VMTN Blog

View Composer is one of the really exciting new parts of the VMware View solution. I'll let Rick Westrate give us the overview. A New “View” of Virtual Desktop Computing | Virtual Insanity.

View Composer is what I consider to be one of the most exciting new features of this release (even though it’s really a separate product). The storage cost associated with deploying virtual desktops has been up to now, one of the largest barriers of adoption. Many organizations I deal with loved VDI and what it represented in terms of data security and lowered management costs, but they just couldn’t get over putting all their desktop storage on expensive, SAN-based storage....  View Composer solves this problem for the rest of the world as it allows you to significantly reduce the amount of storage used by employing linked clones. Composer allows you to identify a “gold image” from which you desktop pool will be created. You then tell Composer what LUN’s to store the VM’s on and then the fun begins. Composer creates a replica on each of the LUN’s you provided and then there, the small linked clones are built. The provisioning is extremely fast and as you can imagine, highly space efficient.  ... 

Composer isn’t just a storage savings tool. It’s also a game changer for desktop management. Now that you have all these linked clones for your desktop pool, you have the option to now manage the lifecycle of these desktops from the image. That’s in contrast to how thing normally work where once a desktop is created you have to continually patch it and upgrade it to maintain it (applications, windows updates, virus updates, and security updates). With the linked clones, we can now simply update the image at the top of the tree and re-home all the downstream desktops to the new version of the image. This is called a “Re-Compose” operation Think about the ramifications of that! You could roll out a new application to 1000’s of users with a few clicks, with a high degree of certainty by simply Re-Composing your users to a new version of the master image. Good stuff!! With the addition of the User Data Drive option which employs Windows Profile Folder Redirection technology, you can ensure that your user’s personal settings persist even after refreshing their desktop or even moving them to a completely new version of their desktop. Heck, you can even schedule a refresh of your user’s desktops every x days to ensure that your user’s never experience “Windows Rot” through the “Refresh” function.

Rod Haywood gives us a deep dive into the storage savings. Musings of Rodos: Storage Analysis of VMware View Composer.

Can I turn 16TB of storage for 1000 VDI users into 619GB, let me show you how it’s actually done. The release today of VMware View Manager 3 brings to market the long anticipated thin provisioning of storage for virtual desktops. Previewed in 2007 as SVI (Scalable Virtual Images) what does this now released View Composer linked clone technology look like under the hood? How much storage will it actually use? ...

He goes through the files and directories created when you use View Composer, e.g.

Using the Add Desktop wizard in the View Administrator you can create a pool of desktops based on a snapshot from a ParentVM. As part of the process you have to choose a VM and one of its snapshots. When this is done a unique replica is created. This process is marked as (1) on the diagram. Here a copy of the machine is performed, into a new directory however the disk is thin provisioned. If our original disk was 15G yet only 2G was consumed, the disk in the replica will only by 2G. This process can take a short period of time as the data copies, but it is a once off process. This thin provisioned disk is the master disk that all of the clone VMs will use as their base. You can make changes to the parent VM, and the replica can not be harmed.

Necessary to understand what is going on -- a nice walkthrough before you sit down and try it yourself.

VMware View 3 was just released. (press release, product page).

VMware's Rick Westrate starts us off with a good tour. Link: A New “View” of Virtual Desktop Computing | Virtual Insanity.

Rather than just reprint the marketing press releases, I thought I would highlight some of the key new features of View3, give a short explanation, and add some initial thoughts. As the (borrowed) graphic below shows, “View3” really is the umbrella name that covers all the components of the total solution. View Manager 3 is the desktop broker that sets up and manages connections between end users and back-end desktop virtual machines. Let’s dig into some of these features.

Dave Stiles likes what he's seen so far. Link: Virtually Dave » Welcome to the View from VMware’s perspective.

Many of our customers who have been thinking about desktop virtualization or who are current VMware VDM 2.X users are going to find the new feature set substantially enhances their experience. ... VMware View when coupled with VMware ThinApp truly enables the compute on demand desktop experience many of us have heard about for so long. ...

