A roadmap for server virtualization, desktop virtualization and cloud computing by a virtualization evangelist
May 11, 2013 Leave a comment
NetApp released a free e-book titled Flash Storage for Dummies. The 51-pages book gives a high level overview of technologies, where and how to use flash and benefits on costs, performance. Mind the book is sponsored by NetApp so is used as a marketing tool.
Download via registration here.
April 27, 2013 Leave a comment
VMware released ESXi 5.1 Update 1 at April 25. The update contains mainly bug fixes and some enhancements. No new features.
See the release notes here.
Storage enhancements of Update 1 are discussed in this great blogpost by Cormac Hogan.
Interesting adjustments are an increased maximum heap size. This allows to have an ESXi host a much larger amount of open VMDK files on VMFS volumes. More info on heapsize and how to increase it for vSphere 5.0 can be read in my earlier posting.
Also it is again possible to rename VMDK files while performing a storage vMotion. Frank Denneman has written a blogposting about this.
Before performing the upgrade, make sure other VMware components are compatible with Update 1. Viktor van den Berg has a short posting about this here.
Also mind that upgrading VMware solutions needs to be done in a certain sequence. VMware has details in a post titled Update sequence for vSphere 5.1 Update 1 and its compatible VMware products (2037630)
April 18, 2013 Leave a comment
vOpenData is a cool project that gives insight in statistics like: what is the average size of a VMDK, what is the average physical memory per host and what guest operating system is used most. The project started around 2 weeks ago and already data over 65000 vms has been uploaded.
Taken from vopendata.org
vOpenData is an open community project that grew from the question “What is the average VMDK size for deployed virtual machines?” We wanted to create an open community database that is purely driven by users submitting their virtual infrastructure configurations. Leveraging the powerful virtualization community and applying simple analytics we are able to provide various trending statistics and data for virtualized environments. This is 100% community driven and the results will be available for everyone to view and hopefully you will contribute to the overall dataset!
To contribute, you simply have to register into the website and add the infrastructures you have access to. Consultants have the possibility to upload data about their several customers, so they can increase even further the database.
Results are freely visible, even without registration, at this web page, and you can see an example down here.
Below an impression of the data! Looks very cool!
April 8, 2013 1 Comment
Update April 11: This new service is not DRaaS. Customers still need two datacenters running Hyper-V and SCVMM 2012. Hyper-V Recovery Manager which runs in Azure does orchestration and testing!
Currently in limited Preview program is a new service of Microsoft Windows Azure which enables Disaster Recovery Orchestration for Hyper-V. This post will give some details on this new service.
Windows Azure Hyper-V Recovery Manager helps you protect System Center Virtual Machine Manager private clouds in the event of service outage. You can build recovery orchestration plans using this feature and test your plans periodically to ensure high level of preparedness for unplanned downtime or a planned event like data center load balancing.
Introduction
Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V has a nice feature called Hyper-V Replica. It enables replication of virtual machine disk files to another location for disaster recovery purposes. This feature is available at no additional cost, making DR a lot more cost effective compared to using third party tools. The feature is also very simple to setup and use.
One of the services currently in Limited Preview is part of ‘Azure Recovery Services’ and is named Hyper-V Recovery Manager Vault. It can be enabled by selection of Cloud Services in the Azure Management portal. You cannot use it immediately. There is a queue at the moment.
Windows Azure Hyper-V Recovery Manager helps you protect System Center Virtual Machine Manager private clouds in the event of service outage. You can build recovery orchestration plans using this feature and test your plans periodically to ensure high level of preparedness for unplanned downtime or a planned event like data center load balancing.
Hyper-V Recovery Manager (Preview)
Orchestrate protection and recovery of private clouds
Windows Azure Hyper-V Recovery Manager can help you protect important services by coordinating the replication and recovery of System Center 2012 private clouds at a secondary location.
