VMware View 4 includes PC-over-IP functionality. PC-over-IP is a display protocol licensed from Teradici. There are 2 types of PC-over-IP - hardware and software. VMware View 4 includes the software version. Some details of the inner workings of the software version of PC-over-IP are explained in a recent article by Eric Siebert.

VMware’s software implementation of PCoIP uses Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and User Datagram Protocol (UDP) over port 50002. The TCP port is used for session establishment and control and the UDP port is used for optimal performance of media and streaming content. All traffic between the host server and remote user is encrypted with 128-bit Advanced Encryption Standard encryption. One of the biggest challenges with remote desktops is dealing with remote users that have low bandwidth and/or high latency network connections; PCoIP handles these types of situations very well and still delivers a decent remote desktop experience to a user.

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Technorati : PC-over-IP, VDI, VMware
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Which protocol produces the best performance for vSphere? That is a question NetApp recently published a whitepaper about. The paper compares the performance of FC, iSCSI, and NFS connected storage along with the gains made in protocol optimization with vSphere as compared to VI3.

Some interesting information from the report states “…there is very little difference between the performance results of any storage protocol when running VMware on NetApp. This first graph is one of many showing I/O throughput.”

I would have thought there would a little more difference. More tests were performed with 10GbE for NFS and iSCSI showing little discrepancy.

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Technorati : Fiber Channel, NFS, VMware, iSCSI, performance, vSphere
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Microsoft is enabling virtualization functionality in System Center Essentials (SCE) 2010. The release candidate of SCE will include System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) for up to 50 servers and 500 clients. Alessandro Perilli explains a little more in a recent article at virtualization.info.

Also, Microsoft released a demo video that demonstrates:

• The requirements for hosting SCE 2010
• How to add a host and create a VM
• How to P2V
• How to import Microsoft and VMware virtual machines
• Hot to take snapshots
• Hot to save a VM template.

Technorati : SCVMM, System Center
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VMware has released public drafts of the vSphere 4.0 Security Hardening Guides. This set of documents provides guidance on how to securely deploy vSphere 4.0 in a production environment. The focus is on configuration of the virtualization infrastructure, which covers the following:

• The virtualization hosts (both ESX and ESXi)
• Configuration of the virtual machine container (NOT hardening of the guest OS or any applications running within)
• Configuration of the virtual networking infrastructure, including the management and storage networks as well as the virtual switch (but NOT the virtual machine’s network security)
• vCenter Server and its database
• VMware Update Manager (included because the regular update and patching of the ESX/ESXi hosts and the virtual machine containers is essential to maintaining the security of the environment)

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Technorati : Hardening, Security, VMware, vSphere
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If you want to use a Microsoft Windows Desktop OS in your VDI environment, you have to have a special type of licensing called Virtual Enterprise Centralized Desktop (VECD) licensing. Currently, VECD is only available via SA and is priced per device.

One executive responsible for Windows licensing, the Software Assurance (SA) maintenance agreement and Virtual Enterprise Centralized Desktop (VECD) said Microsoft will revitalize its licensing program later this year to lift some of the restrictions of today’s per-device model.

“We will see incremental changes on product use rights, on product use types and on requirements customers can meet to enable more types of users,” said Amilcar Alfaro, senior product manager of worldwide licensing and pricing at Microsoft.

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Technorati : VDI, VECD, Virtualized Desktops
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Joren van de Kamp recently posted an article on BrianMadden.com about virtualizing Terminal Server workloads. This article is actually an excerpt from Project VRC. The Terminal Server workload is quite a bit different than other workloads and special consideration needs to be taken when virtualizing Terminal Services. Joren’s article covers:

• Virtual CPUs (vCPUs)
• vCPU Overcommit
• Transparent Page Sharing
• Interpreting VRC Results

It is interesting to read the results of the Project VRC tests on virtualizing TS workloads.

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Technorati : Project VRC, Terminal Services
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VKernel recently released a free tool called VM Status. Following is a summary of the VM Stats features:

• Provides key summary statistics for your VMware environment
• • Virtualization deployment statistics (VMs, hosts, data stores, etc.)
  • Total available resources (CPU, memory and storage)
• Benchmarks your virtualization efficiency against industry averages
• Highlights savings achievable by correctly sizing VMs and eliminating wasted storage
  • Typical customers recover 20% to 30% of server and storage costs

You can download VM Stats for free from VKernel.

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Technorati : Free Tools, VKernel, VMware
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Jerry Orman wrote a cool free tool to manage Hyper-V VMs from the system tray of a Windows 2008 Server. This tool allows you to start, stop, save state, and pause VMs without having to keep Hyper-V manager up and going. The tool uses WMI to interface with the VMs. Jerry also provides the source code if you want to explore how to use WMI to work with Hyper-V VMs.

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Technorati : Free Tools, Hyper-V
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Microsoft got in the hypervisor game with the release of Windows Server 2008. Since then, there have been some misunderstandings/myths about Hyper-V. Chris Steffen recently guest posted an article on TechNet to set some of these things straight in his article titled “9 Reasons Why Hyper-V is a Great Choice for Enterprises.” In the article, Chris covers:

• Breadth of OS support
• Memory Management (overcommit)
• Security
• Live Migration
• VM Priority Restarts
• Fault Tolerance
• Hot-Adds
• 3rd Party Vendor Support
• Maturity

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Technorati : Hypber-V, Live Migration, Memory Overcommit
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VMware has a feature called memory overcommit. Basically, memory overcommit is a feature that lets you assign more RAM to virtual machines than the physical host actually has installed. The thinking behind this is that if VMs do not use all the RAM assigned, let other VMs share the RAM. Of course, you will run into a problem if all VMs all of a sudden need all their assigned RAM (which would be rare).

Gabrie van Zanten wrote a nice detailed article diving more in depth on this feature and whether to use memory overcommit in a production environment.

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Technorati : Memory Overcommit, VMware
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