Desktop virtualization

Freakonomics: How H1N1 boosts desktop virtualization adoption

Desktop virtualization vendors are spinning their wheels trying to get enterprises to adopt the technology, but it turns out, all they really needed was a good pandemic.

I met with some of VMware Inc.’s desktop virtualization reps yesterday to discuss the next version of VMware View (4.0), which is due out next week, and learned there is a correlation between desktop virtualization adoption rates and the 2009 H1N1 flu (formerly known as Swine Flu).   

Though he couldn’t share specific numbers, Raj Mallempati, the desktop virtualization marketing manager, said VMware’s VDI adoption rates increased in direct correlation with H1N1 flu. In fact, he said VMware sold a VDI license in Australia for the first time when H1N1 started alarming people there this summer.

“It makes you think, did VMware invent swine flu?” Mallempati joked.

They saw the same spike in desktop virtualization adoption when the SARS virus hit a few years ago, he said.

VMware claims to have around 1.5 million VMware View license holders so far, which is between 6-7% of the company’s revenue, according to a VMware rep.

While these correlations could be coincidental, deploying desktop virtualization certainly makes sense for corporations that don’t want to lose productivity every time a deadly virus pops up (gotta love capitalism). With VDI, employees who don’t want to come into work because they are afraid of the sneezer in the next cubuicle can access their desktops from home. Or if they are sick, they can still work from their quarantine and not infect everyone else in the office.

So, although I haven’t seen any marketing campaigns fear-mongering customers into buying desktop virtualization as a way to avoid H1N1, it wouldn’t surprise me.

Solution for VMware Player security vulnerability

The gang at Milw0rm have posted one of the few exploits against VMware’s desktop line of products, specifically VMware Player version 2.5.1. This exploits the vmwarebase.dll file when running VMware Player on Windows systems. There is no chance of being able to run generic code through this exploit. In addition, VMware ESX, VMware ESXi, VMware Server and older versions of VMware Player are unaffected.

The issue occurs when you pass long usernames or passwords into VMware-Authd which will cause the application to crash. While it is restarted, a DoS attack could occur which would keep crashing the application and possibly filling up disk space with crash files as well.

VMware has been very responsive to this vulnerability and a fix is already completed. Check out this VMware thread for some more details. This type of response is quite commendable.

Milw0rm is a great resource for exploits of any kind, but since it is used by hackers it is best to access this site from a system you do not mind rebuilding occasionally; a VM works as does using The Onion Ring (TOR) plug-in for Firefox and Internet Explorer. It is best to be overly cautious when browsing sites that hackers create and visit, though they often have the latest exploits and attacks available.

Another good site is prometric.com, which hosts the 100 top hacker sites. As always be cautious when accessing any of these sites.

A hearty “good job” to VMware for their response to this and all other security issues!

VMware View Composer and vCenter architecture

With the recent release of VMware View, one of the hottest components of the desktop virtualization component is the linked clone technology. In planning how VMware View works, it is important to understand the critical component - VMware View Composer.

VMware View Composer is simply a Windows service that resides on a vCenter server. VMware View Composer interacts with both vCenter and the View Connection Manager. For environments that already have a server based VMware environment with vCenter and ESX hosts, it is clear that a separate environment is a good idea. This would be best served through dedicated hosts, storage and a separate vCenter server. The figure below shows how the VMware View Composer and vCenter installations would work together:

The VMware View Composer service, or svid, interacts with vCenter from the configuration set forth from VMware View Connection manager, which functions as the broker for connections. Once the linked clone virtual desktops are created, they then deliver the storage optimization that we have been anticipating with the release of VMware View.

One other feature of View Composer is storage over-commit. This functionality is a configurable level of how the linked clones’ delta disk, or differencing disk, is allocated. Looking at a guest virtual machine, the delta disk would be a very small percentage of the parent or base VM. This setting will determine the behavior of determining how many VMs will fit on a datastore. A setting of conservative will enable less VMs to fit on a datastore, yet run less of a likelihood of running out of space. While a more aggressive level will attempt to put more VMs on the datastore and reserve less storage reserved for the delta disks. With that information, it is critically important to get an expectation of the delta disk behavior to best utilize the storage.