Automated protection
System Center 2012 Virtual Machine Manager private clouds can be protected through automating the replication of the virtual machines that compose them at a secondary location. The ongoing asynchronous replication of each VM is provided by Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V Replica and is monitored and coordinated by Hyper-V Recovery Manager.
Orchestrated Recovery
The service helps automate the orderly recovery in the event of a site outage at the primary datacenter. VMs can be brought up in an orchestrated fashion to help restore service quickly. This process can also be used for testing recovery, or temporarily transferring services.
Note: This limited preview program is available to a small group of customers in specific geographic locations1 using Windows Server 2012 and System Center 2012 SP1. However, we are always on the lookout for additional customers who will provide us with interesting and actionable feedback. If you would like to be considered for this program please complete the Microsoft survey located here. Thank you in advance for your responses! We will only be contacting those of you that have been accepted to participate.
1 Only customers located in the following countries will be considered: United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Belgium, Switzerland, Denmark, Netherlands, Finland, Australia, Japan, India, New Zealand. Data for this Preview feature will be stored only in the Azure datacenters located in the United States
April 3, 2013 Leave a comment
It is likely you never have heard of VMFS heap size used by VMware vSphere. This probably means you have not run into issues yet. However when using VMware vSphere AND virtual disks located on VMFS volumes AND relative large sized virtual disks you can run into some serious issues!
This posting will give the reader some insight in how to avoid those issues by adjusting settings and apply a recent published VMware patch.
An increasing number of organizations are using hosts with serious amounts of physical memory and compute power to be able to run many VMs per host. VM’s having large amounts of memory and virtual CPU’s are called monster VM’s.
However those monsters can easily be made unconscious when those VMs are running a couple of large VMDK’s. For instance you might run into issues when running multiple virtual machines like Exchange Servers, file servers or database servers with large VMDK’s on the same ESX host.
March 17, 2013 1 Comment
I ‘ve never been a big fan of Apple iTunes software. In particular the way files from a Windows PC are copied to the iPad/iPhone/iPod, or to an application (for example PDF of Divx video files) installed on such a device is totally not intuitive. iTunes user interface is a nightmare. No, I am not an 77 old man but someone with quite some experience in using pc’s and applications. Maybe over the years I am losing patience with rubbish software. Patience is what you need to manage iTunes.
Yesterday a friend of mine asked me if I could help her putting some MP3 music files on her iPhone. Sure, no problem but I forgot it needs bloody iTunes for transferring. I installed iTunes and tried to synchronize, not wanting to delete any of the photos on her device. To make a long story short: I gave up. No patience to handle this poorly designed user interface.
So I started to look for iTunes alternatives. There are quite a few. Some free, some ask an amount of money after a trial period.
One of the best programs I found was Phone Stick made by a company called Softorino. The software can initially be used as evaluation and you get 1 GB of transfer for free. An additional 1 GB of transfer is given for free when you Like Softorino on Facebook.
Transferring files is very easy:
Install Phone Stick, connect the iPad, iPhone or iPod using an USB cable to your Windows pc. Select the mount button next to Media. Then your Windows PC will get an new drive letter. You simply browse to the music folder and start copy/paste files from Windows Explorer. I like it that the folder structure you use on the Pc is maintained in the explorer view of the iPad.
It is also possible to use the iPad/iPhone/iPod as an USB device. Simple mount it as USB Stick and you get an additional drive letter.
I installed Phone Stick on a Windows 8 laptop and had no problems at all. Program felt very robust, has a very easy user interface and does its job great.
A Phone Stick license which can be installed on one Windows PC costs $19,95 while a license which can be installed on max 5 PC’s costs $29,95.
March 13, 2013 Leave a comment
VMware today announced it is expecting to launch a new Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) platform named VMware vCloud Hybrid Service in Q2 2013.
This post explains what vCloud Hybrid Service is and will explain the setup. For IT staff wanting to learn public cloud using vCloud Connector the vCloud Hybrid Service is a great way to start. You do not need to get hardware, spent time on installation and configuration. Just register and play with it.
