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VDI: VMware View 3 Premier vs. Citrix XenDesktop Enterprise 2.1

by Roger Lund
written by Roger Lund

VDI: VMware View 3 Premier vs. Citrix XenDesktop Enterprise 2.1

 

Jason B has a new post on VDI vs Citrix.

“by jason on Feb.09, 2009, under Virtualization

VDI was hot in 2008 and it’s predicted to be even hotter in 2009.  On the heels of this prediction, VMware commissioned The Tolly Group to compare two VDI solutions head to head:  VMware View 3 Premier and Citrix XenDesktop Enterprise 2.1.  The Tolly Group has published their findings in an eight page report which you can grab here.  The results are not at all surprising:

Executive Summary

The VMware View 3 VDI solution deploys more simply and more rapidly than Citrix XenDesktop 2.1.  VMware provides more comprehensive, efficient image and storage management of virtual desktops.  It provides end users with a quality of experience on the LAN that matches or exceeds that offered by the Citrix solution.

The Tolly Group used a standard virtual desktop configuration for both test environments:

  • 1 CPU core
  • 512MB RAM
  • 8GB Hard disk drive storage
  • Microsoft Windows Media Player 9
  • Microsoft Office 2007 (full installation)
  • Microsoft Windows XP SP2

In their report, they confirm the following five facts as the bottom line:

VMware View 3:

  1. Installed more rapidly and with considerably fewer steps and less manual intervention
  2. Provides simpler image management that makes more efficient use of disk
  3. Requires no manual configuration of Microsoft Active Directory or DHCP
  4. Allows management of all VDI functions through a single web-based GUI
  5. Provides equivalent end-user experience on LAN as Citrix for Microsoft Office applications

Given the opportunity, Citrix declined to actively participate in the product comparisons.

“

 

I thought this was interesting, and I wanted to post it.

 

Thanks to Jason.

 

Source Post http://www.boche.net/blog/index.php/2009/02/09/vdi-vmware-view-3-premier-vs-citrix-xendesktop-enterprise-21/

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DatacenterNewsStorage

Xiotech Market information and Points of Interest.

by Roger Lund
written by Roger Lund

A local vendor sent me these links, and I thought I would share.

 

“

http://www.xiotech.com/About_Press_Release.aspx?ID=NR-09-17-08 Virtual View, recognized in Storage Software for Virtualization category, dramatically simplifies storage monitoring, management and provisioning tasks in VMWare virtual environments
http://www.drunkendata.com/?p=2100  “Xiotech gets my nod for best technology initiative of 2008”
http://www.byteandswitch.com/document.asp?doc_id=169956&WT.svl=news2_1  Article featuring Dan Lewis of USC Marshall School of Business. Lewis declares that his Emprise 7000 system provides an 8x better performance than his old HP EVA3000. He also praises Virtual View, self-healing capabilities, and reduced energy consumption
http://searchstorage.techtarget.com.au/articles/28223-Five-hot-storage-technologies-for-2-9-and-five-flops- ISE among the top 5 technologies for 2009
http://www.drunkendata.com/?p=2085 Jon Toigo comments on the most important IT-related things that happened in 2008. Xiotech holds both the #1 and #2 spots – with ISE and Web Services based management.
http://www.crn.com/storage/212501502;jsessionid=4JXY4Y42KKETWQSNDLRSKH0CJUNN2JVN?pgno=9 The 10 Biggest Storage Stories Of 2008
http://www.xiotech.com/About_Press_Release.aspx?ID=NR-12-15-08  Xiotech Selected as 2009 Hot Companies Finalist
http://www.xiotech.com/About_Press.aspx#  More, more, more
http://www.networkworld.com/supp/2009/ndc1/012609-storage-rethink.html?page=1 Article on Web Services and ISE

 

“

Source Xiotech and local Vendor.

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DatacenterNewsStorage

Going Tapeless in Enterprise

by Roger Lund
written by Roger Lund

Dave Graham @ http://flickerdown.com wrote a blog about going tapeless.

