Microsoft Windows

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.

VMware adds another Windows user to its customer list

VMware, Inc. announced last week that another Windows customer is using VMware Infrastructure 3 (VI3) instead of Microsoft Hyper-V to consolidate servers and reduce costs.

Independence Blue Cross (IBC), the largest health insurer in Philadelphia, has grown quickly in recent years, and their  computing demands and costs have grown along with its business. Physical server sprawl and increasing power consumption has plagued the hospital and the cost of acquiring and managing new hardware was growing out of control, VMware reported.

To reverse these issues, IBC turned to virtualization. The company looked at Microsoft Hyper-V, but ultimately chose VMware because “it offered a more complete solution and robust tool set, rather than simply a hypervisor,” VMware’s spokesperson said on behalf of the customer. Another plus for VMware was that is offers VMotion to live migrate virtual machines (VM), which Micrsoft’s Hyper-V product won’t offer until the next version, as well as high availability,  resource pooling, manageability and automation, VMware said.

So far, IBC’s Windows application environment is approximately 70% virtualized, including applications like Active Directory, Exchange, SharePoint and SQL Server, PeopleSoft and Oracle 9i. There are 386 VMs are running on 48 physical hosts, and CPU utilization has increased from 5% to 75%, VMware reported.

Michael Garber, director of distributed infrastructure, at IBC, stated in the release that VI3 paid for itself in less than 16 months and helped IBC avoid more than $1 million in hardware costs.

VMware currently has over 3,000 hospitals on its list of customers, according to VMware.

VMware release lots of customer case studies to show the world how great they are, but when they announce Windows users as customers, Microsoft Hyper-V takes a bullet.  Hyper-V is built right in to Windows Server 2008, so why wouldn’t a Windows user just virtualize with Hyper-V? That’s Microsoft’s argument, and it looks like people aren’t buying it.

There is a ton of speculation on whether Hyper-V will be able to surpass VMware in the virtualization market, but I haven’t seen anything from Microsoft (like Hyper-V customers!) signaling that possibility.

VMware virtualizes Nationwide Services’ Windows environment

Palo Alto, Calif.-based VMware, Inc. announced that Nationwide Services Co., which provides shared services to the Nationwide family of companies, has deployed VMware Infrastructure 3, to consolidate Nationwide’s Windows-based server environment and undo physical server sprawl.

Nationwide Services Co., a unit of Nationwide Mutual Insurance Company, initially deployed VMware Infrastructure to reverse the effects of server sprawl and lower power consumption. Using a mixture of VMware and zLinux virtualization software that are complementary to each other, Nationwide reduced over 700 physical hosts.

So far, Nationwide has achieved a virtual-to-physical consolidation ratio of 13:1 and virtualization has helped Nationwide increase server utilization from an average of 15 percent to 70 percent.

Nationwide started its consolidation project with over 5000 HP servers, mostly DL385 and DL585 servers in 2004, and are now down to around 3,300 physical servers with over 1,200 virtual servers, said Scott Miggo, vice president of infrastructure engineering at Nationwide Services Co. 

Nationwide has not upgraded to Windows Server 2008, which has Microsoft’s hypervisor Hyper-V built in, and Miggos said he has no immediate plans to move there. 

“We may look at Hyper-V in the future when it is more tested and mature, but for know we feel VMware is more mature and my staff is fully trained on Vmware,” Miggos said. “Since we have been using VMware for over 4 years with good success, no major issues and an enterprise licensing agreement with VMware that help hold down our costs, we feel very comfortable staying with Vmware for the near term future. “

In addition, Nationwide has already saved $2.2 million in hardware and expects to save even more by replacing additional physical servers with virtual machines. The company is also saving on its power bills, because they have reduced energy consumption and streamlined system administration.All of this was done without affecting availability, VMware reported.

VMware’s PR department is hard at work: More case studies

VMware always has plenty of customers to vouch for their products, and their PR team certainly isn’t shy about sending journalists examples. I get so many emails touting the latest VMware success that I could publish new VMware Infrastructure case studies every week. (Hey VMware — if you’re reading this, we know people like your product and how they benefit from it. You don’t have to point it out every other day, but thanks.)