Until now VMware was a vendor of software which enables private and public clouds and much more. The IaaS offering is done by VMware vCloud service providers. However VMware believes the adoption of public clouds which are using VMware vCloud Director and other VMware solutions does not progress fast enough. It also sees Amazon and others increase their market share in the IaaS space using non VMware software. There is a lot of competition.
It is a bit like a potato’s farmer does not see the wanted growth in number of McDonalds and Burger King outlets so decides to start a fast food chain itself to keep the potato farming going!
The competition immediately responded with a campaign. See this Microsoft page:
So VMware will offer and operate its own public cloud. It is labeled a hybrid cloud because it can easily be connected to any private cloud running VMware software. It will not only just offer virtual hardware on which cloudconsumers can built their operating system and applications. vCloud Hybrid service offers a lot of virtual appliances which have preinstalled development tools, CRM tools or webpublishing tools. Examples of such turn key available tools are :
Ruby on Rails Web Application, WordPress, Joomla!, Drupal, SugarCRM, Redmin, Tomcat, Alfresco , Gallery , Tracks , phpBB, MediaWiki. See the screendump below for a complete overview.
VMware today announced its intensions. vCloud Hybrid Service will go into GA in Q2 2013.
Until then, VMware vCloud Hybrid Cloud can be evaluated starting March 13 for free during 90 days. The registration is easy: go to https://vcloudservice.vmware.com/starteval , fill in name, company, email address and telephone number. No credit card needed. Soon after you will receive an email and a order number on your mobile phone. After confirming the order number another email will be sent containing username and password. The portal says you have to wait 15 minutes for provisioning. In practice it can take one to two hours before you are able to log in.
The free 90-day Test Drive includes everything you need to get started in the cloud:
•Windows or Linux OS
•2 VM’s/2 CPU’s
•2 GB RAM
•50 GB Disk
The image below shows the operating systems which are available as a template.
It is also possible to connect a private VMware vSphere cloud to the vCloud Hybrid Service using vCloud Connector. This allows moving your workload in – or out – with vCloud Connector!
Setup of a virtual machine is pretty straightforward. Basically a next next finish job. It is handy to understand what a vApp is. After creation of a VM has finished, you can use the remote console. You will have to install the VMware Remote Console Plug-in to be able to use the remote console. Installing means closing Internet Explorer.
To change the properties of the virtual machine, go to the ‘ View in vCloud Director’ tab, select VMs, select the server name and right mouse click. Then select properties.
Frequently Asked Questions on vCloud Hybrid Service are answered here.
Forrester has an in-depth review of this future new service titled VMware Takes the Cover Off Its Public Cloud
Gartner also writes about VMware’s intention: VMware Will be a Public Cloud IaaS Provider
Soon after the announcement Microsoft responded in a blogposting stating VMware has a zig-zag strategy, is rearranging the furniture and does not know how to operate a cloud.
February 20, 2013 Leave a comment
VMware unveiled at February 20 a new software solution named VMware Horizon Suite. The software will be available later in Q1 2013.
The suite has three components:
The VMware Horizon Suite will bring together VMware’s industry-leading desktop virtualization solution and technologies VMware has built from the ground up to support a mobile, collaborative workforce, including Project Octopus, Project AppBlast, Project AppShift, VMware ThinApp, VMware Horizon Application Manager and VMware Horizon Mobile into a single, unified solution.
Project AppBlast is now the Blast protocol which is used to deliver a virtual desktop (no published applications) to any HTML5 compatible browser. No client install needed. The protocol does have a lot of restrictions compared to Citrix technologies for application and desktop delivery. Blast was not designed as a full protocol. Its purpose is for flexible access from devices and locations where a full View Client with PCoIP isn’t practical or possible.
VMware Horizon Suite will be licensed per named user with prices starting at $300. All of the Horizon Suite products will also be sold individually.