“

I was asked the other day about the potential for finally going tapeless in Commercial and Enterprise spaces. Truth be told, this is becoming a more common occurence as those mechanical beasts hit the tail-end of their maintenance windows. With that in mind, what are some (not all) of the business drivers that move enterprises from tape to disk (or other mediums)?

“Tape is Dead!” has echoed through the halls of storage IT for quite some time. It’s been an ideological pursuit of the “next generation backup” mantra hawked by the Tier Ones in the storage space. What has been noted is the continued price depreciation of disk as capacity has increased, the tighter compliance metrics from government agencies, as well as the legacy of natural disasters that have arrived on the scene since 2001. Let’s unpack these a bit.

“

He discusses the following topic’s.

Price Depreciations and Increased Capacity

Tighter Compliance

Natural Disasters

Remediating the Problem

Price Depreciation and Capacity Increase – Tapeless

Tighter Compliance – Tapeless

Natural Disasters – Tapeless

Please check out the full post

http://flickerdown.com/2009/01/going-tapeless-in-enterprise/

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DatacenterStorageVMware

A “Multivendor Post” to help our mutual iSCSI customers using VMware

by Roger Lund
written by Roger Lund

 

http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/virtual_geek posted a nice blog post titled : A “Multivendor Post” to help our mutual iSCSI customers using VMware

 

“

Today’s post is one you don’t often find in the blogosphere, see today’s post is a collaborative effort initiated by me, Chad Sakac (EMC), which includes contributions from Andy Banta (VMware), Vaughn Stewart (NetApp), Eric Schott (Dell/EqualLogic), and Adam Carter (HP/Lefthand), David Black (EMC) and various other folks at each of the companies.

Together, our companies make up the large majority of the iSCSI market, all make great iSCSI targets, and we (as individuals and companies) all want our customers to have iSCSI success.

I have to say, I see this one often – customer struggling to get high throughput out of iSCSI targets on ESX.   Sometimes they are OK with that, but often I hear this comment: "…My internal SAS controller can drive 4-5x the throughput of an iSCSI LUN…"   

Can you get high throughput with iSCSI with GbE on ESX?   The answer is YES.  But there are some complications, and some configuration steps that are not immediately apparent. You need to understanding some iSCSI fundamentals, some Link Aggregation fundamentals, and know some ESX internals – none of which are immediately obvious…

If you’re interested (and who wouldn’t be interested with a great topic and a bizzaro-world “multi-vendor collaboration”… I can feel the space-time continuum collapsing around me :-), read on…

We could start this conversation by playing a trump card; 10GbE, but we’ll save this topic for another discussion. Today 10GbE is relatively expensive per port and relatively rare, and the vast majority of iSCSI and NFS deployments are on GbE. 10GbE is supported by VMware today (see the VMware HCL here), and all of the vendors here either have, or have announced 10GbE support.

10GbE can support the ideal number of cables from an ESX host – two. This reduction in port count can simplify configurations, reduce the need for link aggregation, provide ample bandwidth, and even unify FC using FCoE on the same fabric for customers with existing FC investments. We all expect to see rapid adoption of 10GbE as prices continue to drop. Chad has blogged on 10GbE and VMware here.

This post is about trying to help people maximize iSCSI on GbE, so we’ll leave 10GbE for a followup.

If you are serious about iSCSI in your production environment, it’s valuable to do a bit of learning, and it’s important to do a little engineering during design.    iSCSI is easy to connect and begin using, but like many technologies which excel in terms of their simplicity the default options and parameters may not be robust enough to provide an iSCSI infrastructure which can support your business.

 

“

This is a very long post, and worth reading more than once. Included are diagrams and links. This is a very nice overview for anyone considering iSCSI for their San.

 

Here are some topic’s he covers.