Secondly and more importantly, the ability to build and reference off a single master image with linked clones is going to save a lot of time in deployment, management, and disk space costs.  ...

Third, View is really a multi-purpose front-end load balancer.  No longer is View just the connection broker for virtual machines, it can be the front end for Terminal Servers and PCs.  This is a big enhancement, many of our customers are going to like.  The ability to use the SSL tunneling provided for under VDM and continued in view is really going to be a full on security solution for remote office workers.

And last but not least, the feature I have been longing for the most, offline desktop. ...

Brian Madden also gives us his "60 second overview". Link: VMware releases their new VDI product, View 3. Here's a 60-second overview - Brian Madden - BrianMadden.com. He notes these advantages over Citrix, although he rightly points out that VMware hasn't yet delivered on all that we previewed at VMworld 2008.

• A lot (a mean a whole lot, like 75%) of customers who use Citrix XenDesktop run it on VMware's infrastructure. If that's the case, then VMware is a much cheaper solution, at only $150 for the edition of View 3 that includes everything.
• VMware's extensions to RDP, plus the ThinPrint stuff they've licensed, means that Citrix does not have as much as an advantage with ICA anymore.

At VMworld 2008, we announced a number of name changes to our product lines. In broad strokes, Virtual Center becomes VMware vCenter and a brand for our management and automation products; and the product line for the enterprise desktop and our vClient Initiative become VMware View. Today we revamped the website to reflect these new names.

VMware vCenter
Brand name for all infrastructure and application management products from VMware

VMware VirtualCenter  → VMware vCenter Server
The central management product for VMware Infrastructure

VMware Lifecycle Manager → VMware vCenter Lifecycle Manager
Workflow automation product for creation, deployment and decommissioning of virtual machines

VMware Converter → VMware vCenter Converter (for the version integrated into vCenter)
VMware vCenter Converter Standalone (for the separately downloadable version); comes in two flavors: Enterprise and Starter
Physical to virtual (P2V) conversion product

VMware Lab Manager → VMware vCenter Lab Manager
Automation product for application development environments

VMware Stage Manager → VMware vCenter Stage Manager
Automation product for application staging and deployment environments

VMware Update Manager → VMware vCenter Update Manager
Host and virtual machine patch management product integrated with vCenter Server

VMware Site Recovery Manager → VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager
Disaster recovery orchestration product

VirtualCenter Foundation → vCenter Server Foundation
Node limited version of vCenter Server

VMFS → VMware vStorage VMFS
VMware’s cluster file system

VMware Virtual Desktop Infrastructure → VMware View
VMware’s integrated desktop virtualization solution that delivers enterprise-class control and manageability

Virtual Desktop Manager (VDM) → VMware View Manager
Enterprise class server which manages connections from end points to virtual desktops or hosted desktops while helping rapidly provision desktops

VMware Administrator Interface → VMware View Administrator
Administrator Interface for View Manager

VDM Agent → VMware View Manager Agent
Agent for View Manager to talk to the virtual desktop

VDM Web Access → VMware View Portal
Access to virtual desktops through web browser

VDM Client for Windows → VMware View Client for Windows
Client used to install on Win 32 PC or Win XP embedded thin client to connect to View Manager for virtual desktop access

VDM Client for Linux → VMware View Client for Linux
Client used to install on Linux thin clients to connect to View Manager for virtual desktop access

Only the current versions change their names -- older versions keep the older names, so you won't have to do that translation in your head. It's hopefully not too confusing, and it sets us up for more logical naming going forward. Behind such seemingly simple changes go a lot of work, so congrats to the team for pulling it off.

I think Workstation is 25% off with the same code as well.

Link: VMware: Team Fusion: One Day VMware Fusion Madness: 50% off VMware Fusion. Combine with Competitive Rebate.

From 12:01 AM Pacific Time (well, I think it actually might be live right now) on December 1st, 2008 through 11:59 PM, 24 hours later, VMware Fusion will be on sale for 50% off, worldwide.

 

That’s right.  Using the coupon code “CyberMondayDeal” at checkout, you can buy VMware Fusion at half off its typical list price.