VMware Horizon Workspace will be priced at $150 per named user
Gabe Knuth, blogger at BrianMadden.com wrote a in-depth article about the new VMware product. VMware launches Horizon Suite, but it still has a ways to go to meet expectations. Here’s our complete analysis
Other blogs worth reading are:
TechTarget
Myvirtualcloud.net What’s New in VMware Horizon View 5.2 (Beyond Marketing)
vladan.fr VMware Horizon Workspace – New Suite from VMware
The official VMware blog: Transforming Windows Desktops Into a Centralized Service
February 19, 2013 1 Comment
Desktop virtualization (VDI) gets a lot of attraction. Its advantages over physical desktops lure many organizations to a VDI-implementation. Reasons to start using VDI are :
However many VDI-projects fail for the same reason: bad performance and costs going up unexpectedly during the project. While the proof of concept delivers fine performance, soon after adding more users performance get worse to unacceptable. The only solution is ask for more budget to solve the issues.
This VMware video titled Storage Considerations for Desktop Virtualization has a lot of tips for storage design in VDI deployments. This VMware post titled Storage Optimization with VMware Horizon View has information on new VMware View 5.2 enhancements for storage.
So storage cost and performance had been a key obstacle to wide scale VDI deployments. In fact, today virtual desktops are still a very small percentage of overall enterprise desktops, somewhere below 3 per cent.
This post will show solutions which will bring costs down and deliver more than enough performance.
Some of the vendors mentioned in this post are in random order:
GreenBytes, Virsto, Nimble Storage, Tintri, WHIPTAIL, Nexenta, Nutanix, Atlantis
VDI has many advantages over traditional pc’s and laptops. However there are challenges as well:
Costs for the VDI-project should not be underestimated. Around 40 to 50% of the costs for VDI will be on storage. Purchase costs per VM for just storage range between $100 to $ 300 per VM.
Different licensing models are used: charge for the device, charge per capacity, charge per VDI seat. An OPEX/ pay per use model makes adoption of VDI into organizations much easier because of the low purchase costs.
This post will focus on the performance challenge and how vendors are solving this.
Many do not realize desktop virtualization has different and higher demands on the storage layer than a regular virtual server. Small, random write io requests push traditional harddisk storage to the limit. On average VDI has 20-40% reads and 60-80% writes during production. At boot time of the virtual desktop there will be mostly reads.
Think about what happens in the morning when staff comes in for work and log in to their virtual desktop. This sudden demand for IOPS is called a boot storm. Another IO consumer is anti-virus scans especially when traditional anti-virus agents are used in each virtual desktop VM. A more innovative approach is using VMware vSphere Endpoint protection which is part of all vSphere 5.1 editions. Read the whitepaper Project VRC made on the impact of anti-virus on VDI.
The different IO patterns at the same time initiated from virtual desktops towards the storage layer is named by many as the IO Blender effect.
Calculation showing how many cores, internal memory, disk capacity and IOPS you need when using VMware View can be done using this calculator.
Stress tests can be performed using the Login VSI tool. A free license for vExpert, MVP and CTP can be obtained here,
For VMware Partners only the View Planner software is available. This is a load generat0r for VMware View. More information on the View Planner here.
February 18, 2013 Leave a comment
VMware announced in February 2013 it will acquire Virsto Software. Virsto makes a very clever VM-centric storage hypervisor which is purpose architected to accelerate storage, provide efficiency and simplicity of management. Targeted scenario’s are especially Virtual Desktop Infrastructures (VDI). Virsto uses a clever way to accelerate storage performance by using a transaction log for random IO writes, acknowledge the write to the VM and then send those sequentially to the storage device. Also the filesystem has very clever technologies which integrate nicely with vSphere.
Soon after the announcement some analysts wrote that VMware took over Virsto because of Microsoft Storage Spaces. While Storage Spaces has some similarities with Virsto, basically it is like comparing a Fiat to an Audi because they both have wheels.