 

“

Understanding your Ethernet Infrastructure

Understanding: iSCSI Fundamentals

Understanding: Link Aggregation Fundamentals

Understanding: iSCSI implementation in ESX 3.x

(Strongly) Recommended Additional Reading

  1. I would STRONGLY recommend reading a series of posts that the inimitable Scott Lowe has done on ESX networking, and start at his recap here: http://blog.scottlowe.org/2008/12/19/vmware-esx-networking-articles/
  2. Also – I would strongly recommend reading the vendor documentation on this carefully.

ENOUGH WITH THE LEARNING!!! HOW do you get high iSCSI throughput in ESX 3.x?

As discussed earlier, the ESX 3.x software initiator really only works on a single TCP connection for each target – so all traffic to a single iSCSI Target will use a single logical interface. Without extra design measures, it does limit the amount of IO available to each iSCSI target to roughly 120 – 160 MBs of read and write access.

This design does not limit the total amount of I/O bandwidth available to an ESX host configured with multiple GbE links for iSCSI traffic (or more generally VMKernel traffic) connecting to multiple datastores across multiple iSCSI targets, but does for a single iSCSI target without taking extra steps.

Here are the questions that customers usually ask themselves:

Question 1: How do I configure MPIO (in this case, VMware NMP) and my iSCSI targets and LUNs to get the most optimal use of my network infrastructure? How do I scale that up?

Question 2: If I have a single LUN that needs really high bandwidth – more than 160MBps and I can’t wait for the next major ESX version, how do I do that?

Question 3: Do I use the Software Initiator or the Hardware Initiator?

Question 4: Do I use Link Aggregation and if so, how?

In closing…..

I would suggest that anyone considering iSCSI with VMware should feel confident that their deployments can provide high performance and high availability. You would be joining many, many customer enjoying the benefits of VMware and advanced storage that leverages Ethernet.

To make your deployment a success, understand the “one link max per iSCSI target” ESX 3.x iSCSI initiator behavior. Set your expectations accordingly, and if you have to, use the guest iSCSI initiator method for LUNs needing higher bandwidth than a single link can provide.

Most of all ensure that you follow the best practices of your storage vendor and VMware.

“

Thanks to VirutalGeek for content.

Full Source Post http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/virtual_geek/2009/01/a-multivendor-post-to-help-our-mutual-iscsi-customers-using-vmware.html

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DatacenterStorageVirtualization

Running Virtual Center/vCenter as a virtual machine or virtual appliance

by Philip Sellers
written by Philip Sellers

I’m wondering what everyone else in the world does…  I’m investigating running Virtual Center/vCenter as a virtual machine in order to remove two additional physical servers running Windows 2003 Enterprise in a cluster.  I’m also very interested in running vCenter as a Linux virtual appliance when that becomes available.  Is anyone out there running vCenter as a virtual machine?  If so, how do you do it?  Do you run it on a separate ESX cluster from the clusters it manages?  How do you protect this in the event of a storage or ESX failure or some kind?   Does anyone else NOT do this for specific reasons?  Anyone else running vCenter 2.5 in a Windows cluster (MCSC)?    If not, how do you protect your vCenter to make it resilient to failures?  Just looking for other people’s personal experiences, not necisarily a corporate recommendation…

As a side note, we recently upgraded our farm from Virtual Center 2.0 to 2.5.  Since that time, I’m seeing some things that I don’t necessarily think are working properly.  We have Update Manager and Converter Enterprise installed and both services seem to go AWOL on us from time to time, disconnecting or just going unavailable from the Plug-Ins in Virtual Infrastructure Client.  Not seeing much so far in VMware KB to help with running these peripherial services in a Windows cluster…  Any help there would be greatly appreciated too…

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DatacenterStorageVirtualization

Con-call to discuss VMware View

by Philip Sellers
written by Philip Sellers

Not long ago, we did a demo of VMware’s VDI product at HTC.  To be honest, we were underwhelmed at the time.  Fast forward to December and VMware remedied that problem with the release of VMware View.  We are just in the beginnings of the trial for the View 3.0 product and we haven’t gotten our first virtual desktop running under it, but already our expectations are set pretty high.  

