Well, the VDI feasibilty study I’m involved with is gathering pace. Both Xendesktop and View have been tested for printing and USB functionality, and the results are much of a muchness. Xendesktop shades it on the printing side (despite the latest View release 4.01 that includes Virtual Printing) as with their Session Printing you can use the OEM printer drivers and not just the universal ones. This means extended support for printers with advanced features that Thinprint doesn’t cater for. USB functionality is about the same with both products. Where View has the advantage is with memory overcommitment, which Xen can’t do, plus the fact that it is just so much simpler to set up and administer. So the bottom line when it comes to making a decision will probably be money (as usual). If we had no money constraints I would go with VMware View coupled with a product called Appsense which would fill in all the bits that View can’t yet do. If money were a problem maybe Xenserver/Xendesktop would be the way to go. Who knows. You really do need a crystal ball in this game!
VDI latest
February 21st, 2010vSphere is here!
February 16th, 2010Last weekend was the big day – time to upgrade all our VMware infrastructure to vSphere! We have recently started virtualise our domain controllers at work, and the OS we were using – Windows Server 2008 R2 – was only fully supported in vSphere, so I managed to push the upgrade through on the back of another project (2008 Upgrade).
I started at about 10.00 AM on the Sunday (we have a monthly Sunday maintenance window where we can do major work), after doing a few hours prep work the day before. This prep work included watching the vSphere upgrade videos on the VMware site, and although the videos are very informative, the audio goes out of sync with the video a lot and it is a bit hard work to follow!
First up was upgrading the vCenter server and database, which went smoothly although took over an hour to do. Next up was upgrading each ESX server. I took the precaution of removing the HP Management tools from each host beforehand, as there were some issues with upgrading from v4 to v4 Update 1 and I didn’t want to take any chances. Upgrading involved putting the host into maintenance mode and migrating all the VMs off, then upgrading using Update Manager and an upgrade baseline. Using Update Manager is a breeze, and it’s nice just sitting back and watching it being done all for you in front of your eyes. It took about 45 minutes for each host and with 12 hosts that obviously took a while, but we got there in the end.
The next stage of the upgrade is updating the VMware tools and hardware on each VM, and we are going to do that over a period of time rather than all in one go. Everything still works using VMs with the older version, it’s just that you don’t get all the new features and benefits until you do.
One VM I was determined to upgrade straight away though was our main SQL 2005 Server. I had heard that performance was greatly increased with apps like SQL so I upgraded it late Sunday night. It did not disappoint. Looking at the CPU usage over the first few days of running under vSphere saw a drop from about 40% down to about 20%. That is impressive. I can’t wait to tell our SQL Admin tomorrow!
All in all the upgrade took most of the day. Starting at 10.00 AM with a couple of hours off in the middle and finishing at 12.45 AM the next morning, it was a long but satisfying day, and it is so nice using the new VIClient and looking at all the cool new things. We haven’t got the Enterprise Plus version so we haven’t got some of the new toys like Distributed Switches and Host Profiles, but there is still plenty new good stuff to go round! 
VDI
January 27th, 2010At work we are doing a VDI feasibility study with VMware View 4 up against Citrix XenDesktop 4.
Installing View was a breeze and we were up and running within a short space of time. We are a VMware house anyway with a mature ESX/Virtualcenter environment, so that’s no big surprise.
Citrix XenDesktop, however, is a totally different animal. It is well complicated to set up and we have had a few issues along the way. Today we reached the point where we created our first Citrix desktop pool, and unfortunately we ran into yet another problem. Even though the pool has been created, the VMs are showing up as unregistered and therefore nothing is happening when we try to access the virtual desktops. So, we’re Googling away at the mo to try and find an answer and I’m getting stressed. We’ve only got until the end of February for this project and I’ve also got a load of other stuff to do too. 
Unfortunately, despite the ease with which we set it up, VMware View is a bit lacking in certain departments, namely virtual printing and user preferences, especially when using PCOverIP (the new protocol it bought/developed from Terradici). There are also worries about the bandwidth it needs over the WAN. All this amounts to a half-finished product in my book, and despite its complexity, Citrix Xendesktop is the favourite at this moment in time. Providing we get it working. The powers that be want to start rolling out VDI desktops in October, but I can’t help thinking that it would be best to wait awhile, until both products mature sufficiently.
The most useless machine ever
January 26th, 2010This Youtube video was pointed out to me the other day. It’s for the most useless machine ever, whose sole purpose is to switch itself off. I love it.
Tired
January 25th, 2010Well, I decided yesterday to patch our 12 VMware ESX servers at work with VC 3.5 Update 5 and subsequent patches, and also to update the firmware on the HP BL460C blades that they run on. I started at 4.00PM and had an idea that it would take 5 or 6 hours. I finally got to bed at 5.00AM! It just took sooo long! The firmware CD had to run twice on each ESX host because the ILO firmware caused the server to disconnect from the virtual media, and of course I had to migrate all the VMs running on each host to somewhere else (using DRS). And just when I thought it was safe to go to bed, one of the application VMs refused to play ball. First of all it wouldn’t migrate off the host, so I shut it down. Then after I had the host it refused to boot up. Looking at the vmdk files, it looked like there was a snapshot on the VM (the files were named xxx000001.vmdk like delta files), although there was no snapshot at all. I tried creating one and deleting it, to no avail. So in the end I had to clone the VM (with no customisation) which consolidated all the “delta” files, and then remove the original. With 100GB to clone at 4.00 AM I was not a happy bunny! As I said, I got to bed at 5.00 AM, and I had to take today off work, but at least it all worked after I had finished with it – which is always nice!