Windows Computing

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 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.

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.”

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.

Technosium 2008: VMware Update Manager now with offline patching

I am blogging from the Technosium Global Conference and Expo in Santa Clara, California. While here, I will be providing you important VMware info from the show.

VMware Update Manager is now shipping with the ability to patch offline virtual machines. This is done by using a special patching network for suspended or offline systems. Any organization implementing any network access control or that would be concerned by a system at risk by presenting itself to the main network.

Offline patching uses the Shavlik patch management technology to interact with Update Manager and the virtual machine. The patching capabilities currently include Windows virtual machines for Microsoft, Adobe, and Mozilla updates and a scanning only capability for Linux systems.

Use Virtual Infrastructure Client with Caution on Vista

The Virtual Infrastructure Client used to manage your VMWare ESX hosts may not perform all tasks correctly when running on Windows Vista. There are a handful of issues reported from users in the VMWare communities board such as “Object reference not set to an instance of an object” when trying to use the VMWare cloning features. I was fortunate enough to experience this issue just today. This thread mentions to update some time zone information into the registry. On another Vista system, we performed this registry tweak, and the VI client worked. However, this is not a good resolution from the Vistal environment perspective.

Critical VI Tasks Use on XP

If you are performing some critical VMWare tasks that are prone to failure when the VI client is installed on Vista, a better idea would be to perform those tasks from a Windows XP system. Though the issues reported with Vista are minor, and the VMWare server-side parts have intelligence to manage the issues as they occur to avoid integrity issues with the virtual machines or other pending tasks.

How to Install VMWare Tools Through Windows Group Policy

With all of the migration strategies available to the virtualization host administrators, it is easy to overlook the guest operating system details. When it comes to upgrading or installing VMWare Tools, the idea of touching every server interactively is not very appealing. For a Windows guest operating system (OS) on a domain, a group policy object can be one of your quickest options for getting the tools installed.

Some Guidelines for Installing VMWare Tools through Group Policy

The VMWare Tools are available for your guest OS as an .ISO CD-ROM file. Find the file, and get access to it from another system. Open the CD .ISO file or write it to disk and retrieve the files. Be sure to place them in a share accessible to the systems you want to install VMWare Tools with an indicator of the version. For example, \\SERVER1\Applications\VmwareTools\ESX3.02\ would indicate that this path would hold VMWare Tools for guest OSs on ESX server 3.02. Be sure to use the correct version of VMWare Tools with the corresponding guest OS if you have different VMWare host platforms in use. Each version of VMWare tools is optimized with the version provided with the installation.

Making the GPO

To make a new Group Policy Object (GPO) that would install the VMWare tools do the following from the Group Policy Management Console (gpmc.msc):

-Select the Organizational Unit (OU) you want to install VMWare tools
-Expand Computer Configuration
-Expand Software Configuration
-Click Software Installation
-In the right pane, select “New-Package”
-Browse to the VMWare Tools.msi file in your shared path
-Click Open
-Sending the package to “Assigned” will install the VMWare Tools package on the next refresh of the policy on the systems in the OU to which this GPO is linked.
-Once the package is listed, rename it from “VMWare Tools” to something more clear like “VMWare Tools - Windows - ESX 3.02″
-Once this is complete the VMWare tools will install on the server on the next boot without interaction. The Windows event log will have an entry similar to the following:


The install of application VMWare Tools - Windows - ESX 3.02 from policy Default Domain Policy succeeded.Changes to software installation settings were applied successfully.

Upgrades to VMWare Tools

In the situation where hosts are upgraded and guest OSs are moved dynamically, upgrading the VMWare Tools through the same fashion can be done as well. Be sure to use the version of the tools again in the package, and remove the old one if needed. Some proper testing is of course due, and a best practice would be to set up a test OU to apply the VMWare tools package before rolling out to more virtual machines.