Yesterday, we had a conference call with our VMware partner and some of VMware’s technical and sales resources.  We talked specifically about the packages available with the View product line and what the two basic packages buy us.  First, VMware is offering an Enterprise and a Premier bundles of the VMware View software.  Enterprise is basically the upgraded version of VDI.  Premier on the other hand includes the features we were looking forward to utilizing – namely thin provisioning, View Composer and maybe even VMware ThinApp.  

Going into the virtual desktop foray, we knew that storage was likely our biggest hurdle.  We knew that the SAN storage is much more expensive than the SATA drives we currently bundle in desktops, so our gigabytes will become a premium in the virtual world.  The thin provisioning/linked clones technology is huge as we drive further down this road.  I think that this technology has the potential of cutting our storage utilization by 1/10th of the estimated need we projected in November.  

All that said, we were concerned about the price point from VMware for the product, especially once I saw that we needed the Premier bundle, but VMware surprised us with the list price being only $200 per virtual desktop with a buy in as low as 10 virtual desktops in a starter pack.  I have not seen our actual quote from our partner, but I assume we may get some sort of price break, but the value of the bundle is great in my eyes.

The bundle includes not only the license to run 10 virtual desktops, but also an ESX server license – not just the free hypervisor, but he full VI3 enterprise license, and it includes a copy of VirtualCenter Foundations (a scaled down, 3 ESX only version of vCenter).  Our thought is to purchase two of these 10 user starter bundles, which will give us two ESX servers on which to run our virtual desktops and two hosts to provide some level of redundancy for our virtual desktops – with a cluster utilizing HA, DRS and VMotion. 

We still must cross the Microsoft licensing hurdles.  And, I read earlier this week that Microsoft has again changed their licensing, so we’ll see what impact that has on us, but for now, we’re making progress.  Should be an interesting week next week looking into thin provisioning with my co-worker.  I’m pretty excited.

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DatacenterNewsStorage

Are you a EMC ControlCenter and VMware customer? Good hotfix to know about..

by Roger Lund
written by Roger Lund

Virtual Geek has a write up on EMC ControlCenter and Vmware, and a hotfix. I wanted to post this as it is one of those things that is good to know.

“

Was working a customer case where they were having issues with VMotion and Control Center. Control Center is one of the only Storage Resource Management tools with tons of VMware integration – and has had it for more than a year.

Ok, Control Center has active discovery (i.e. agent) and passive discovery mechanisms (i.e. leverage an API). Most VMware-integrated features use the passive mechanism – basically ControlCenter has a VM-proxy (i.e. a host which can be a VM that has software that queries the ESX CIM API and the VC APIs). Some customers want more. For example, they want file-level reporting for chargeback and analysis WITHIN the VM. Or, they want drill-downs into databases in VMs. These require agents to run inside the VM if you want that (again, ESX-layer chargeback, utilization reports, thin provisioning use, performance and VMDK->Datastore->LUN/filesystem->backend details – those have no agent requirement).

So, the problem only arises when ControlCenter components running on a guest systems (ergo agents to provide file-level reporting or application integration) are Vmotioned and ControlCenter has discovered the ESX server hosting the VMs that those ControlCenter components are running on.

The root cause is that the ControlCenter store component incorrectly interprets a Vmotion activity as a deletion of a VM (i.e. at the ESX CIM level, the VM just disappeared, and requires correlation at the VC layer). That deletion is not allowed by other rules within the ControlCenter repository and the discovery of the ESX server fails resulting in stale data in ControlCenter and sometimes corruption to ControlCenter component configuration data.

We just released a hotfix for this problem for EMC Control Center 6.1 (HF4486) and will be releasing one for 6.0 shortly (HF4485).

This primus case contains more information regarding the problem. emc203588

http://knowledgebase.emc.com/emcice/documentDisplay.do;jsessionid=0735EE24ACC9E5D50A82A6A5D8CF9820?docType=1006&clusterName=DefaultCluster&resultType=5002&groupId=1&page=&docProp=$solution_id&docPropValue=emc203588&passedTitle=null

Based on our testing, once the correct hotfix is applied, Vmotion of VMs with ControlCenter components installed will work fine and there will be no support limitations.

