Behind the account of vegard_s is the name of Vegard Sagbakken who works at VMware as Technical Account Manager in the Nordic region. As far as the rumor mill tells me, this is a deciscion on CEO / CTO level and it looks like this rumor will be confirmed soon as being correct. Now, what has gotten into VMware to do this? I can’t think of big pro’s of holding the two events close to eachother, in fact, everything that comes to mind is against holding those two events so close together. Lets look at some arguments against.

The techies

• As a consultant, especially in these times, it is hard to get training and even harder to get your boss pay for a trip to an event like VMworld or Microsoft TechEd. With both events held in the same quarter I can be sure that I can only go to one. Even Microsoft recognized this by holding TechED US and Europe at different times.
• When the events were held further apart, I could often make a case in which the Europe event was especially good for networking and early previews. This helped me advise my customers to go a certain direction without having the final products. The US event would show me the final product and supply much more detailed info. But now it will be hard to tell the difference between the two events and even harder for me to tell my boss the difference and that I want to visit the US event rather then the Europe event. Long story short, no more US visits.
• The great thing about VMworld (US and Europe) has always been meeting those people you always have contact with over twitter, e-mail, MSN, etc, etc and now get to meet them in person. Which (luckily) is always of much more value then only digital contact. By seperating these two events, this sort of contact between “those” from the US and “them” from Europe will slowly degrade. A pitty. Remember that VMware always has been seen as some sort of religion (http://www.virtualgipsy.com) and those followers want to meet to strengthen their believe.

The Press

• How can the press choose between both events? Will VMware make Europe an exact copy of US? Then all the news will be released in the US and the European press will have nothing new to report or has to sent their reports to the US. In either way, the event in Europe will degrade.
• Maybe some news will be released in the US and some more in Europe. So as a press agancy, I will have to sent my reporters to two events for just a few scoops and for 80% (???) of double content. Is this still worth the investment for the press agancy?

The Vendors

I’m conviced that large vendors like Dell, HP, IBM, NetApp, etc, etc will have the money and the people to be at two places in almost the same time. But they do have larger booths which they now at least have to have an extra copy of to be able to attend US and Europe. Maybe they already have and it is not a real problem for these large vendors. But I’m certain that the smaller vendors like Veeam, VizionCore, vKernel, DataCore, etc will have quite a challange attending both events.

• Doug Hazelman from Veeam ( http://www.veeam.com) about his opinion on this rumor: “Well Gabe, if this rumor is true, I think it will present a challenge for smaller ecosystem vendors who will need to cover two conferences in different parts of the world.”
• Mr. Steve Beaver from vWire ( http://www.vwire.com ) said: “I look forward having the opportunity to goto both and this might really put a damper on those plans since it is too much travel in such a short period of time for me. I would guess it would be very rough on any company having to put out all the money at one time to be a part of both conferences at basically the same time.”

What is the reason behind this?

This year I also expect Microsoft, Citrix, Novell, etc to be at VMworld and that they will have plenty of room to talk about their products and how much better they are. But when opening my VMworld bag and finding the VMworld Program Guide, I was a bit surprised to see that it was wrapped in a nice yellow paper from Citrix. Is this VMware displaying a god amount of self confidence?

VMworld Program Guide

Del.icio.us : Citrix, VMware, VMworld

Now, it seems there are people that do studies on this. They observe and participate in these “communities” to learn how this affects the lifes of people, to discover patterns equal to normal day life and learn to explain certain behavior.

I’m lucky enough to know one of these observers (or better: anthropologists) and have her join me to Cannes this year. So, if you’re interested in how virtual and physical world meet and interact, see the website of my girlfriend Brenda at: http://www.VirtualGipsy.com. She’ll be blogging all week about her findings. Add here site to your RSS feed and bookmarks !

Del.icio.us : VMworld VMware Virtual World ViirtualGipsy Gipsy view twitter MSN GTalk

www.youtube.com/watch?v=WeOIABjvLug

See you all at VMworld Europe 2009 in Cannes !!!

The first VMworld Europe conference ever gave more than 4,600 attendees a glimpse into the future of virtualization, 95 partners unveiled the newest technologies, products and best practices for deploying virtualization solutions at the solutions exchange. More than 100 journalists attended the conference.

We would like to thank you for your participation. Keynotes, videos, sessions and labs are now available on http://www.vmworld.com

DV07 – Optimizing storage for virtual desktops

(Tony Armstrong – VMware, Mike Slisinger & M. Vaughan Stewart (NetApp)

To be honest, this was one of the session I didn’t like. I would have expected this session to be about how to work with storage in a VDI environment, but it turned out to be a commercial talk for NetApp and what they can do.

