VMware ESXi is small and free. This makes it possible to load ESXi on a portal USB stick and boot into ESXi directly from USB. I wouldn’t recommend running any production system via USB, but it is handy to have for a test/POC environment. Rick Vanover posted some tips on how to set up booting to ESXi from USB over at virtualizationreview.com. Diskless ESXi boot is nice, especially for lab configurations. Your VMFS volumes, if on local disk, will be preserved in case you need to reload the hypervisor. And thanks to VMFS-3’s backward and forward version compatibility, there won’t be any surprises down the way.

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Technorati : ESXi, VMware
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I’ve been talking a lot about VDI performance lately. A lot more information is becoming available from the community as well. I found this article from Dave Caddick about his musings on VDI performance. Dave looks at storage performance, VDI best practices, ROI/TCO calculation, graphics, etc.

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Technorati : Performance, Storage, VDI
Del.icio.us : Performance, Storage, VDI

Hyper-V was originally released with Windows Server 2008. With the release of Windows Server 2008 R2, some new features have made it into Hyper-V as well. Some of these improvements surround performance. Anthony F. Voellm updated an original FAQ about Hyper-V performance to include some of these improvements. The FAQ contains the following:

• Q: Is there a place that compares features and versions of Hyper-V?
• Q: What is the recommend configuration for performance testing?
• Q: How do I monitor performance?
• Q: Is there any “official” documentation for Hyper-V performance counters?
• Q: Are there any official virtualization benchmarks I can use to compare machines and virtualization solutions?
• Q: Is there any common terminology used to talk about virtual machine configurations?
• Q: How much memory should I reserve for the root?
• Q: Are there any services that should be stopped?
• Q: Is it ok run applications / processes in the root OS?
• Q: Is there a simple way to disable the hypervisor to run some baseline tests on the native system
• Q: Should I use passthrough disks or iSCSI attached to the guest for storage?
• Q: Are there ways to reduce overall networking overhead?
• Q: Are there additional knobs for performance nuts?
• Q: Are their additional resources that are useful for understanding Hyper-V?

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Technorati : Hyper-V, Microsoft, Performance
Del.icio.us : Hyper-V, Microsoft, Performance

In November of 2008, VMware announced the acquisition of a company called Trango. This acquisition was aimed at bringing virtualization technology to mobile smart phones. Things have been somewhat quite since the announcement, but recently some more information appeared on the Computerworld website stating some of the capabilities/progress. Tim Lohman (Computerworld) writes about some of the highlights in a recent article.

Speaking to Computerworld, Srinivas Krishnamurti, VMware’s head of mobile phone virtualisation said the company’s vision for virtualisation on smartphones went beyond the basic dual-boot prototypes currently in development to one that ran both a private and work operating system and profile at the same time.

“We don’t think dual booting will be good enough - we’ll allow you to run both profiles at the same time and be able to switch between them by clicking a button,” he said. “You’ll be able to get and make calls in either profile - work or home - as they will both be live at any given point in time.”

VMware has successfully demonstrated Android and Windows Mobile on a last generation smartphone with 128MB of RAM, Krishnamurti said, however, for production, 256MB of RAM would likely be the recommended spec.

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Technorati : SmartPhone, Trango, VMware
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As virtualization and cloud computing become more mainstream, new tools are needed for data center orchestration/automation. Citrix has something call Workflow Studio for orchestration, and VMware acquired a company called Dunes Technology for orchestration. With the acquisition of Opalis, Microsoft looks to add orchestration to the System Center line. Some examples might be:

• Incident response - standardize and automate triage, diagnose and repair processes to reduce the number of incidents.
• Provisioning - orchestrate datacenter tools to configure, deploy, and verify IT services in response to an incident or change request. Provision server, storage, or network resources across physical, virtual or cloud environments.
• Virtual service management - automate virtual lifecycle management to control server sprawl and extend management best practices, such as incident management and provisioning, to your virtual environments.
• Run book procedures - automate re-occurring maintenance and administrative tasks, such as data and file handling, database and application support.
• Cloud Computing - automate cloud lifecycle management, to request, provision, release and track costs of cloud resources.

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Technorati : Hyper-V, Microsoft
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One of the more heavy workloads for a virtual environment is Citrix XenApp. Since many users use the same Windows instance in a XenApp environment, special consideration needs to be taken when virtualizing this workload. Arjan van ‘t Hoff put together an article detailing some of the high level considerations when virtualization XenApp including:

• Host hardware
• Windows OS
• Virtual Disks
• Network Settings
• Disabling unnecessary services
• User profiles
• User load

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Technorati : Citrix, VMware, XenApp, vShpere
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A lot more attention has been given to shared storage performance lately for virtual environments. With shared storage for virtual environments, you have to make sure you have enough capacity (GB) as well as enough performance (IOPS - or, I/O per second). IOPS are not a straight forward as you may think since IOPS really depend on disk speed and RAID levels. Duncan Epping put together a nice high-level article digging in to some of these numbers. Duncan gives a couple of charts and formulas to determine your IOPS needs in your virtual environment.

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Technorati : IOPS, RAID, SAN
Del.icio.us : IOPS, RAID, SAN

As we go further down the road of moving workloads to virtual infrastructure, it is imperative to understand the moving parts that make up the virtual infrastructure. One of the main bottlenecks for virtual environments is shared storage I/O. Ruben Spruijt recently posted an article on BrianMadden.com explaining impact of storage design for VDI environments; although, the information shared in the article is useful for any virtual environment. The article explorers

• Client I/O
• Storage I/O
• SCSI versus ATA
• RAID levels
• Disk alignment
• Prefetching and Defragging

To quote Ruben, “…there is a hidden danger to VDI. There’s a killer named ‘IOPS’”.

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Technorati : IOPS, SAN, Storage, VDI
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When deploying a VMware View VDI environment, it is always good to have some best practices to adhere to. Erik Scholten recently posted an article on VMGuru.nl summarizing sizing best practices for VMware View gathered from KB articles, VMware instructors, and the VMware community at large. Erik explorers topics on the following:

• CPU sizing
• Memory sizing
• Storage sizing
• Network sizing

Sizing recommendations are reviewed for task workers and power users on Windows XP and Windows 7.

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Technorati : Sizing, VDI, VMware, View
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Cloud computing is a hot term these days. With that, some people are exploring the idea of using a hardware as a service cloud provider like Amazon EC2 to provide extra capacity in times of greater demand on their existing data center. This temporary increase in data center resources is sometimes refereed to as cloudbursting. So far, cloudbursting has required quite a bit of development/scripting by the implementer. However, Jim Moyle recently posted an article exploring the possibilities of cloudbursting Citrix XenApp into EC2 with existing tools. Jim points out 5 main features needed to cloudburst:

• A secure connection between the data center and the cloud provider
• Quick provisioning/de-provisioning of servers in the cloud
• WAN acceleration
• Monitoring to know when to cloudburst
• Automation to control it all

Jim explorers these areas and makes points about what is possible today and in the near future.

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Technorati : Amazon, Citrix, Cloudburst, EC2
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