Have you ever heard of PC-over-IP (PCoIP)? PCoIP is a presentation protocol (much like RDP or ICA) introduced by Teradici. The difference in PC-over-IP is that it utilizes hardware chipsets on the server and client. This technology enables centralized desktops and supports high definition audio and video, transparent USB support, web cams, Bluetooth, VoIP, scanners, printers (including multi-function), etc. This technology can also be used in a VDI environment as well as Dan Shappir explains in a nice blog post.
Check out this image from a virtualization demonstration involving multiple monitors:
Technorati : ICA, PC-over-IP, Presentation Virtualization, RDP, Teradici
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Ice Rocket : ICA, PC-over-IP, Presentation Virtualization, RDP, Teradici
Microsoft recently announced that starting September 1, 2008 “…customers will be able to move any of 41 Microsoft server applications between servers within a server farm as often as necessary without paying additional licensing fees, and they can take advantage of expanded specialized technical support.” This licensing change makes it possible to reassign licenses from one server to another within a server farm as frequently as needed. Prior to this change, customers only had 90 days to reassign licenses (which was a legal hurdle to virtualization). There are currently 41 server applications covered under these new licensing terms including “…Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Enterprise edition, Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 Service Pack 1 Standard and Enterprise editions, Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 Enterprise and Professional editions, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, and Microsoft System Center products.” Not only is this legal now, Microsoft also is officially supporting this by expanding technical support. To add to that, Microsoft is also launching worldwide events to help customers get virtual. Talk about getting on the virtualization band-wagon! Way to go Microsoft.
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Technorati : EULA, Hyper-V, Licensing, Microsoft, Virtualization
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So, how do you backup virtual servers? Traditionally, there have been two main schools of thought on this. One is to think of the virtual machine as a physical machine and install a backup agent on the VM. Then, just select what you need backed up just as you would a physical machine. There is nothing wrong with that school of thought, but what if you want to take it a step deeper and backup the actual virtual machine itself? That would be ideal for a disaster recovery situation since recovery time would be reduced. Some backup manufactures are taking advantage of Windows Volume Snapshot Service (VSS a.k.a. Shadow Copy) technology to accomplish this type of backup. Tim Jacobs recently expounded upon the details of this type of technology in a blog post. Tim does a good job of explaining VSS history and how this technology is being taken advantage of in the scenario of backing up virtual machines.
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Technorati : Backup, Recovery, Snapshot, VSS, Virtual Server, Virtualization
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Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) is not really a technology in and of itself. Really, VDI is a combination of technologies. You need hardware virtualization (like VMWare ESX, Microsoft Hyper-V, or Citrix XenServer to name a few). You need some sort of application and/or presentation virtualization (like Citrix XenApp, Microsoft Terminal Services, Provision, etc.) to execute applications on the virtual desktops. You also need a remoting protocol such as RDP, ICA, or SPICE. You also need to have a desktop broker to “traffic” all this virtualization. There are many 3rd party brokers out there, but did you know that with a little you can extend the Windows Server 2008 Terminal Services Session Broker to be a desktop broker as well? The Microsoft Terminal Services Team recently published a blog entry surrounding this topic. Here is an excerpt:
“While the built-in functionality of the TS Session Broker in WS08 only supports routing connections to terminal server sessions, we’ve created a set of APIs that ISVs can use to create connection brokers for other kinds of devices. Basically, these APIs allow you to lobotomize the TS Session Broker and replace its brain - its brokering mechanism - with a new plug-in. This plug-in can contain a new set of rules that support redirection to other types of destinations. It can also provide different means of deciding the best target for new connections, such as load balancing rules based on server resources or login time.”
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Technorati : Desktop Broker, Server 2008, Terminal Services, VDI, Virtualization
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If you are running Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V in your environment (or even if you are thinking about running Hyper-V in your environment), then you should definitely take a look at this white paper published by Microsoft titled “Performance Tuning Guidelines for Windows Server 2008“. This white paper “…describes important tuning parameters and settings that can result in improved performance for the Windows Server® 2008 operating system. Each setting and its potential effect are described to help you make an informed judgment about its relevance to your system, workload, and performance goals.” There is an entire section on Hyper-V in this paper describing performance for processors, cache, memory, networking, storage, etc. The sections in the paper that are not directly related to Hyper-V are still useful in an overall architecture performance plan.