NetApp presented the following products:

• Raid-DP. Its a fault tolerant disk setup like Raid10, but using only the amount of disks of a Raid config.

• Data De-Duplication. This looks like ESX’s transparent page sharing for memory but now on disk. When identical blocks of data would have been written to disk, NetApp writes the identical blocks only once. This of course can save some diskspace, maybe even a higher percentage then transparent page sharing does because there is a lot more identical data on disk.

• FlexClone for fast storage provisioning. A very nice technique which can deliver a 1000 VMs in a minute.

All the options presented by NetApp seem very usable in a VDI environment. Definitely something to look at when deploying VDI in a very large scale environment. Also check out the other storage vendors, because I was told by a colleague that he had seen similar options with other vendors.

]]> http://www.gabesvirtualworld.com/dv07-%e2%80%93-optimizing-storage-for-virtual-desktops/feed/ 3 http://www.gabesvirtualworld.com/dv02-%e2%80%93-implementing-vdi-using-vdm2-tips-and-tricks/ http://www.gabesvirtualworld.com/dv02-%e2%80%93-implementing-vdi-using-vdm2-tips-and-tricks/#comments Sat, 01 Mar 2008 00:29:33 +0000 Gabrie van Zanten http://www.gabesvirtualworld.com/?p=49

DV02 – Implementing VDI using VDM2, tips and tricks

(Puneet Chawla)

 

VDI is catching on with more and more companies. Personally I’ve not had the question yet to implement it, but I do get questions from my customers about what VDI is and if its suited for them. So, this was a must see session for me.

 

An important aspect of VDI is the sizing. Everyone would like to know how many desktops they can run on an ESX host. According to Puneet you should be able to get 6-12 VMs per core, depending on the workload, with an industry average of 8 desktops per core. I was a bit disappointed by this, because surely in this stage, VDI will compete with Citrix WhatEverWeAreCallingItThisYear 4.5 (sorry Mike Laverick for my brutal copy of your joke) at first and I think 8 desktops per core is much less then what I hoped for.

Puneet continued to give some tips when building your VDI client:

-          The virtual LSI Logic SCSI controller is recommend for your VM

-          Make sure your network labels are consistent over all hosts (dhuh).

-          Set Windows screensaver to the blank screensaver

-          Enable 24bit color for RDP

-          Enable Remote Desktop users through a domain group

-          Install VDM Agent for USB pass-through and single sign on

-          Ofcourse, install the VMware Tools

-          In the VMware Tools you can also find a special option for Wyse Multi Media support, use it if you use Wyse terminals

-          Defrag and compress your template

 I would like to add to this list, my own tip: use nLite to make your desktop as small as possible. See my article at:  http://www.gabesvirtualworld.com/?p=39.

Using VDM2 you can make sure there is always a number of VDI desktops waiting for the next client that wants to connect. Per template VDI desktop you can set the minimum and maximum number of copies that should be created. For this pool of desktops, you can also set the number that should be online or immediately available when a client connects. For example:

-          Minimum number of desktops = 50

-          Maximum number of desktops = 100

-          Number of online desktops = 20

 

When this new desktop has been staged, VDM will automatically create 50 copies. From those 50, 20 will be started and running, waiting for a customer. At a given point, there will never be more then 100 copies of this desktop running. A thing that I couldn’t find out yet, is what will happen when 10 users are connected. My guess (but again, I’m not sure) is that you will then have 30 running VMs (10 with users, 20 without).

 

As a last note Puneet pointed out that there is a special ADM template to use for GPO settings for VDI and that the RDC v6.0 client is recommended.

LAB02: Site Recovery Manager (SRM)

(Drill Instructor Dan Anderson and Tim Meyers)

This Lab was great. When entering class and finding your seat, there was this huge American dude standing in front of class. When taking us through the first powerpoint slides, he was constantly walking from left to right and back again, remembering us that “We’re talking smokin’ craters here!!!” when talking about what happened to our production site. And he made also very sure that we wouldn’t press the “RUN fail over now” button, which would mess up the lab. Yeah, don’t mess with the instructor.

I’ve seen a number of presentations of SRM already, which all turned out to be rather dull slides about what the product could do, but I wanted to get some hands on and this was very well possible during this lab. We got to configure two sites, create the replication and do a test fail over. It gave me a really good idea about what SRM is going to offer to me and even more to the customers I work for.

With SRM you define a number of protection groups that include the items you want to fail over, things like VMs (wow really???), resource pools, datastores, networks. On your primary site you will have your Virtual Center with SRM. SRM can be installed on the VC server or on a separate machine, it can use the same SQL server as your Virtual Center, just make sure it uses a different database, because it will happily clean your VC database on install if you by accident give the VC database name. On your secondary or recovery site, you will also install the same combination (VC and SRM). SRM heavily relies on the storage replication by your SAN. You need to make sure that the LUNs you want to fail over on your primary site are always in sync with the LUNs on the secondary site. It is essential for your recovery.