A final key component of View Composer is the Quickprep feature. Quickprep does the guest VM specific tasks such as domain membership, organizational unit placement in Active Directory and run any scripts on the guest VM.

With this information primer on VMware View Composer, it is important to isolate the vCenter and more importantly be aware of how the virtual desktop managment agents will interact with the vCenter server. More information on VMware View can be found on the VMware website.

Next-gen virtual desktops: VClient’s not the only game in town

Although in theory, virtual desktop technology is a good idea, in practice it’s been less than stellar to date. There are a few reasons for the historical shortcomings of desktop virtualization. First, the benefits are a lot less apparent than with server virtualization. Second, rolling out the technology is expensive, and third, it isn’t quite as secure as it was originally made out to be.

VMware provided a solution to these problems yesterday with the announcement of vClient, a hypervisor-based approach that entails a hypervisor layer on a laptop rather than on top of any OS.

VMware not the first 
VMware, however, is the Christopher Columbus of the hypervisor-based virtual desktop approach. Just as Columbus wasn’t really the first to discover America, VMware wasn’t actually the first to come out with this particular idea. I met with a smaller company, Virtual Computer, on the VMworld floor today. Virtual Computer had also announced its product the day prior. NxTop — which is almost identical to vClient — stands out for one big reason: It’s here, at VMworld, and you can see it in action today. VMware has yet to  demo vClient.

Imagine having a completely virtualized laptop: You start it up and then select which virtual machine you’d like to run. There is no host OS, at least not on the laptop. For example, during the NxTop demo Virtual Computer had three virtual machines to choose from. One was the IT department-approved and heavily data center-controlled virtual machine, the other was a virtual machine where an employee could, for example, run iTunes and Skype.

As none of the virtual machines run on top of a base OS, you can’t install a keystroke logger on a base OS and capture supposedly secure information from the virtual desktop, which is a central criticism of previous-generation virtual desktops.

I asked the Virtual Computer team how it planned to compete with VMware. The answer was simply that VMware has focused elsewhere, whereas this is all that Virtual Computer does, so the company is apt to put more effort into it and do it better.  Also, VMware doesn’t actually have the technology available yet, whereas Virtual Computer has a beta release scheduled for November and a select number of betas in use already.

It seems that virtual desktop technology has reached a new level, and perhaps the developers have overcome enough of the previous obstacles  so that we’ll see greater virtual desktop adoption in the coming year.

NxTop pricing is $9.99 per month per virtual desktop, and the management console is free. When a customer reaches a critical mass, however, NxTop will direct the customer to a reseller for more economical pricing. For now, Virtual Computer plans to work with all clients directly.

Virtualization virtual tradeshow offers VMware networking opportunities

Trade shows are great – if you have time to attend, have staff to cover while you’re away learning about a new technology, can avoid summons back to the office during the show, can find a show in your local area or can get budget approval to attend a show that requires flight or hotel reservations.

Enter the virtual trade show (VTS); an online conference conceived to mitigate the above challenges. Last week, sister sites SearchDataCenter.com and SearchServerVirtualization.com hosted an advanced enterprise virtualization VTS. I helped staff the networking lounge and editorial booth where I had the opportunity to chat with VMware users about two of the virtualization provider’s newest tools, Site Recovery Manager (SRM) and Storage VMotion.

IM chatting with attendees
Conversations ranged from general IT talk (“Anyone use virtual desktops?”) to small talk (“What’s the weather like in Maine?”). Trying to be the friendly host, I said “Good morning” to the room. I immediately got the reply “Good evening” and was subsequently told this particular user was signed on from –literally–the other side of the world.

I ended up chiming-in on another user’s question about if anyone was familiar with VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM). The respondent had said that he was, and I ended up asking him about his experience via private IM. SRM orchestrates your virtual machine disaster recovery (DR) plan in the event that your main data center goes down. It prioritizes which virtual machines (VMs) are brought up at the failover site based on available resources, syncs your VM configurations between the main site and the failover site, and allows for DR plan testing without having to take the system offline. It’s a relatively new addition to the VI3 lineup, having been on the market for four months (at the time of publication).

Our conversation turned to plug-ins, and he raved about Andrew Kutz’s Storage VMotion plug-in. The plug-in adds a user interface to the out-of-the-box product, which operates through a command line interface. The attendee explained that he’s primarily a “Windows guy,” so a graphical user interface makes using Storage VMotion much easier.