Speaking of virtualization case studies, I wish other software companies were as forthcoming about their customers. Most software companies send out product press releases that are riddled with marketing speak and not enough meat, with no customers to back up claims like “number one provider” of this or “the world’s best” that. Even Microsoft Corp. wouldn’t give me a Hyper-V customer to chat with after their virtualization product was released on the commercial market this summer. To be fair, however, there are virtualization companies that do offer up customers like Massachusetts-based Virtual Iron. But I digress.

Since I have a few VMware case studies from September cramming my Inbox, here they are in summary.

Accountants Inc.
On September 30, VMware announced that Accountants Inc., an accounting and finance department staffing agency, deployed VMware’s virtualization and management suite VMware Infrastructure 3 to lower its overhead, meet its disaster-recovery requirements, and make its data center more flexible.

Accountants Inc. had been using a single physical server per application, and as the company approached a hardware refresh cycle, it found that virtualization would be more cost-effective, VMware reported.

Donald Wong, manager of IT operations and development at Accountants, Inc., stated that if the company continued deploying physical machines in a ‘one server to one application’ way, it would have cost to much. “Now, we’ve standardized on VMware and we have a strict virtualization-first policy. As a result, we can spend less time managing our IT infrastructure and more time focusing on bigger picture things, like growing the business,” Wong said in the VMware statement.

The company was also able to reduce its data center footprint by consolidating about 50 physical servers onto 10 VMware ESX Servers, which led to added savings in power and cooling costs.

Interfaith Medical Center
On September 23, VMware announced that Interfaith Medical Center (IMC) of Brooklyn, New York is using VMware Infrastructure 3 to create a virtualized environment for the Microsoft Windows-based applications.

The hospital began investigating virtualization when its server hardware requirements reached unsustainable levels; IMC faced power, space and budget constraints and needed a solution, VMware reported. After considering offerings from VMware, Microsoft and Citrix, IMC selected VMware Infrastructure and is now running nearly all of its critical applications in VMware virtual machines. The hospital also implemented a VMware-first policy for all new applications, VMware reported.

IMC has reportedly achieved consolidation ratios as high as 17:1 on its physical hosts and has virtualized approximately 95% of its Microsoft Windows-based applications, including IMC’s core Meditech health information system used for patient care and billing, BlackBerry Enterprise Server, Microsoft SharePoint, Kronos software for timekeeping and scheduling, and Lawson software for finance and accounting.

CITOC
On September 3, VMware announced that Houston-based CITOC, an award-winning provider of managed and hosted IT solutions, standardized on VMware Infrastructure as its application environment for internal systems and client solutions.

CITOC, whose customers including Lockheed Martin, Mary Kay Cosmetics, Sysco Foods and Carriage Services, evaluated a number of virtualization platforms to incorporate into its IT operations, including VMware Infrastructure and Microsoft Hyper-V. CITOC opted to standardize on the VMware platform, mainly because they could run three times as many virtual machines on VMware Infrastructure as it could on Microsoft Hyper-V with identical hardware, VMware reported.

James Garrett, chief operating officer at CITOC, said in VMware’s statement that CITOC guarantees 99.999% application availability for clients, and is trusting VMware to help them stick to that guarantee.

Garrett estimates that CITOC is hosting nearly 5,000 virtual machines for its customers. About 85% of those virtual machines are running Microsoft Windows-based applications. Internally, CITOC is using VMware for applications like Microsoft Dynamics, Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft SharePoint, Microsoft SQL Server, and BlackBerry Enterprise Server.

Garrett reported that one customer was running 343 physical machines when it hired CITOC to streamline its IT operations. Today, the customer is supporting its entire application environment with 16 blade servers (32 including redundancy) running VMware Infrastructure.