Storage Spaces are designed to aggregate physical disk of all types, make a storage pool and present virtual disk out of the pools. Data can be protected against drive failures by mirroring or partity (like hardware RAID). Also thin provisioning is available. There is no smart integration with the hypervisor.
SiliconAngle writes here
Bottom line: VMware aiming to provide the same type of services that Storage Spaces is providing to Windows 2012 Hyper-V.
Techkudos write in this blog titled VMware Buys Startup Virsto To Fend Off Microsoft.
“One of these better features is called Storage Spaces, which works a lot like Virsto.”
“The acquisition of Virsto, which is 50-people strong, is significant because it helps VMware fend off Microsoft.”
By reading these posting one could conclude Storage Spaces is a very innovative technology VMware really needed in defense.
I think the real reasons Virsto was acquired by VMware are:
Strategy reason
1. Virsto fits nicely in VMware’s strategy of a Software Defined Datacenter. In such infrastructure all knowledge is embedded in software running on a hypervisor as a virtual appliance. Hardware is just a dump server , a bunch of disks in a box or a commodity routing/switch device.
2. VDI attracks a lot of attention but is far from being a mainstream technology. However future of VDI according to predictions is bright. See this article for example with the quote below
More than half of US enterprises are migrating to virtual desktops or considering a migration in the next 12 months, a new study by Visiongain finds
Virsto is an affordable yet very effective and innovative way to accelerate VDI performance. It has an attractive low up-front investment. Licensing starts per 1 TB of storage starting at $ 2.500,-. This 1 TB could be enough for 1000 virtual desktops.
Because of its attractive pricing, Virsto can bring down the high purchase costs which are normally involded in VDI-projects. The hypervisor will be commondity soon and VMware will make less profit on vSphere because of strong competition of Hyper-V and others. Selling of additional tooling like VMware View vCloud Director, monitoring etc will bring the profit.
Defensive reason
3. Virsto also supports Hyper-V and Citrix XenDesktop. It will be interesting if VMware continues support for Hyper-V or if VMware decides to discontinue support and such protect View and vSphere. Virsto is an attractive and cheap way to start using Hyper-V combined with VDI. Also Hyper-V is lacking advanced features to manage per VM storage capacity and performance.
4. Customers looking for VDI have different choices. Buy all Flash or hybrid storage appliances to accelerate VDI or buy software solutions like Virsto. By bundling Virsto with EMC storage, customers stay with or choose EMC without purchasing storage from one of the many aggresive and innovative competitors.
Innovation reason
5. VMware is developing a new way of storage away from SAN. Local disks are aggregated into pools and data is distributed. This vSAN technology build on the current available vSphere Storage Appliance. Virsto has technology to aggregate different types of raw storage so this could be valuable to development of vSAN.
VMware is also working on virtual volumes or vVOLs. This allows a more granular storage management. Not on the LUN/volume level but on the virtual machine virtual disk level. Virsto has the same vision and already has the technology in production. VMware wil certainly use the technique in vSphere.
February 11, 2013 Leave a comment
Veeam Software today released a new product named Veeam Backup & Replication Cloud Edition. This edition has the same features which Veeam Backup & Replication 6.5 delivers plus it offers a storage cloud gateway.
This enables backup admins of small to midsized VMware or Hyper-V shops to store and retrieve files to and from cloud storage providers. Veeam Backup & Replication Cloud Edition enables the storage of for instance the Veeam backup repository (known as .VBK files) to an external location. The cloud storage gateway software is targeted at the enduser of Veeam Backup & Replication (not yet at Service Providers) and will be sold as part of Veaam Backup & Replication.
An impressive number of 15 different cloud storage providers are support in this 1.0 release. Even more as each OpenStack based cloud storage provider is supported as wel.
The Edition is especially targeted at small, single site customers which are looking for a simple and cost-effective
way to perform periodic offsite backups.
To reduce costs upfront a new subscription based license is available for 1, 2 or 3 years including 24/7 support.
