VMware announces VMware View 4

VMware has today announced the new VMware View 4 platform for virtualizing desktops on their own VMware vSphere platform. So yes, VMware View 4 has support for VMware vSphere 4.0. It is built and tested on the latest VMware vSphere 4.0 releases

It has been a while since VMware announced the partnership with Teradici to use their PCoIP protocol within VMware View for improved user multimedia experience. This is a huge upgrade from the current RDP protocol, which VMware used in prior versions of View

I have watched a few demo’s of Teradici’s PCoIP protocol and has been pretty impressed with those

An overview of the VMware View Architecture:

VMware View will be GA on 19th of November 2009 and 60 days evaluation will be available for downloads.

Read more or register for an evaluation on VMware View 4here and you will receive an email when VMware View 4 is ready for download

vCalendar Widget added to Virtualtroll.com

Jason Boche over at http://www.boche.net/blog/ came up with an initiative to create a vCalendar.

Its quite nice and if I had a work with a personal desktop, I would certainly try to get one of these. Instead I did the 2nd best option, because Jason also made a vCalendar Widget. I have now added this widget to my blog, so the dailiy tips, tricks, comments etc is shown on virtualtroll.com.

So now you just need to come back here to virtualtroll to read the daily virtualization quote of the day

Read more about it here

Thanks to Jason for this initiative.

ESXi and HA….

For the last year I have been working with building a VMware enterprise environment for a customer planned to hold approx 700 guests.

By the customers wish we went with ESXi. A decision I now, to some extent, regret.

One of the things that have been the most annoying is the implementation of HA on ESXi. For stable performance of the HA agent, it is nessary to implement some swap space for the agent as described in http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1004177

If you look at the best practices for deploying VMware 3.5, it is not recommended to have your swapspace on SAN, due to the potentiel increased I/O it can generate. In my world this applies to ESXi too…..but would that not ruin the idea of having a server without disks booting from a embedded image?

We have chosen to implement local disks just for swap use. This is, in my opinion, not a very elegant solution. It would have been nice to see the servers delivered with ESXi Embedded with some more space on the chips holding the ESXi, and then swapping on that space.

That solved we ran into more problems with HA. We had some issues with hosts suddently being disconnected in the vCenter interface. All guests kept running, but the management part of the host was inaccessable. This error looked very much like errors i had seen before with logs filling up the / on regular ESX. And correct…it was.

The HA logs are actually located in /var/log/vmware/aam/agent which was not on it’s partition. Therefore this classic error.

The solution is to log into the hidden busybox (press ALT-F1 on the ESXi console and type unsupported), log in with the root password and delete the files using, for example,

find /var/log/vmware/aam/rule -name ‘*.log’ -exec rm {} \;

and restart the management agents using “services.sh restart”

This is a known issue with VMware and will be addressed in Update 4 which we, at the moment, do not have a release date on.

All in all this seriously gives me thought on reinstalling the whole environment to regular ESX 3.5

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

VMware to release ESX 3i for free next week

VMware finally made the move that everybody predicted and was awaited for a long time: releasing its hypervisor for free.

During the Q2 2008 earnings call the company announced that before the end of July it will release the Update 2 for VMware Infrastructure 3.5 and that will give away the lightweight edition of the product, ESX 3i, for free.

The new 3i edition was introduced at the end of the last year.
It doesn’t change the characteristics of the hypervisor but fundamentally chances a part of its architecture, dropping the Console Operating System (COS) and reducing the overall system footprint to 32Mb.
The change allowed several OEMs to preload this edition of the hypervisor into their servers, through internal USB keys, Solid-State Drives (SSD) or hidden partition in the primary hard drives.

virtualization.info has learned some additional details about the move:

• VI 3.5 and ESX 3i will continue to share a the large majority of the code base (so there will be an ESX 3i Update 2). There will be no delays on the release of both products.
• ESX 3i will continue to have the same features that has today, without additional limitations
• ESX 3i will continue to have the same APIs, allowing anybody to develop free or commercial alternatives to VirtualCenter (despite some features like VMotion cannot be replicated because of the VMware SDK limitations).
• VMware will not require the purchase of any software & support subscription to access the product. Customer will be able to get the code without any restriction.
• The customers that purchased the current version of ESX 3i directly from the VMware online store will be eligible for a rebate.
• The ESX version that includes the Console Operating System (COS) will not be faded out (at least in the short timeframe). Most VMware customers are currently using that version and the company will support them for a long time.
• VMware Server will not be faded out (as many could suppose). The company still sees the product as a valuable proposition for a different kind of audience.