 

What’s more, in the United States and Canada, this deal combines with our $30 competitive rebate for Parallels and Virtual PC for Mac users. On top of getting Fusion for half off, you can get $30 back when you prove ownership of a competing product.

 

So yes, you heard that right.

 

People interested in running Windows on the Mac, can do so with Fusion for half price, all day tomorrow.

 

And people interested in switching from Parallels and Virtual PC to VMware Fusion can do so for as little as $9.99.

 

Re our post yesterday on ESXi, Duncan dives deeper into one of the tools that VMware is creating so that you don't have to pop the hood -- VMware Infrastructure Management Assistant (VIMA).

Link: VMotioning your Service Console?! » Yellow Bricks.

Some of you might have looked into VIMA already. Those of you that didn’t please check it out because I expect this to be the way that VMware is heading. Note, I don’t know if it really is the way VMware is heading, but a Service Console with VMotion capabilities sounds like a winner to me. A little birdie also just told me that APC, the UPS Company, is finishing their VIMA Compatible UPS software agent!

The cool thing about VIMA is that it includes the RCLI commands, the Perl toolkit and a logger daemon named vilogd. The last one will be the topic for this blog. So what does this logger daemon include? The vilogd daemon collects all the logs that are available through the DiagnosticManager VI API:

ESXi is not your father's ESX. There is no Service Console, so trying to fit it into the exact same processes that you're used to with ESX isn't recommended. I know, I know, you have all those scripts you're used to running in the console. VMware is building tools to manage and administer your ESXi from outside the box, and while they're not quite feature complete, they're well on their way. So don't pop the hood; it's welded shut for a reason.

Link: Keep your VMware ESXi warranty: Don't break the security shell.

Working with VMware ESXi can be frustrating; you're not supposed to enable the Dropbear SSH client or use its technical support mode without the assistance of a VMware support representative. System administrators, however, may be tempted to use tech support mode (or enable Dropbear) to fix problems or manage connections on the fly. Cracking this security shell, however, can void the VMware ESXi warranty and break support contracts. In this tip, I'll explain alternatives that allow you to manage your ESXi virtual machines without compromising its security -- and possibly breaking a support contract.

Blogs are a great way learning more about virtualization, getting the best technical tips, and keeping up with the news. (See my last post on Virtualization Alltop.)  One of the nice developments of this year is that we're seeing more VMware employees blogging.

One of our newest blogs is from Dave Lawrence, a VMware senior systems engineer. He asked for advice as he was starting his blog, and both Mike and I both told him that people come back if you provide value -- writing about what you know, so it's interesting, and posting every day, so there's something to come back for.

Well, Dave evidently took our advice to heart, because the result is his new blog The VMguy, "Virtualization for the little guy." Dave's focus is SMB, and I hope he keeps going in that direction, because there's a dearth of virtualization resources for small business out there, but really the topics so far will be of interest to everybody. Some recent posts:

Which storage protocol is best?

This question is definitely one of the most common that I receive. "We’re thinking of building a new infrastructure for our virtual machines, which storage protocol should we use?"  There are two things to remember for this decision.  Performance and functionality.

HCL Update Recap for the week (btw, new feeds will be coming in that area)

Notable KB Articles from the week

What does 80-cores mean to you?

When you're running 32-cores in a server how many apps will utilize that hardware?  Virtualization is the only one.  AMD and Intel’s "arms race" of processors has left the average software application in the dust. Most applications in customer’s environments don’t even remotely push the CPU capacity in the datacenter.  One of the few remaining ways to utilize these types of processors is virtualization.  If you have not virtualized as much as you can, keep working towards it.  Remember that the 4 or 6 core CPU you purchased this year will be end-of-life in 3-5 years.  Perhaps the replacement machine might just have one of the 80-core powerhouses in it.  Then you will be able to migrate all of your virtual machines to it, without having to modify a thing inside them.

VMware Converter 4.0 now in beta White Paper: RVI Performance

Redmondmag.com Reader’s Choice Awards announced

What is Enhanced vMotion Compatibility anyway?