Thanks ControlCenter team!!

“

Thanks for the write up, gives people a chance to know about it.

Full Source Post

http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/virtual_geek/2009/01/are-you-a-emc-controlcenter-and-vmware-customer-good-hotfix-to-know-about.html

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DatacenterNewsStorage

KB1008130: VMware ESX and ESXi 3.5 U3 I/O failure on SAN LUN(s) and LUN queue is blocked indefinitely

by Roger Lund
written by Roger Lund

 

Jason Boche, @ Boche.net has a post about KB 1008130 that I wanted to share.

 

“

KB1008130: VMware ESX and ESXi 3.5 U3 I/O failure on SAN LUN(s) and LUN queue is blocked indefinitely

by jason on Jan.19, 2009, under Virtualization

I became aware of this issue last week by word of mouth and received the official Email blast from VMware this morning.

The vulnerability lies in a convergence of circumstances:

  1. Fibre channel SAN storage with multipathing
  2. A fibre channel SAN path failure or planned path transition
  3. Metadata update occurring during the fibre channel SAN path failure where metadata updates include but are not limited to:
    1. Power operations of a VM
    2. Snapshot operations of a VM (think backups)
    3. Storage VMotion (sVMotion)
    4. Changing a file’s attributes
    5. Creating a VMFS volume
    6. Creating, modifying, deleting, growing, or locking of a file on a VMFS volume

The chance of a fibre channel path failure can be rated as slim, however, metadata updates can happen quite frequently, or more often than you might think.  Therefore, if a fibre channel path failure occurs, chances are good that a metadata update could be in flight which is precisely when disaster will strike.  Moreover, the safety benefit and reliance on multipathing is diminished by the vulnerability.

 

“

He also has the letter from VMware Here on the source post.

Full Source Post http://www.boche.net/blog/index.php/2009/01/19/kb1008130-vmware-esx-and-esxi-35-u3-io-failure-on-san-luns-and-lun-queue-is-blocked-indefinitely/

 

Thanks to Jason.

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DatacenterNewsStorage

NetApp and Virtualization One Stop Shop!

by Roger Lund
written by Roger Lund

Christopher Kusek, Technology Evangelist

http://www.pkguild.com posted a collection of Netapp related information.

I am going to quote it here. Please refer to the source post for updates and changes.

“

NetApp and Virtualization One Stop Shop!

You ever ask the question “Wow, I wish there were a consolidated place to find everything* there is to find about NetApp and Virtualization?”

I ask that question all the time. The following is a release of my internal notes I’d forward to people when they say “NetApp + Citrix?” “NetApp + VMware” or “NetApp + Hyper-V”

This way, both you AND I have a single place to go look and I don’t have to reinvent my wheel!

Everything you wanted to know about NetApp and Virtualization but were afraid to ask.

NetApp Virtualization Team Blog – Great resource of information and the definitive source on updates of new documents, TR’s, etc – It is where I’ll update new links like those above from.

VMware and NetApp

Microsoft and NetApp

Citrix and NetApp

Oracle and NetApp

And some definite –must- reads!

NetApp 50% Virtualization Guarantee* (Effective until December 31, 2009)

Top Must Read Knowledge Base Articles (Virt-KB!)

NetApp Virtualization and Twitter!

Yes! I was able to track down the folks at NetApp who are on Twitter, so follow them here!

NetApp Virtualization and YouTube!

  • NetAppTV (Customer Success Stories and other cool videos)
  • NetAppTube (Demos from VMWorld and more!)
  • NTriantos (SMVI, VDI, OSSV and more!)

“

Since we have been looking at NetApp, these caught my eye. I hope someone else will find them useful. Make sure to check out http://www.pkguild.com if you haven’t before.