An important part of the replication and fail over mechanism is the “Storage Replication Adapter”. This is not a hardware like adapter, but a software plug in for SRM that should be created by your storage vendor. What SRM globally does when a fail over is initiated:

- Stop the running VMs on your primary site, because the disaster happening might not be a total disaster yet and you might have VMs that are still running. You want to shut them cleanly first.

- Then SRM tells the Storage Replication Adapter to break the replication of the LUNs from primary to secondary site and make the secondary site LUNs available to the ESX hosts on the secondary site.

- Next it will start the VMs on the ESX hosts on the secondary site, using the replicated LUNs.

Important to know is that SRM will not manage your LUNs, it will not talk to your storage, the Storage Replication Adapter will do this. SRM just kicks off this SRA script and tell it to do its job. This is why your storage vendor should write the Storage Replication Adapter. They know best how to talk to their SAN. So for your its essential to ring your storage vendor tomorrow and ask them when they will be ready for SRM. Without their support, nothing is gonna happen !!! Let them know you want it.

It was a great lab although there was not really anything I hadn’t heard already in earlier presentations, but getting a feel of it was great. I was even able to draw their attention to the fact that the small printed text in green and red, was very difficult to read for a colorblind guy like me. Love to see if they listened and changed this in the final product.

AP09 – Fast and easy disk workload characterization on ESX

(Richard McDougall)

 

When moving an I/O insensitive workload onto ESX, you’re always asking yourself: “Will it hold? Will it perform? Is there something I can tweak to make it perform better?”. In this session Richard showed some things to look at.

 

The key questions before moving to virtual are:

-         What is the I/O blocksize?

-         What is the spatial locality?

-         What is the I/O interarrival period?

-         What is the Queue Depth needed?

-         How much latency is allowed?

-         What are the read / write rations?

 

When knowing these figures for you physical environment, you can start testing in your virtual environment to see if your configuration can meet the demand. Richard is an SUN and Oracle guy, so a lot of examples are Oracle based, but that is no problem for understanding where its all about.

 

The tools he uses frequently to test performance are Filebench OLTP, OSDL dbt-2 and Windows large file copies.  In the virtual environment you can monitor what your vSCSI adapter of your VM is doing by looking at /usr/lib/vmware/bin/vscsistats -h. It can show you metrics like I/O size, R/W ratios and Outstanding I/Os. Very important data to have when discussing performance with your SAN admin.

 

There are some limitations in using vscsistats, it only shows histograms per virtual disk and it doesn’t give a complete I/O picture because you will have other VMs interfering and traffic from the ESX host itself. But, nevertheless still a great tool to start with when diving into performance characteristics. Be sure to check out these sites, on which more information can be found about performance:

http://www.virtualscoop.org and the VROOM blog on the VMware site.

 

Great session, although Richard sometimes went pretty fast and left no time for me to take notes. Well, there is always the online pdf in a couple of weeks.

So, here I sit at the beach. A nice cappucino on the table, sun light on my face, Amy Winehouse playing on my mp3-player, beautiful girls doin’ their morning jogging round and a laptop on my knees. I could imagine worse conditions. When walking past Palais des Festivals, the big VMworld advertising is gone, all VMworld flags have been removed and are laying in a corner below the stairs. A new event is coming and Palais des Festivals is ready for it. That’s how fast it goes.

 

Looking back at three days VMworld I must say, this was better then ever. I’ve been to Paris in 2006, Nice and San Francisco in 2007, but Cannes has topped them all. Great job VMware and Richard Garsthagen!!! It was very well organized: coming from the airport we were directed to the buses by nice ladies with big Vmworld signs. In Cannes itself registration went very fast and without any problems. During the remainder of the event you would almost trip over all the helpful personnel waiting to help you. Getting lost was alsmost impossible.

 

Not only the entourage was good, the sessions were great to. The technical level was much better then previous events. I spoke to Richard Garsthagen about this and he told me that he instructed the speakers to use a max of 2 slides for global introduction and dive into deep technical details as soon as possible. Well, most of them managed to do so. My compliments, this is were I came for and I’ve been hearing the same comments from other VMworld visitors.

 

In the next few days I’ll try to write short summaries about the sessions I’ve visited. You can already find the Exchange with 16000 mailboxes report on my blog. Be sure to check for new reports real soon. 

 

Hope to see you at VMworld Europe 2009 !!!

 

(wow, that seems like a really long time!)