Kutz recently released an update to the Storage VMotion plug-in.

“The new release now ignores raw device mapping,” Kutz said. “Previously, if you had a raw device that pointed to a 300 Gig disk, the plug-in would look at it as an actual disk and screw up the disk size map.”

He also removed the majority VMware’s internal code from the plug-in (excepting the code that loads the plug-in), replacing it with code based on the VI Toolkit for .NET.

Impressive user interface
The VTS emulates the look of a physical tradeshow floor, which makes navigation a bit friendly, though not as intuitive as I would have liked. You could either move around with the help of a clickable navigation bar, or point-and-click your way from the main entryway to the desired location, be it the conference hall, vendor hall, networking lounge or “library” where you can download PDFs of presentations and various information from vendors, which then moves into your “suitcase,” displayed on your personal page.

VTSs are essentially fancy webcast packages displayed in unconventional ways. In this particular show, the topics were “Protecting your Virtual Environment: Backup and Storage,” “Virtual Infrastructure Automation and High Availability Best Practices” and “Virtual Infrastructure Tuning and Advanced Management.” The speaker was displayed on the left side of the screen presenting his slides via streaming video. The slides were displayed on the right hand side. Users could ask questions via a box at the bottom of the screen.

The VTS, if done correctly, has many more plusses than minuses. As long as there is a reliable Internet connection, there’s no need to leave the data center (if you don’t have a reliable connection in your data center, you might think about leaving for good). The content is almost exactly the same as at a physical trade show (that’s how they got the video of the speaker to begin with). And editorial staff can send IT pros direct links to helpful guides that they know of if an IT pro wants to know about, for example, virtual desktop drawbacks.

If any SearchVMware.com readers passed up the opportunity to “attend” a virtual trade show, I suggest you test it out next time a topic of interest comes around. It’s actually fun to use (think AOL in the 90’s minus the “you’ve got mail”) and offers great learning potential and networking opportunities.

An archived version of the advanced enterprise virtualization virtual trade show is available online, short registration required.

VMware acquires performance management software company B-hive Networks

VMware, Inc. today announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire B-hive Networks, Inc., a privately-held application performance management software company with headquarters in San Mateo, California and principal R&D facilities in Herzliya, Israel.

By acquiring the company, VMware will add B-hive’s technology for performance management and service level reporting for applications running within VMware virtual machines on both servers and desktops. In addition, B-hive’s R&D facility and team will be the core of VMware’s new development center in Israel.

The terms of the B-hive acquisition, which is expected to be completed during the third quarter of 2008, subject to customary closing conditions, were not disclosed. This is VMware’s seventh acquisition in the past year.

VMware’s President and CEO Diane Greene said during a JP Morgan technology conference in Boston last week that VMware will continue acquiring companies as a growth strategy. The company grew 69% last quarter compared to the same quarter in 2007.

“We are always looking for technologies we don’t have. In the past year we have bought six small companies; we look to grow organically and through acquisitions,” Greene said at the conference.

What is B-hive?

Founded in 2005, B-hive developed a technology that gives visibility into application performance in virtual environments, such as end-user transaction response time, virtual machine utilization and cross-virtual machine dependencies. Unlike operating system-based performance monitoring products, B-hive’s product is designed to measure performance across multi-tier or service-oriented architecture applications that are distributed across clusters of ESX hypervisors and virtual machines.

B-hive’s flagship product, an agentless virtual appliance called B-hive Conductor, which was a “Best of VMworld” finalist at VMworld 2007, monitors end-user performance and issues service level reports, and also proactively resolves application performance problems by automatically triggering actions such as dynamically allocating more resources, migrating the application to a different server, provisioning additional virtual machines, changing transaction routing, or system reboots, accoridng to VMware.

For example, if B-hive identifies degradation in application response time, it can remediate the problem by automatically instructing VMware Infrastructure to adjust the resources allocated to the application or provision an additional virtual machine with an additional instance of the application, according to VMware.

VMware announces new desktop virtualization services, thin client certification

VMware, Inc. recently made two announcements surrounding its Virtual Desktop Infrastruture (VDI) product–a new certification program for thin client devices, and a suite of services to help implement and manage virtual desktops.

