that content of all types can be viewed from the tags.

The best part of these resources is that they are free. Check out the Intel Premier IT Professional website and register for an event in your area.