See this video on YouTube for an overview of the new product.
Read the Press release here.
February 11, 2013 Leave a comment
Microsoft is doing its best to provide customers and partners with the right tools and knowledge to migrate from VMware vSphere to Hyper-V infrastructures.
One of the challenges of this type of migration is the conversion of the virtual machines. vSphere is using a different virtual disk format and a different host-VM integration tool than Hyper-V does. So you need to do a Virtual to virtual (v2v) migration.
February 5, 2013 Leave a comment
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At Thursday, February 7 4:00 PM – 5:00 PM GMT StarWind presents a webinar. Speaker is Max Craft, Solution Engineer, StarWind Software, Inc.
Register for this FREE webinar to learn how to reduce cost and complexity of your backup infrastructure, and get the most from StarWind VMware Backup Plug-in!
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January 30, 2013 Leave a comment
Charon-AXP also supports running in a Windows Server 2008 / 2003 R2 virtual machine on top of VMware vSphere. See this article on the site of the vendor of Charon, Stromasys, This allows features like vMotion, cloning and Disaster Recovery which were not available or at high costs when using OpenVMS on legacy Digital/HP AlphaServers.
However according to the vendor there is a performance loss of around 5 % when Charon is running in a virtual machine instead of running on a bare metal server.
Also a vMotion of OpenVMS on virtualized AlphaServer hardware has not been tested. A vMotion could lead to unwanted results . Most companies which are using Charon software do not run the software on top of vSphere. This because of costs. Also in most cases OpenVMS is clustered and nodes are running in Charon VMs installed on multiple bare metal servers running Windows Server.
The license costs of Charon-AXP depends on the type of AlphaServer being emulated. Three license types are available. An unlimted license, a one year license and a 720 hour disaster recovery license.
Also an individual instance or multi-instance can be purchased. The individual license allows to run a single instance of virtualized AlphaServer . The multi-instance allows to run multiple instances of AlphaServers on the same guest operating system.
The license is implemented using an USB key which needs to be in the server at all times. If the USB is accidently removed all Charon workloads running on that server will stop.
Price for a AlphaServer DS10/DS20 emulation is around Euro 14.000 for an unlimited time license. This covers the cost of a single VM! For each VM you need to purchase a license.
This PowerPoint presentation has a lot of information on Charon . It shows names of Charon customers. Some examples of European customers of Charon-AXP are
Arma Suisse, BCC, BP, Bundeswehr, Commerzbank, Degremont, Eurofighter, European Space Agency, Fugro UK, Huntsmann Chemicals, Gallimard France, GlaxoSmithKline Italy, Kirchenrat Stuttgart, Metalli Italy, Oto Melara, Philips Medical Systems, Police Netherlands, RAF UK, Stockholm Public Transport, Urano Germany
December 12, 2012 Leave a comment
Virtualization adds some challenges when it comes to disaster recovery (DR). DR procedures just aren’t the same in a virtualized environment as they are in a physical one and they require a different approach. Join VMware VCDX and vExpert, Joep Piscaer, during this one-hour webinar as he highlights the most important implementation steps and gives a very detailed analysis of a DR project he implemented.
Topics that will be discussed:
The second part of the session will be devoted to a practical application of the lessons Joep learned:
The webinar should be interesting for IT managers and system administrators.
Register now!
This site will focus primarily on VMware vSphere and Hyper-V solutions.
The main reason I started this blogsite beginning of 2009 is to share my experiences and knowledge. I strongly believe in sharing knowledge. Also I like to write articles. A third reason is for personal usage: information is used by myself when I forgot something ;-)
Please to not hesitate to fill in comments after reading a blogposting. I really like to get feedback.
I recieved the VMware the vExpert 2011 award as a recognization for my work for the community.
I can be contacted by email at mvdb22 (at) gmail dot com or by Twitter @marcelvandenber
Disclaimer: The views expressed anywhere on this site are strictly mine and not the opinions and views of the company I work for.
