One kink in the armor

If there is any issues with VI3, it has to be the reliability of Virtual Center after its host machine crashes.  In the past 2 years of running virtual center, the Windows box on which it runs has lost power due to facility issues maybe 5 times.  Of the five major power surges/outages, virtual center has failed to fully come online 4 times.  So far each time has required a reinstallation of the application, and a restoration of the last full db backup.  Luckily bringing the hosts back under management isn't a very arduous task.  Even without the database backup, you can still bring all of the hosts back under the VC umbrella rather quickly.  You do however lose all of your cluster configuration options.  This particular fault bit me just a few weeks back.

After a VC reinstallation due to a power outage, I had what I thought was a suspect database backup and current DB.  So I wiped the old db, and created a new one.  I brought all of the hosts back into management, but had forgotten about setting the DRS to partially automatic, rather than the default fully automatic.  This caused the VMs on my 75% utilized production cluster to start VMotioning at will about 3 every 2 minutes.  After about 40 or so vmotions in an hour, we finally had one puke.  Luckily it was our corporate exchange server.  After looking at the logs, and seeing all of the VMotions, it became clear to me that I had forgotten to go back in and setup all of the cluster settings as per my preference.  Once this was done, a VM reset, everything was fine.

Moral of the story, when recreating a VC database, be sure to go in and inspect all settings of a cluster, before re-adding the hosts!

VMWorld Coming Soon

VMWorld 2008 is coming very soon.  Check out www.vmworld.com for details.

Leadership Changes at VMware

Well,

I will always remember her as the incredibly enthusiastic lady presenting at the VMworld key note addresses.  It looks like Diane Greene's time at the company she founded may have come to an end.  I don't know if she decided she wanted to do something else, or what happened, however I do believe that she is one of those people that are incredibly successful at pretty much anything she does.

Here's the VMware Press Release.

http://www.vmware.com/company/news/releases/executive_leadership.html

VMWorld Session Proposal

Its official, my VMware Fusion sessions didn't get selected as an official session at VMWorld 2008.  Oh well, maybe next year.  VMWorld is a great conference.  I have been a few times, and am always blown away with what VMware has up their sleeves.  The keynotes are great, and the sessions cover everything you could possibly imagine.  This year its in Vegas in mid September.  If you have thought about going, I would highly recommend it.  Who knows what they will come up with for this year's technical presentations.  Seeing Continuous Availability last year was pretty awesome.  I am sure they will probably cover some of there new applications that have come out in the last year like Site Recovery Manager, or ThinApp.  Anyways, its a great show, and I would highly recommend it.

Time is running out on Windows XP

Everyone knew that it would eventually happen, however for those of us that are purchasing Windows XP Professional licenses to run XP based virtual machines, this is a significant moment.  After 6/30/2008, many distributors will no longer be selling Windows XP Professional.  So if you are planning a VDI deployment using Windows XP Professional, you may want to get your OS licenses ahead of time, other wise you are stuck with Vista.  I do believe you can downgrade a Vista license to XP, but I am not totally sure of the process or if its actually possible.  I also don't know if this affects Volume Licensing customers as well.

Virtualized Desktop Infrastructure - VDI is for Real

So you have taken a big step, and have began virtualizing your server environment. You get all of the benefits of virtualization: 1.) Reduced the number of physical servers in your datacenter. Therefore reducing your power and cooling requirements. 2.) Increased utilization of remaining servers through DRS clusters. 3.) Added High Availability to every single application that you have using VMware HA clusters. And a few others. Now, what's stopping you from taking these same concepts and applying them to your desktop environment? The desktop environment has been one of the hardest IT based management tasks to keep under control. This is the case for several reasons. 1.) PCs are constantly being replaced. Either through hardware failure, or lack of processing power a PC usually has about a 3 to 4 year lifespan. 2.) You aren't replacing all of the PCs at the same time. This means that you now have to manage drivers and other OEM software for each different model that you are supporting. 3.) Users store data on their local hard drives. Most of the time this isn't being backed up by your Enterprise Backup solution. When hard drives crash, businesses can lose quite a bit of critical data. This is a very large risk for small businesses. 4.) Applications and even Windows can go haywire. Files get corrupt. Users delete system files. Its just a fact of life. So, getting back to the initial idea, why can't we take all the great benefits that we get through server virtualization, and apply them at the desktop level? What if you could replace 100 400 watt desktop machines with 100 16w thin clients? Well you can. Your first step is to create a base image. Through this base image, all of your user's desktops will be created. For most of us, you will be creating Windows XP Pro or Windows Vista VM's. Remember, that Windows XP and Windows Vista OEM licenses aren't transferrable to a VM. You must buy licenses from your provider of choice for the VMs. Once you have created your base image, you then convert that Virtual Machine into a template. I like to run sysprep on the image, just before making it a template. VMware VirtualCenter can also do this as a built in feature for many operating systems as you deploy from the template. From your template, you begin deploying your VMs. Watch your physical resources to be sure that you don't oversubscribe any of your hosts. I would also suggest that you keep desktop VMs seperate from server VMs. Desktop I/O and Server I/O is quite a bit different. On the client side you have a couple of choices. To keep it simple I will go over a quick 1 to 1 scenario. This means that for every XP Machine, there is one thin client machine configured to connect to it. The other choice involves the use of a Virtual Desktop Broker software package. There are several that are available today. I haven't used any of them as of yet. VMware is also releasing an update to their VDM in the coming months. For the thin client peice I am currently using several JackPC's from Chip PC. They seem to do the job that I need them for. They are small, and fit in a wall jack. The only drawback to them, is that they are CE based, and not XP Embedded, therefore there isn't as much flexibility to them that I would like. In summary, VDI has several benefits. You get a decent costs savings in your monthly power consumption by dropping your PC power requirements by close to 90 percent. You get the ability to snapshot your client VMs that may contain mission critical data, and even use the VCB to back them up. You can now quickly provision more desktop VMs through your created template. Plus you get all the benefits of HA and DRS.