Read more here. at virtualization.info.

Five reasons to choose VMware over Hyper-V or?

I read Bernd Harzog’s Microsoft Hyper-V Virtualization: Resistance is Futile (Almost) and good points were made. But take alook at one anonymous guy who commented on the article with these 5 statements on why Microsoft doesnt live up to the hype:

1. Hyper-V is marketed as free but really isn’t.

Yeah it’s $28 bucks but that’s on top of a Windows 2008 License paid in full. This is nowehere near the realm of free, in fact if you take a straight Windows 2008 Standard Licence which is $999 and add Hyper-V you have a $1027 hypervisor that doesn’t event have management ability.

ESXi starts at $495 and comes bundled with most major hardware vendors soon (which can be perceived as free similar to hyper-v if apples are to apples). ESXi also has far more functionality and stability over Hyper-V.

Perceived pricing is all fine and good but when it’s time to actually fork over the cash, the reality can (and will) be painful. There is no way to obtain Hyper-V without paying MS for full Licenses of Windows 2008. Even if you have a software deal, you still paid, and don’t kid yourself that you didn’t.

2. Hyper-V is not actually bare metal.

What we have here is a competitor to VMware server with Hardware assist and Enlightened devices. Hyper-v looks good on paper but is nothing more than a hosted hypervisor with paravirtualization support with dated features.

3. MS target market is low margin with little to gain because SMBs aren’t ready.

Going for the entry level market is fine strategy that has worked in the past but Virtualization does not follow standard paths. There are reasons why SMBs don’t use Virtualization as much, if they really intended to do server consolidation en masse they would have done so with the plethora of free software already out there.

The truth is that SMBs do not want to put their eggs in one basket. Placing 10-15 servers on one physical box is not ideal for them. In this situation a single outage is massive and may bring down the entire company. Hyper-V only increases this risk further. There are no killer features in Microsoft’s roadmap right now that can address high availabilty at the costs necessary to achieve SMB adoption. Free is not going to work here otherwise VMware server would be absolutely everywhere already.

The SMB market is slowly coming around but just any old Hypervisor is not going to break them free. What is really needed is an affordable solution that can bring functionality like VMotion and High Availability at a price that is highly affordable.

4. Hyper-V ties the hypervisor back to the OS.

I don’t see a server that is running Windows 2008 being vunerable to viruses, patches and so on being a palettable platform to house 10 or more machines. Need a security update? Time to reboot…yeah that’s not going over well. Virus took down a windows component? Now you have a massive outage.

The OS being part of the hypervisor is a big mistake. It has to be transparent, the user can’t know it exists at all, VMware is right that it should be in the hardware completely protected from the elements. A hypervisor is supposed to be running virtual machines, not Virus Scanners and other 3rd party junk screwing up the OS.

MS will have to release a true bare metal product to compete with VMware and they need to do it soon. I highly doubt they will though as Windows is integral to Hyper-V’s ability to do half of the things ESX does.

5. Virtual Machine Density is a fraction of what is possible

Overcommit is underestimated by Microsoft. If you give 4GB RAM to a Virtual Machine, does it really actually always need that 4GB? No! If it uses 2GB 90% of the time, why not use that 2GB?

ESX has at least double the capacity for VMs over Hyper-V in the overwhelming majority of situations. And yes, it performs admirably in reality. Higher VM density = major cost savings.

Microsoft has a long way to go. They have a 1.0 product, good for them. But this product is going to have an uphill battle for a long time in a new market. Virtualization is a different animal than SQL server and Netscape. Price is not the only factor, especially when just implementing Virtual Machines gives immediate ROI regardless of the solution chosen.

I for one will choose 99.999% uptime and spend 2x the money to get it over a solution that can’t offer anything close when I’m already going to save hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on top of licensing fees to implement it (or millions).

Food for thought.

Interesting reading…