VDI is desktop virtualization software that replaces traditional PCs with virtual machines (VM) deployed from and managed in the data center. This presents a number of potential benefits: all of the information on that desktop VM, is protected from disaster and theft; thousands of VMs can be updated from the data center without touching actual desktops; and employees can also log into their virtual machine remotely.

VMware is not alone in the desktop virtualization space, however. Several vendors offer desktop virtualization products, including Sun Microsystems, Inc., Citrix Systems, Inc. and Pano Logic, Inc.

VMware’s certification program is based on the company’s open standards. Virtual desktop users can expect a consistent experience when using VMware certified thin client devices.

After thin client devices have been certified, they will be listed on the VMware Certified Compatibility Guide. The devices listed in the Guide will have passed VMware’s testing criteria for interoperability and quality assurance .

VMware’s other announcement today is a set of new Professional Services that offers best practices and guidance from virtualization experts. Here is a rundown of what these services include:

*Virtual Desktop Infrastructure Jumpstart: A VMware Certified Professional will train up to five staff in setting up VMware products, provide knowledge transfer and discuss best practices of deployment.

*Application Virtualization Jumpstart: VMware Professional Services offers training on running any version of any application on a single OS without conflict.

*Plan and Design for VMware Virtual Desktop Infrastructure and Application Virtualization: Begins with assessment and analysis of the customer’s objectives and existing infrastructure. VMware Professional Services then builds a blueprint for VDI and/or Application Virtualization deployment

*Remote Office/Branch Office (ROBO) Services Acceleration Kit: helps simplify the process of optimizing customers’ remote and branch offices using VDI.

The list price for Jumpstarts in North America range from $6,000 to $13,500. For education classes, it’s $2995 for the four day class, accoring to a VMware spokesperson.

Desktop virtualization is still a mixed bag

During a session on desktop virtualization at the VMware virtualization forum in New York last week it became clear that many hurdles still hinder adoption of what Gartner called in 2004 the next disruptive PC technology.

How much does desktop virtualization really save?
Kicking off the session was NEC departmental servers director Ken Hertzler who went through the usual sponsor sales pitch mixed in with some moderately interesting statistics in hopes of making the case for desktop virtualization. When businesses hand out laptops to employees, they are actually making a bigger investment than the few hundred dollars for the machine. NEC puts management costs somewhere around $4500 over a three year period; and those costs are rising. Of course, Hertzler identified desktop virtualization as the key to reducing those costs.

Mark A. Margevicius is the research director at Stamford, Conn.-based research organization Gartner, and he agreed that businesses can save by deploying virtual desktops. He said that quantifying exactly how much savings, however, can be sticky. “On average, our customers save two to 12% from a TCO perspective,” he said. Measuring total cost of ownership makes it difficult to pin down savings. For example, how do you measure how much you save in PC uptime? Or, to put it another way, how often do non-virtual PCs go down?

But it isn’t just about the cost of maintaining remote workers. The security risks are often enormous. Hertzler cited a local banking firm that estimates the cost of a lost or stolen laptop in the neighborhood of $50,000 when it’s all said and done. Although Margevicius wasn’t surprised by this number, he said that every organization measures these expenses differently. “You could argue that losing the laptop you gave to the janitor to play solitare with would result in high cost,” he said.

For Margevicius, it’s all about the capital costs versus TCO to which people need to pay attention. Most customers get hung up on capital costs, i.e. the investment it takes to get things going. What many people are realizing, however, is that desktop virtualization is a shared resource and that many of the savings come in the form of things like higher levels of redundancy.

Hardware requirements coming to the forefront
After throwing out some scary numbers, Hertzler ended with a demonstration of NEC’s desktop virtualization server designed specifically for use in VMware virtual desktop environments. The crowning feature of the server is its fault tolerance and automatic failover capability. In fact, Hertzler had been running his entire presentation on a virtual machine hosted on one of these very servers.

He asked a volunteer to unplug the power, and to the surprise of absolutely no one, the server automatically failed over to the backup with no interruption to the single VM running an instance of Power Point and what looked like Windows Explorer. Sweetening the deal was the nearly unnoticeable 30 seconds before he could open his applications back up–very impressive.