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Technorati : Hyper-V, Hypervisor, Microsoft, Performance, Virtualization
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During this year’s BriForum, Ron Oglesby did an independent performance comparison between the Xen hypervisor and VMWare ESX 3.5. Keep in mind that Ron does not work for either VMWare or Citrix (and, oh yeah, Ron wrote the book on virtualization). I must admit that the results were somewhat surprising. In almost every performance test Xen was comparable and even faster than ESX. But, you don’t have to take my work for it. Just check out the PowerPoint and video of Ron explaining the tests and results.
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Technorati : Citrix, ESX, Hypervisor, Performance, VMWare, Xen
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Ice Rocket : Citrix, ESX, Hypervisor, Performance, VMWare, Xen
I am sure you have heard about the VMWare Update 2 fiasco by now. So, VMWare has fixed the issue with an express update, but are there things you can do in your own data center ti mitigate this kind of risk? Gabe Knuth has written an article on BrianMadden.com addressing this specific question. “Some might say that simply splitting the virtualized servers between two or three hypervisors is enough since you’re only shouldering half the outage, but in reality that just makes them 2 or 3 times more prone to a single failure. An airplane with two engines is twice as likely to experience an engine failure as an airplane with one engine, and the same applies here.”
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Technorati : Datacenter, Hypervisor, Risk Mitigation, VMWare
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There seems to be some speculation out there that Microsoft may be gearing up to go mano-a-mano with Google Docs. You may already know that it is possible to use Microsoft Office 2007 in an App-V environment. But, is Microsoft trying to position this technology to the general public (SaaS)? Possibly. According to some recent posts on virtualization.info, that may (or may not) be Microsoft’s goal. The evidence presented includes some new Office license agreements, and some interesting verbiage on a recent job posting. Plus, Microsoft and Google have been competitors for a while now. I’m not convinced yet that this is pointing to a straight up competition with Google Docs. I guess we’ll have to wait and see what comes of these developments.
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Technorati : App-V, Google, Office 2007, SaaS, Virtualization
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Usually when people set up Microsoft SoftGrid App-V, one of the first applications they try to virtualize is Office. I must admit that I am guilty of this too. As it turns out, Office isn’t exactly the easiest of applications to sequence (or virtualize). This isn’t to say the Office won’t work in the App-V environment - quite the contrary. However, getting to that point can take some work. Luckily, J.C. Hornbeck has posted a blog entry on the App-V blog detailing how to sequence Office 2007 in 30 easy steps. Yep, that’s right - I said 30 steps. Whether virtualizing Office is a good idea or not is still up for debate (considering the number of applications that have dependencies on Office. Yes, I know there is dynamic suiting in App-V now - but that is a discussion for another day).
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Technorati : App-V, Application Virtualization, Office 2007, SoftGrid
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Usually when someone mentions the word agnosticism, they are talking religion. It isn’t always a good idea to talk about politics or religion, so we are going to talk about hypervisor agnosticism. Hypervisor agnosticism is the idea that the customer does not care about which hypervisor they use in an environment since the hypervisor is becoming more of a commodity. There is even talk about hypervisors being built into the BIOS. Citrix is trying to re-focus on making virtual applications run more efficiently on the microkernel-based hypervisor as well as making “virtual workloads” portable. This is where Project Kensho comes in. Citrix states that “…Project Kensho will enable ISVs and enterprise IT staff to leverage a hypervisor-independent portable virtual machine format that packages a complete application workload as a secure, portable, pre-configured open standard virtual appliance. This will solve a multitude of interoperability issues between virtualization platforms while allowing automated provisioning and management of applications, rather than just virtual machines… These tools will allow application workloads to be imported and run across Citrix XenServer, Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V and VMware ESX virtual environments. ” Unfortunately there are no public betas out yet, but it will be cool to see as this project materializes.
Check out CIO’s write up on this technology to get some more information.
Technorati : Citrix, Hyper-V, Hypervisor, VMWare, Virtualization
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