VMware achieves Microsoft SVVP validation - New reason to upgrade to ESX 3.5 Update 2

Now there is added incentive to upgrade your VMware hosts to ESX version 3.5 Update 2 (ESX 3.5 U2). Today VMware announced that they are the first hypervisor to be validated by Microsoft in the Microsoft Server Virtualization Validation Program (SVVP). This means that VMware customers that run Microsoft applications like Exchange and SQL (full list of applications here) on ESX 3.5 U2 virtual machines now are entitled to expanded, cooperative support from both companies. It is important to note that the only SVVP validated version of VMware’s ESX hypervisor is the latest, version ESX 3.5 U2. This means that VMware customers still running any previous versions do not qualify for the new support policy. Both VMware and Microsoft published helpful information about this news today.

VMware’s official announcement explains the following:

“Under this program, Microsoft offers cooperative technical support to customers running Windows Server on validated, non-Microsoft server virtualization software, such as VMware ESX 3.5 update 2. Customers with support policies in place, and running Windows Server-based applications on VMware ESX 3.5u2, can receive cooperative technical support from Microsoft. VMware also offers an extra layer of protection for customers, outside of Microsoft’s Server Virtualization Validation Program, who work directly with VMware for support. The additional protection is a part of the VMware Premier Support contract with Microsoft that enables VMware to escalate application issues rapidly and work directly with Microsoft engineers to expedite resolution. “

The Windows Virtualization Team Blog published a post titled The Validated Hypervisor.

“ESX 3.5 update 2 now joins Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V as being validated to run Windows Server and associated Microsoft server applications. And now that ESX 3.5 has passed SVVP, VMware customers will join Novell customers as receiving cooperative technical support (if there’s a support policy in place, and the customer is running the validated configuration) for Microsoft software running in/on their virtualization software.”

This same Windows Virtualization Team Blog post also refers to Microsoft’s KB article 897615 originally published on August 19, 2008:

“… for vendors with whom Microsoft has established a support relationship that covers virtualization solutions, or for vendors who have Server Virtualization Validation Program (SVVP) validated solutions, Microsoft will support server operating systems subject to the Microsoft Support Lifecycle policy for its customers who have support agreements when the operating system runs virtualized on non-Microsoft hardware virtualization software. This support will include coordinating with the vendor to jointly investigate support issues.”

For more information on this great news read the complete articles and posts at the links above. Although ESXi 3.5 is not mentioned in either the Microsoft or VMware announcements today, I would assume since the kernel is the same for both versions ESXi 3.5 U2 is also considered validated under the SVVP policy. However, this is just my guess.

I would expect that any administrators that are currently skeptical about upgrading to ESX 3.5 U2 now have a compelling reason to reconsider.

VMware Workstation 6.5 and ACE 2.5 both available in Beta 2

VMware has just announced the availability of VMware Workstation 6.5 Beta 2 and VMware ACE 2.5 Beta 2 through their new Beta Portal.

VMware Workstation 6 makes it possible for multiple virtual machines (VMs) to run on a desktop or laptop. An existing physical PC can be converted into a VMware VM, or a new VM can be created from scratch. Each VM then represents a complete PC, including the processor, memory, network connections and peripheral ports, and can run Windows, Linux and a host of other operating systems side-by-side on the same computer.

Here is what’s new in Workstation 6.5:

A record/replay functionality in the integrated virtual debugger. You can deploy your applications in “record” mode directly from Visual Studio to capture your entire virtual machine (VM) execution. Record/Replay functionality has been added to the existing Integrated Virtual Debugger plug to reproduce exact VM executions and debug the application during replay and identify defects without leaving the familiar Integrated Development Environment (IDE).

It includes multi-monitor support for Unity, so users can integrate guest applications with host machines across two or more monitors.

VMware has also added support for virtual machine streaming, so users can start using their VMs without waiting for them to completely finish downloading from the Virtual Appliance Marketplace or a HTTP server.

VMware’s ACE is used to provision standardized client PC environments inside secure and centrally managed VMs. Each ACE contains a complete client PC—including the operating system and all applications.

ACE 2.5 users will be able to take advantage of all new features in Workstation 6.5, plus these new features;

Now there is a Kiosk Mode, so virtual desktops can be deployed to shared physical PCs while preventing the host operating system from misuse or from attacks.