But it wasn’t the server technology, per se, that Margevicius was concerned about—it’s storage. “Most people at minimum take for granted the amount of storage a PC has. People expect 80, 10, 250 gigs of local storage as part of the platform,” he said, it goes back to the question of capital costs. “How much storage do you allocate in your data center [for local storage on virtual PCs]?” This, again, is a question of how much capital cost you want to invest in your virtual infrastructure.

Are we ready for desktop virtualization?
Gartner still sees maturity as a major hurdle. Although Mark acknowledges the progress made by VMware, Citrix and Microsoft, components such as software and brokering technology still need to be addressed and improved.

The question of maturity is raised in terms of scalability. Most deployments are still in the area of 100 or so virtual desktops and many of those are still in pilot or testing. Although he couldn’t release names, Mark said that he knows of a handful of people who’ve “gotten religion” over virtual infrastructure and who have plans to move into the 500-1000 virtual desktop range with the end goal of an entire virtual desktop architecture.

A showdown for your VDI investment?

Virtualization expert Barb Goldworm has been banging the desktop virtualization and application virtualization drum for a while now. She contends that there is still a lot of innovation to be had in this space and that businesses are poised to reap the benefits, despite pushback from execs. It’s a symbiotic relationship, however, between IT departments and virtualization vendor. In other words, an opportunity for a business to virtualize some aspect of their infrastructure translates to an opportunity for a vendor to sell that virtualization product.

But how do you choose which vendor will fulfill that need? Chances are if you’re on this site, you’re either deeply invested in VMware, or about to become deeply invested, and will probably choose VMware Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) for your desktop virtualization needs. For the time being, that’s probably a smart decision for you. It’s also a good thing for VMware, which is positioned to recognize Goldworm’s assessment and to take advantage of the opportunity in the virtual desktop space.

In a recent interview with SearchVMware.com associate editor Hannah Drake, VMware expert and author David Rule agreed. “Virtual desktops is where VMware is going to see a huge surge of revenue. Take a company that has 1,000 servers, that’s 3,000 - 4,000 users. Ten percent of number is a huge amount of net new [virtual desktop] licenses,” he said. Furthermore, Rule believes that investment to be sound because they’re already ahead of the game. In his view, VMware will remain the virtualization technology market leader. “VMware is the innovator in the marketplace. Citrix and Microsoft haven’t brought anything new to the market that VMware hasn’t.”

He’s right, at least in comparison with Microsoft desktop offerings. Virtual PC is more of an emulator than an enterprise virtual infrastructure for distributed computing, and it might take a while to see how Microsoft’s acquisition of Kidaro pans out. In the meantime, VMware is going to have to look out for Citrix’s offering, XenDesktop, according to virtualization guru Chris Wolf. As the major player in the thin-client space, Citrix has the shortest to go in order to compete with VMware VDI and ACE. In fact, Wolf noted during a recent interview with Drake that at last week’s Microsoft Management Summit, when customers asked Microsoft about desktop virtualization, Microsoft reps said that they [don't] have any current offerings but “strongly recommended Citrix XenDesktop” to their customers.

But Microsoft recommends XenDesktop for good reason. “Citrix has put a lot of work into Xen virtual desktop, and they don’t try to compete with Microsoft. They’ve been working towards interoperability from day one. I can run a VM on Hyper-V, power it down and run the VM on XenServer. I might have to change some device drivers, but I know it’ll run fine for me,” he said, adding that VMware has a lot to learn in terms of backend architecture. “From a scalability perspective, the XenDesktop architecture is a better architecture on the backend. If you look at the VMware line moving forward there will be substantial enhancements for virtual desktops, especially with storage and sharing virtual images.”

But what about price point? It turns out that the lackluster economy may turn out to be the wild card forcing change in the desktop and overall virtualization market. According to Wolf, virtualization price will play a bigger role in determining market leadership than some experts have predicted:

“For your average organization, it’s not just about feature for feature comparison, which VMware is always going to win. It’s about what is good enough, and what can I do with my IT budget, especially in [what is] arguably a recession right now. Price becomes a major consideration in purchasing decision. If I can get by with a product, then that’s going to be a compelling reason to look at that product. For VMware to maintain their market dominance, they have to lower their prices. There’s just no other way around it right now.”

Will VMware drop its prices this year? Only time will tell. We’ll continue to follow the virtualization price war; stay tuned.