Today, VMware made their official announcement of vSphere, the next generation of virtualization technology in their flagship ESX line. Â There has been a lot of coverage of vSphere online in the weeks leading up to today’s big announcement. Â To me, the most interesting information and the most sought after is the answer to one simple question – what will this upgrade cost me as a current VMware customer with an active support agreement. Â
Category:
Virtualization
Our journey to VDI continues. Â This week, we had several more milestones on our road to delivering this solution into the far reaching corners of our area. Â Among those accomplishments were implementing the DHCP options successfully, setting up several pools of linked-clone virtual desktops and a wider testing of the Pano devices and their capabilites. (This is only an incremental update – see my prior post.)
I may have already mentioned that one of our projects for the year is to transition our corporate ESX cluster from 2U hardware onto blades. Â The process of transitioning does not come without some concern and some caveots moving to the blade architecture. Â We feel that blades are a good fit in our case for this particular cluster (we run several ESX clusters). Â Our VMware View deployment is our first production ESX workload on blade hardware. Â We have learned a few things from this deployment that might be helpful.
For anyone in my local area, I wanted to make sure to let you know that Wilmington, NC, area has a newly formed VMware Users Group. Â Their inaugural meeting will be March 25 at the North Carolina State Port Authority. Â The Port Authority will be presenting a case study of their VMware View (VDI) deployment. Â A senior sales engineer will also be presenting updates from VMworld Europe. Â
I’m very excited that a more local group is available to me and my co-workers and I look forward to participating as often as possible. Â For more information about this user group (or one in your area if you’re not in Myrtle Beach or Wilmington), go to:Â http://www.vmware.com/communities/content/vmug/Â and click on events or local groups.
My boss, a co-worker and I attended the Carolina’s Summit in Charlotte, NC, last May and we were very impressed by the event. Â I received another announcement that this event will be held again this year on May 29. Â This is an all day thing with several session – a mini-VMworld if you will. Â I found last year to be very informative and helpful. Â Like last year, Mike Laverick with RTFM Education will be the guest speaker.
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…
Con-call to discuss VMware View
written by Philip Sellers
Not long ago, we did a demo of VMware’s VDI product at HTC. Â To be honest, we were underwhelmed at the time. Â Fast forward to December and VMware remedied that problem with the release of VMware View. Â 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. Â
Yesterday, we had a conference call with our VMware partner and some of VMware’s technical and sales resources. Â We talked specifically about the packages available with the View product line and what the two basic packages buy us. Â First, VMware is offering an Enterprise and a Premier bundles of the VMware View software. Â Enterprise is basically the upgraded version of VDI. Â Premier on the other hand includes the features we were looking forward to utilizing – namely thin provisioning, View Composer and maybe even VMware ThinApp. Â
Going into the virtual desktop foray, we knew that storage was likely our biggest hurdle. Â 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. Â The thin provisioning/linked clones technology is huge as we drive further down this road. Â I think that this technology has the potential of cutting our storage utilization by 1/10th of the estimated need we projected in November. Â
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. Â 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). Â 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.Â
We still must cross the Microsoft licensing hurdles. Â 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. Â Should be an interesting week next week looking into thin provisioning with my co-worker. Â I’m pretty excited.
As a followup to my previous posts about thin clients and our research, we made a first step into the virtual desktop arena. We purchased 55 Pano Logic units just before end of last year. They arrived and have been safely stored away while we work out the rest of our implementation plans. This is just our first step at HTC and we see the potential of choosing one or maybe two more solutions which meet our needs in other areas.  We are unsure how the Pano units will work in our business offices. Our initial roll out will be in our central offices and we may expand upon that.
We still need to complete the backend infrastructure to handle our roll out. We are making decisions now whether to locate our initial virtual desktop pools with our other virtual servers in the same cluster, or whether to deploy a new cluster. We also have to look at DHCP for our entire network, as our current solution does not appear to be able to hand out the additional directives to the Pano devices. I hope to be able to do a more detailed entry about the whole process once we get further down the road.
In the process of installing the Windows 7 beta, I have come across a few things that don’t quite work well out of the box on my MacBook Pro. Here are some notes from my experiences that may help someone else:
- Partitioned the drive using Boot Camp Assistant. Install takes up about 9GB, so you’ll want at least a 20GB partition. I chose 32GB.
- I had to burn the ISO to a physical disk to get it to install – couldn’t figure out how to use the ISO to install Windows 7 into the Boot Camp partition.
I had a conversation with one of the senior systems admins in my group today. Â The conversation was basically why is it easier to get to VMware patches and to know what has been released to you than it is with Microsoft’s patches? Â Beyond the basic “well Microsoft has way more software to support” answer, I came to the conclusion that VMware’s website organization of their patches for their products is far superior to Microsoft and their emails alerts are actually useful.
There is a nice article out in one of the VMTN blogs which covers all the rebranding that VMware is attempting with their next generation products. Â I’m not a big fan of rebranding (think Citrix’s Xen-everything confusion) as I think it muddies the water and causes brand confusion, but for some reason or another companies like to do this. Â VMware is at least doing so with a new release of software and I understand their reasons behind the rebranding, but it is something new to learn. Â
Anyways, the link. Â You can find more information on all the renaming here: Â http://blogs.vmware.com/vmtn/2008/12/do-they-smell-a.html