One important factor to note.  In order to enable EVC for a cluster, you cannot have any virtual machines running on that cluster.  All of the virtual machines must be powered down (or a clean cluster with no VMs.)  This protects the stability of the existing VMs.  If you had a VM running on a host and it changed it’s CPUID while a VM was running, it would appear to the OS and app that the CPU changed while the VM was running, thus adding instability just like our original problem above. Once EVC is enabled for a cluster, there are no more VM outages required to add additional hosts to that cluster.  ...

Another thing to be aware of: the FlexMigration (Intel) and Extended Migration (AMD) features do not block the actual instructions themselves.  They only mask what the CPUID instruction reports.  Back in the 486 days, application programmers would figure out what CPU they were on by trying different instructions.  Intel formally added the CPUID instruction in the first Pentium processors in the early 1990’s. They also recommended that developers use this standard method going forward to determine CPU functionality.  This is a much better method as it is much more consistent and reliable.  The point is that it is possible that there could be code in use today, from the early 1990’s, that has not been upgraded and does not use the standard CPU checking with CPUID and tries to determine CPU capability by "trying functions."

Should I buy blades or standalones for my virtualization platform?

VirtualCenter, run it on physical or virtual?

Dave already has it down -- a mix of news, tech tips, commentary, and discussion, all inspired by his day job interacting with hundreds of small businesses -- and his blog is very worth keeping up with. Please welcome Dave to the virtualization blogosphere.

You should already be aware of Planet VMware and Planet V12n for all your virtualization blog needs -- technical tips, industry news, commentary.

But now there's a new way to scan the best virtualization blogs -- virtualization.alltop.com. The Planets present a "river of news" linear reverse chronological aggregation, which is a great way for getting a sense of the last week's zeitgeist or catching the day's breaking news, but if your favorite blogger hasn't updated in the last few days their latest post may get lost in the noise.

Alltop takes a different strategy -- their sites give you a grid of blogs and the latest 5 post titles from each. That makes it a good way to check out what's going on with a particular news source, and since it just includes titles, you can scan pretty quickly. Hover over a topic to get an excerpt.

They also had the good taste to steal liberally from the blogroll at Planet V12n, which shows they have taste. I do think they probably aren't virtualization experts, because they are definitely missing some feeds. (Like Alessandro at virtualization.info -- probably the best-known of all the virtualization blogs...)

Guy Kawasaki was one of the founders of the company, which they liken to a "magazine rack." I thought it was a stupid idea when I saw the first set of topics, but they're growing on me. The range of Alltop sites are quite wide, but since you're reading this you might also be interested in the sites covering enterprise and cloud computing.

There a whole bunch of SRM projects going on globally where VMware PSO, the department I work for, is assisting. These projects typically have a duration of 3 to 9 months, while it seems that with the ease of VMware Site Recovery Manager this should be a matter of days.

People tend to forget that the most important thing about Distaster Recovery / Business Continuity is the business. You need to know the organisation and IT environment very well before you can even start ...

The fact that SRM is so easy to setup makes it really hard to actually explain to a customer why a BCDR project will take much longer then he expected.

There are a few sets of instructions floating around the Internet on how to run ESX or ESXi inside Workstation 6.5. (Let me Google that for you or just go to xtravirt) Lots of reasons you'd want to do this -- for training, testing, lab work, demos, POCs, or even just as a parlor trick to impress your friends. You'll need recent hardware. Now David Davis has published a nice 14 minute video tutorial on the topic at Petri IT Knowledgebase. Link: Running VMware ESX 3.5 and ESXi in Workstation on your desktop PC.

Site Recovery Manager can be hard to evaluate -- you need some shared storage that is going to be replicated and then set up SRM to do all the tricky failover workflow bits. Tomas Ten Dam has laid out a process to set that up in Workstation as well using the NetApp ONTAP simulator: SRM in a Box final release (the complete setup) « Ten Dam. (Looks like you need to be a current NetApp customer to get your hands on it. You should also be able to do this with the EMC Celerra simulator, same conditions apply. Looks like you can do SRM with Lefthand VSA as well, and you can at least do that with a 30-day trial. Has anybody set this up with a free or open source, albeit unsupported, tool? How about a set of virtual appliances?)

