VMware Desktop Infrastructure

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 product name changes: vCenter, View

VMware has just announced that they are changing the names of their current products to the new product names that were announced at VMworld. The biggest changes are that VirtualCenter is now being referred to as vCenter Server and Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) is now being referred to as View. vCenter is also the name that will be used for all of their infrastructure and management applications (i.e. Lab Manager is now vCenter Lab Manager) and View will also be the name for all of their desktop applications (i.e. Virtual Desktop Manager is now View Manager).

While this was a good time to change the name for VDI to View with the release of the new version (View 3) it was expected that the vCenter name change would not take place until the release of VI4. Subsequently this may lead to confusion for a while as the vCenter name is effective immediately for the current version of the product (VirtualCenter 2.5 Update 3). VMware has updated their website accordingly for all the product download and documentation pages but the name has not been changed in the current documentation or product. Whether they apply the name change inside the application and documentation in the next release of vCenter (presumably 2.5 Update 4) or wait until VI4 is released is not currently known. Additionally this only applies to the current versions which presumably means any version of vCenter 2.5, version 2.0.x is still referred to as VirtualCenter.

All of the product name changes affected by this are listed below:

VMware VirtualCenter → VMware vCenter Server
VMware Lifecycle Manager → VMware vCenter Lifecycle Manager
VMware Converter → VMware vCenter Converter
VMware Lab Manager → VMware vCenter Lab Manager
VMware Stage Manager → VMware vCenter Stage Manager
VMware Update Manager → VMware vCenter Update Manager
VMware Site Recovery Manager → VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager
VirtualCenter Foundation → vCenter Server Foundation
VMFS → VMware vStorage VMFS
VMware Virtual Desktop Infrastructure → VMware View
Virtual Desktop Manager (VDM) → VMware View Manager
VMware Administrator Interface → VMware View Administrator
VDM Agent → VMware View Manager Agent
VDM Web Access → VMware View Portal
VDM Client for Windows → VMware View Client for Windows
VDM Client for Linux → VMware View Client for Linux

What’s that noise? Predictions for VMworld 2008

By Monday morning, the buzz surrounding the world’s largest virtualization conference, VMworld 2008 in Las Vegas, Nevada, should be so deafening that it will make you virtually insane. The pun was intended. The topics on news, finance, technical analysis and blog sites will be overflowing with announcements and reports from VMware, sponsors, exhibitors and partners at the conference. We are, and will continue, contributing to the buzz here at Virtualization Pro as well. There will also be strategically released announcements from VMware’s competitors, most of which signed up for exhibitor booths at VMworld anyway. I do not know how I will keep up with the steady geyser of information, and I will be in the middle of it.

Here are some of my predictions on what I expect (more like hope) to hear loud and clear above the constant static to be generated next week. I have no special access or insight other than my conversations with my contacts. These predictions are just my guesses.

ESX/ESXi

• Continuous Availability – Demonstrated in the past at VMworlds, the ability to simultaneously run a VM across multiple ESX/ESXi hosts and provide a synchronized, instantaneous failover will be touted as the foundation for the next generation of VMware’s HA (high availability) features.
• Cloud Infrastructure – Building on advances like continuous availability, VMware’s vision of ubiquitous and automated virtual infrastructure will be discussed in detail.

VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure)

• Offline VMs – The latest version of VMware’s virtual desktop manager product, VDM, will help push the VDI concept to the next level of adoption with the ability to provide mobile users a local copy of a VM that will synchronize with a master version when on the corporate network.
• Faster, more flexible and efficient VM deployments – I expect to hear about advancements in the ability to rapidly deploy large numbers of VMs from a single master template using minimal storage space. This will be achieved by separating the operating system, applications, and user profiles into separate components that are individually pieced together to form a customized virtual desktop. Enhancements from storage vendors in thin provisioning and LUN cloning will support this model.

VMware Workstation 6.5

• Version 6.5 – VMworld 2008 would be a great time to release the latest version, wouldn’t it? With the growing popularity of Sun’s xVM Virtualbox VMware should take the opportunity to introduce the new version and all the automation, GUI, and performance improvements they’ve added.
• Integration of ACE – Building on the existing integration of VMware ACE in the current version, I expect VMware Workstation and ACE to merge into one product eventually.
• Free Version or enhancements to VMware Player – I’m not convinced that the full version of Workstation will ever be offered for free, but, just like VMware’s strategy with ESXi, I can imagine a free version of VMware Workstation that could be offered with limited features. Whether VMware introduces a restricted Workstation or just adds to the already free VMware Player, offering a free desktop product with comparable features to the competition would make sense.