Thanks to http://www.pkguild.com and NetApp

Source Post

http://www.pkguild.com/2009/01/16/netapp-and-virtualization-one-stop-shop/

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DatacenterNewsStorage

TheVMguy’s Notable KB articles from the week

by Roger Lund
written by Roger Lund

http://vmguy.com/wordpress/index.php has posted his weekly Notable KB articles from the week

“

Sorry, better late than never. Here’s last week’s collection from the 71 New/Updated KB Articles:

“

I thought the following where wroth a extensive read.

iSCSI and Jumbo Frames configuration on ESX 3.5

“

KB Article
1007654

Products

VMware ESX

Product Versions

VMware ESX 3.5.x

Symptoms

Large queues are seen while monitoring Jumbo Frames

Purpose

This article provides information related to setting up an NAS and iSCSI environment with Jumbo Frames.

Caution: This is not a VMware supported configuration.

Resolution

Important Jumbo Frame Information

The following is important information to know when using Jumbo Frames:

  • Any packet larger than 1500 MTU is a Jumbo Frame. ESX 3.5 supports frames up to 9kB (9000 Bytes). They are limited to data networking only (virtual machines and the VMotion network) on ESX 3i/3.5.

  • Jumbo Frames must be enabled for each vSwitch or VMkernel interface through the command‐line interface on your ESX Server 3 host.

  • To allow ESX Server 3 to send larger frames out onto the physical network, the network must support Jumbo Frames end to end for Jumbo Frames to be effective.

  • Before enabling jumbo frames, ensure the NIC or LOM supports jumbo frames.

  • VMware supports jumbo frames with the following vendors:

    • Intel (82546, 82571),

    • Broadcom (5708, 5706, 5709),

    • Netxen (NXB-10GXxR,

    • NXB-10GCX4),

    • Neterion (Xframe, Xframe II, Xframe E).

Creating a Jumbo Frames-enabled vSwitch
  1. Log in directly to your ESX Server 3 hosts console.

  2. Run the esxcfg-vswitch -m <MTU> <vSwitch> command to set the MTU size for the vSwitch.
    This command sets the MTU for all uplinks on that vSwitch. Set the MTU size to the largest MTU size among all the virtual network adapters connected to the vSwitch.

  3. Run the esxcfg-vswitch -l command to display a list of vSwitches on the host, and check that the configuration of the vSwitch is correct.

Creating a Jumbo Frames-enabled VMkernel interface

To create a Jumbo Frames-enabled VMkernel interface:

  1. Log in directly to your ESX Server 3 host’s console.

  2. Run the esxcfg-vmknic -a -i <ip address> -n <netmask> -m <MTU> <portgroup name> command to create a VMkernel connection with Jumbo Frame
    support.

  3. Run the esxcfg-vmknic -l command to display a list of VMkernel interfaces, and check that the configuration of the Jumbo Frame‐enabled interface is correct.
    Note: ESX Server 3 supports a maximum MTU size of 9000.

“

Microsoft Windows 64bit operating systems (Vista, 2003, and 2008) randomly fail

“

KB Article
1006576

Products
VMware ACE

VMware ESX

VMware ESXi

VMware Fusion

VMware Player

VMware Workstation

Product Versions

Any

Symptoms

  • Your Windows operating system fails or stops responding

  • A computer that is running an x64-based version of Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista, or Windows Server 2008 randomly restarts and generates a Stop error

  • The Stop error code may be:

    • 0x0000001E

    • 0x000000D1

    • or another Stop error code

Resolution

This is a Microsoft issue caused by a patch.

This problem occurs after you install Microsoft update 932596 on the computer. For more information, refer to http://support.microsoft.com/kb/950772.

“

Addtionaly,

Make sure to know the proper trouble shooting method’s when running A Fiber Channel array via VMware.

Troubleshooting ESX and ESXi connectivity to fibre channel arrays

Troubleshooting fibre channel storage connectivity

These both outline it well.

Thanks to The VMguy and VMware for the content.

Full Source Post http://vmguy.com/wordpress/index.php/archives/479

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