Completely new to SRM? Check out this new video (parts 2 and 3 coming soon).

[Update: from Chad Sakac in the comments, the Celerra simulator is available to everybody.]

Drop by the Communities Roundtable Podcast tomorrow. It's an open topic day, meaning we'll talk about whatever we feel like. We'll talk about whatever you feel like as well. Listen in and join the conversation.

Some interesting things went on this week. Let's go over to Planet V12n and see...

Rob Randell, one of our security specialists here at VMware, is guest-posting over at Mike D's blog. (Guys, you're welcome over here as well.)

Link: Mike D's Virtualization Blog: Virtualization Team vs. Security Team: It is important to remove the “vs.”!.

Unfortunately, very often this situation is the exception and not the rule. Many of the customers that I talk to are only talking to me because they have started a widescale deployment of VMware VI and the security team gets wind of it once it is well underway or worse some sort of audit is initiated (PCI, Sarbox, HIPAA, etc…). At this point the entire architecture needs to be reviewed and very often rearchitected to meet the necessary security and audit requirements. See the following article for a great example of this.

(Emphasis mine.) Sounds like a nightmare, so my guess is that you don't want that to happen to you. Always consult your friendly neighborhood security team first.

We're pleased to announce a new VMware Referral Program that gives you rewards when you recommend VMware products to others. You can participate even without a blog or website, as we give you the tools to send custom emails or bug your friends on social networks, or if you do have a blog, you can get a spiffy widget like you see on the right, and you can customize what it says. (All rewards through this particular widget go to the Red Cross, by the way.) You're also giving out a special "friends & family" offer, which at this point is a 10% discount.

You get $10 credit (which can go straight to your PayPal account or to a gift card or charity) every time two VMware Store purchases are made from your referrals. (That $10 number tells me that we expect to moving more copies of Fusion and Workstation than VI Enterprise through this referral, but go crazy selling ESX if that's what you're into.) In any case, it's a great way to spread the word about the solutions you use every day that make your life easier and got you your last promotion.

So sign up now -- it takes 3 minutes to get started.

Thank you very much, and I hope you make a bunch of dough.

Calling all bloggers going to VMworld Europe 2009. We really appreciate folks blogging from our conferences.

• It helps to spread news and announcements.
• It gets a lot of technical detail up on the public web so Google can find it.
• It helps people who aren't on site feel more like they are there -- and hopefully come next time! It really is a very good tech conference for both beginners and experienced virtualizers.
• It helps others create successful strategies for navigating the event, and it gives feedback to the conference team.
• It helps continue to cement this global community of virtualization enthusiasts and VMware experts we are building.

Check out the coverage of VMworld 2008 if you weren't there, and you can see some past sessions on vmworld.com as well.

If you're going to show up in Cannes on February 24, please drop me a line (jtroyer @ vmware). Although we're going to reach out to folks we know in Europe, if you're outside of Europe but planning on coming or if you don't blog primarily in English, we might not know to ask, so please speak up.

I'm not making any promises, but last year the folks who were regularly blogging were treated very well by Richard, including custom shirts, a nice place with power and connectivity and refreshments to blog, press passes, and room to shoot video or do interviews. I highly recommend getting on Richard's list.

And if you aren't a current blogger, I don't think we can get you a press pass, but it's a fine time to start a blog. Remember you can always start a free one at vmworld.com/blogs or communities.vmware.com/blogs.

Richard Garsthagen, evangelist extraordinaire, giving the VMware overview at Microsoft TechEd EMEA. It's a good short overview that gets past the "my hypervisor is better than yours" argument to talk about the entire suite of infrastructure and management software that we offer. Also, make sure you watch to the very end. Richard can be very, very sneaky.

(click for the video)

Richard is also coordinating the bloggers (and many other things) at VMworld Europe 2009. If you have a blog and are going to be in Cannes this February, drop me a line (jtroyer @ vmware).