Performance tips from the summer New England VMUG; attendees sound off

425 IT geeks invaded Brunswick, Maine last Thursday for the New England VMware Users Group summer meeting at Brunswick High School. The event, which started at 10 AM with a sponsor showcase and proceeded with after-lunch sessions, concluded in a Lobster/Clambake at Gritty’s in Freeport, Maine.

 “Good performance starts with proper planning and design, configuration best practices and operational awareness,” said Mike Burke (left), Virtual Infrastructure Practice Director for Virtera, a CT-based consulting firm during the first session I attended equivocally titled “Getting the most out of your ESX Environment – Performance tuning.”

“Tuning is not a replacement for proper planning and design,” Burke said. “Don’t guess; gather the data.”

Planning trumps tuning in VMware deployments
Performance, Burke said, hinges on examining and understanding how CPU, memory, networking and disk space will work together in a virtual infrastructure. Planning, then, is the key to better ESX performance, and not necessarily tuning.

Generally speaking, more cores are better; so plan on going big. “How does VMware license their product? Per socket. If you can choose a quad-core, it’s a lot more economical,” Burke said, citing that AMD series processors are now “dirt cheap” compared to earlier years, with eight core boxes going for around $2000.

“You need to weigh what the workload is against what the goals of virtualizing it are,” Burke said. For example, a four-CPU physical server may not be a good candidate for a server consolidation project if it’s currently using the four CPUs to the fullest extent, because you won’t have a good consolidation ratio on those systems. It may, however, be a candidate if the goal is overall server virtualization instead of consolidation.

Another reason for this type virtualization is hardware capability. You can’t VMotion from AMD to Intel. Even in servers from the same line, Burke said, older hardware instruction sets coded in the CPU won’t look the same, preventing VMotion capability.

More host RAM gives better overall performance, configure a VM’s memory based on actual need – are you really using the full two GHz, or would it better used elsewhere? On a general note, though, Burke said “oversubscribing,” or provisioning more memory for virtual machines in the physical host server, is better than not.

Advanced configurations
A systems administrator can, however, tweak a few advanced variables in a virtual machine’s configuration or vmx file. For memory, you can reset the time interval for transparent page sharing (TPS), which is automatically set at 60 seconds, by using mem.ShareScanTime. Adjust the memory pages to scan per 1 GHz idle cycle, automatically set at 4 MB/sec per 1GHz by using mem.ShareScanGhz. mem.CtlMaxPercent limits memory reclamation by ballooning.

But tweaking these parameters, Burke warned, can detract from virtualizing your systems. “You’re instructing ESX to spend more time processing and looking for memory savings rather than sitting in the background and running the VMs, which diverts resources away from virtualizing guests to handling these configurations on the backend.”

On a per-VM level, you can use the same mem.CtlMaxPercent command, and also: sched.mem.maxmemstl, which caps the max memory reclamation by ballooning (vmmemctl); sched.mem.pshare.enable – enables/disables memory sharing (TPS); lastly, using sched.swap.persist can enable vSwap to persist after power-off.

New England VMware Users Group summer meeting attendees sound off
Other sessions spanned from technical sessions about VMware DRS and HA to VDI demonstrations, SRM implementation and general topics, such as managing the virtual data center and how to minimize VM sprawl. Some sessions were led by speakers from consulting companies; others were 45 minute long vendor sales pitches disguised as learning sessions, but overall attendees had a good experience.

“For me, the sessions are good, but I can learn the same material in a textbook or on a website,” said Lee Pullen of the Maine Education Association. “The largest benefit is the networking, meeting other users and finding out what they’re doing in their own environments. That’s the real value in attending.”

“I found a few of the titles of the sessions misleading,” said State of Maine Office of Information Technology employee Lori Blier. “The last session I was at seemed like it was going to be about getting more out of your virtual infrastructure, which is what it was called. But they mainly talked about virtual desktops.”

Perhaps next year, the organizers could include descriptions of the presentations so that participants know exactly what to expect, Blier suggested. She said that she liked the sessions that discussed managing and using ESX Server, which is what the state of Maine plans to upgrade to pending management approval. They currently use VMware Server in production.

“I was a little disappointed that there were no sessions or vendors that focused on the networking side,” commented Kris Kirby from the Vermont Agency of Natural Resources, who said that’s his main concern with his VMware environment. “I also thought it was going to start a little earlier.”

Chris Harney, a systems engineer from Maine who organizes the New England Users Group meetings, said that feedback from the last session indicated increased interest in virtual desktop information sessions, which is why several of the sessions catered to that track. He also said that if networking came up as a trend on the feedback sheets, it would be voted on by a focus group and most likely included in the program for the January winter meeting, which will be held in Massachusetts.

“We’ve only been doing this for a couple years, and we’re still trying to figure out what works,” Harney said. “This is just a hobby for me, but it’s almost a full-time job. When we first started, we had 35 people. Now we’re looking at almost 500 per meeting.”

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 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 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.