There is a Full Screen Toggle Mode, so IT can switch full-screen views between guests or between guest and host operating system via hot keys.

And lastly, the new version includes Pocket ACE Caching, which improves performance of Pocket ACE by setting pre-defined maximum cache size.

Virtualization Competitive Analysis in the middle of an ROI Calculator?

Microsoft recently published their Integrated Virtualization – ROI Tool, and I thought “That’s great. When the time comes I will have the ability to provide Microsoft branded reports to support a Microsoft virtual infrastructure opportunity.” I did not take the time to check out calculator first, but I assumed (or hoped) that it would provide clear answers about licensing costs and the confusing licensing options for virtualization. It wasn’t until I read VMware’s post Microsoft’s Virtualization ROI/TCO Calculator: Our Take that I decided I’d better understand what Microsoft’s ROI calculator produced.

Specifically, VMware’s post asked me to consider the inaccuracies they found:

“… evaluate the Microsoft calculator yourself – let us know what else you find! “

So I did just that, but it wasn’t how Microsoft calculated the numbers that bothered me most. I struggled to understand why a TCO and ROI calculator included a competitive analysis. After all, VMware’s TCO calculator doesn’t compare the cost of competitor’s products. What does that have to do with return on investment? It just seems out of place to me. Furthermore, if you go back and review VMware’s points they are mostly about the competitive cost comparison, too. It’s easy to forget we are discussing a TCO / ROI calculator.

As for using the calculator for ROI, it’s fine, I guess. But it did not live up to my basic expectations of helping with licensing. In fact, intentional or not, Microsoft comes across as trying to hide accurate licensing costs, as VMware points out:

“We did find a one-line disclaimer buried in the 66-page document: “Warning – Check pricing advice and rules as the automated recommendations here may not reflect all licensing rules.” Come on, guys - licensing is such a basic component for accurate TCO estimates. The disclaimer feels pretty weak.”

On the other hand, I think I can use the Windows Server Virtualization Calculators to help estimate licensing costs. But I shouldn’t have to use another calculator to verify the first one. Overall, I am left with the same feeling I get when trying to buy a new car. It’s similar to that doubt about the “dealership transport” charges or the frustration of feeling that I’m missing hidden costs even though the price is right. I am being forced to do way too much research.

I understand that the next few years will be filled with explaining the technical and financial differences between Microsoft, Citrix, VMware and all the other virtualization products. A competitive analysis calculator would come in handy. A single, unbiased virtualization competition calculator might be impossible to create, but even separate tools from each vendor that let you enter your own pricing numbers would be a great start. Call these tools what they really are. Don’t hide them in an ROI Calculator.

VMware: beware of bridge-building competitors

VMware may be king of the virtualization mountain now. But it should beware of bridge-building competitors.

Chris Wolf, an analyst with the Burton Group, warned that Novell Inc. was similarly at the top of the world in the late 1980s with its NetWare network operating system, which filled a key gap in Microsoft products. Addressing the problem, Microsoft responded with Windows NT, a weaker alternative to NetWare but “good enough” and stronger over time, and featuring a Gateway Services tool with just enough interoperability to make it easy to port data between the two systems.

But that “gateway” eventually became a floodgate, siphoning off Novell NetWare customers, who now had an easy way to migrate to Microsoft NT and a motive for doing so: Microsoft had a much larger package of software solutions while Novell’s NetWare was just a single point solution. Farewell, Novell NetWare.

Fast forward to 2008. VMware is the undisputed leader in virtualization, the hottest thing in the software market. And as part of its interoperability measures, Microsoft’s new System Center Virtual Machine Manager will have extenders to VMware. Microsoft will also launch its far more modest Hyper-V virtualization software at the giveaway price of $28 per server this summer. But, clearly, Microsoft will be working at furious speed to make it more competitive.

VMware, like Novell NetWare, is a point solution, and Microsoft, even more than in the 1980s, is a giant ecosystem with an overwhelming share of the global software market.

“This is a great strategy for Microsoft,” Wolf said. “It’s providing just enough interoperability [with VMware] to give some management with the goal of facilitating migration. And when users get comfortable with those tools, they will slowly migrate over to Microsoft.

“It’s exactly the same runbook as Microsoft ran against Novell,” Wolf said. “It’s pretty eerie.”

Fortune 500 company uses VMware to slash long term power costs

Santa Ana, Calif.-based First American Corp., a Fortune 500 company that provides business information and analytics, is standardizing its data center with virtualization software from VMware, Inc. to improve power efficiency and better server utilization rates.

First American’s Enterprise Architect, Jake Seitz, said the increasing cost of power was the most significant driver for virtualization.

“In Q407 we started looking at our utility costs and our data center footprint, and realized that embracing virtualization would help us maximize what we have and shrink our utility footprint,” Seitz said. “My hope is that we can get to 80% virtualzed environment – we are at about 30% right now.”

Low hardware utilization rates also prompted the company to invest in VMware virtualization. “We wanted to better utilize our existing hardware. We had some hardware utilization as low as 4%, and rarely would be see anything above 15% utilization,” Seitz said.

When Seitz began looking at virualization about two years ago, he also deployed small Microsoft Virtual Server and Citrix XenServer environments - both less expensive than VMware - but decided to standardize on VMware going forward because he liked the management tools and support.

When the project started, the data center at First American was equipped with 2,800 physical servers running that many OSes. After virtualizing 700 of those servers, First American runs 3,500 OSes, Seitz said.

The OSes are mostly Microsoft Windows, though there are some Unix systems on mainframes and in Xen containers, he said. The physical servers supporting the virtual machines are x86 servers rom Hewlett Packard and Dell, and many are equipped with Intel Xeon quad-core processors, Seitz said.

First American hasn’t gotten rid of many physical servers because they lease them, but it will save power in the long run because with better server utilization, they won’t have to add more physical servers in the future, Seitz said.

Also, because their hardware is leased, it is refreshed every three years. When this happens, the IT staff has to port all of the applications and OSes from the old hardware to the new hardware. Normally, this takes months to accomplish, but it should be a lot easier using virtualization, Seitz said.

“Now, instead of doing a one-to-one refresh, we will virtualize our environment and it will shave off a few months in man hours,” Seitz said.

The company is starting to virtualize their mission critical applications now, and have even adopted a “virtual machine first” policy.

“You need a really good reason to get a physical server,” Sietz said. “Everything we do now is virtual.”

Use the VMware Converter bootable CD for the difficult conversions

Depending on the scope of your virtual environment, it is likely that physical-to-virtual (P2V) conversions have taken place. The P2V process truly enables VMware administrators to put physical systems into virtual environments. However, you may have come across a system that for some reason will not go through the normal conversion. In such cases the VMware Converter bootable CD may be an option. It provides a zero-transaction state that may be a favorable environment to perform P2V conversions.

Good candidates for using the VMware Converter bootable CD include:

• Systems that run a database engine,
• have real-time systems that may not convert correctly,
• or systems where the VMware Converter agent otherwise fails.

The bootable CD is licensed to enterprise customers, so the download requires advance purchase. The VMware Converter bootable CD is a Windows XP Pre Installation (PE) environment. The initial screen loads as follows:

The behavior is very similar to that of the full installation version once the VMware Converter interface loads. The only difference is that you can only convert the local system instead of being able to convert a remote system. This is to be expected, as the bootable environment should only be used when the traditional mechanisms fail. Once in the application, you can push the conversion to a VMware ESX server or to a flat .vmdk file for use in VMware Server or VMware Workstation:

I had a chance to use the VMware Converter bootable CD for a Windows 2000 system conversion that would not complete correctly in the installed, online environment. The bootable environment is also referred to as a cold clone environment, and with no transactions occurring on the file system a clean backup environment is available. The unfortunate circumstance is that this functionality can transport a poorly configured system to your virtual environment - so you may be able to keep it and its issues running forever.