virtualization.info

Yesterday, while busy partying with Microsoft around the new VDI licensing and the additional revenue opportunity that RemoteFX will introduce, Citrix also announced the upcoming Feature Pack 1 for XenDesktop 4.0 (expected before the end of March).

In a corporate blog post, the company detailed the planned features:

• Streamed user profiles
  XenDesktop 4.0 FP1 will be able to stream user profiles in the same way it does for applications. Citrix reports that access to virtual desktops is 5x faster thanks to this.
• Integration with Microsoft App-V
  The Feature Pack will introduces the same integration capabilities included in the new XenApp 6.0
• Support for up to 100,000 concurrent virtual desktop sessions
  FP1 will support up to 100,000 shared virtual desktop sessions concurrently from a single site.

One thing that Feature Pack 1 will not introduce is the connection broker (Desktop Delivery Controller) and the management console support for Windows Server 2008 R2.

Labels: Citrix, VDI

Yesterday Cisco published the first VMware VMmark benchmark obtained with its Unified Computing System blade platform B250 M2 and VMware vSphere 4.0 Update 1.

The B250 M2 machine, powered by the just released Intel Xeon quad-core X5680 CPUs (codename Westmere) at 3.33GHz and 192GB RAM, scored 35.83 with 26 tiles, a 42% increase over the previous best result obtained by Fujitsu with the RX300 S5 and VMware vSphere 4.0: 25.16 with 17 tiles.

The full configuration of this B250 M2 is described here.

CRN reports that new UCS systems with the impressive Intel Xeon 5600 CPUs, used for this benchmark, will be available in April. 

Cisco also announced that it has over 400 customers for UCS, and that “most of them” are using it in production.

Labels: Benchmarks, Cisco, VMware

Yesterday Microsoft announced a number of new technologies and initiatives around desktop/server virtualization and VDI.

The company also announced a new paper titled Virtual Hard Disk Performance.

The 35-pages document describes a benchmark executed by Microsoft to compare I/O performance of files inside its Virtual Hard Disk (VHD) format (both fixed size and dynamically created) against files inside raw disks and files inside the NTFS file system.

Tests were executed on systems running a number of different workloads, including SQL and Exchange.
Microsoft explains that compared to previous implementations, VHD support is native inside Windows Server 2008 R2 and thus is not depending on the presence of Hyper-V:

…the impact of the Windows hypervisor is quite small based on past experimental results. This is mainly due to the fact that performance critical workloads are re-directed to synthetic VMBus channels instead of using the longer emulation path. To get the most accurate CPU utilization and to focus on native performance, the Windows hypervisor is turned on only during VHD performance measurement in Windows Server 2008 which is required to mount VHDs on a Windows Server 2008 machine while it remains off for all other performance testing scenarios…

Microsoft decided to use a server (the vendors is undisclosed) with two quad-core Intel Nehalem-EP processors, 6GB RAM with NUMA enabled, serving 64bit Windows Server Enterprise 2008 and Windows Server Enterprise 2008 R2, attached to a Dell PowerVault MD1000 DAS.

The paper closes with an interesting table listing the pros and cons of different storage containers for Hyper-V. 

Labels: Benchmarks, Microsoft, Papers

William Lam, a UNIX Systems Administrator at Salesforce.com, popular in the virtualization community, develops a Perl script which scans VMware ESX/ESXi hosts and vSphere vCenter servers and reports the status of number of aspects.

Called VMware Health Check Report, it reached version 4.0 yesterday, offering very welcome new capabilities:

• Report is now completely modular in which categories to display via a configuration file
• Ability to specify specific ESX/ESXi host to query
• Ability to specify specific Virtual Mchines to query
• vCenter HA Advanced Runtime information
• vCenter HA Configuration (primary/secondary and node states)
• vCenter HA Advanced Configurations
• vCenter DRS Advanced Runtime information
• ESX/ESXi IP/HOSTNAME of vCenter Management IP
• ESX/ESXi Newly improved Hardware and System Health Stuats information
• ESX/ESXi Advanced Configurations
• ESX/ESXi NUMA information
• VM UUID,Bootime,Resource Statistics, Fault Tolerance, Thin provisioned and NPIV information

The list of aspects that it was already able to check is impressive

• vCenter Managed IP per ESX(i) host
• vCenter User/Group Permissions
• Added Host & SCSI LUN Model attribute
• Added Host boottime
• Additional LUN Mapping information including Datastore,VolumeUUID,DiskName and DeviceName
• VM portgroup + dvportgroup mapping
• Performance Stats for both Cluster + Hosts (cpu/mem avg + %)
• Performance Stats for VM (cpu/mem avg + %, ready & ballon)
• Email report capability
• Added additional command line options for including Cluster,Host and VM Performance stats (default: off)
• New licensing format/summary
• EVC Enabled information
• Cluster VM monitoring
• Cluster Host monitoring}
• # off VMotions within a cluster
• Datastore uncommitted info
• CPU power management info
• VM info (FT, Record/Replay, Clean Poweroff)
• Host IPv6, FT, SSL Thumbprint
• Host Profiles
• vApp information
• Distributed vSwitch information}
• vCenter Build/Release
• Active Sessions
• ESX/ESXi Build/Release
• Cluster(s) Name/Statistics (Hosts,CPU and MEM availabity, HA,DRS and DPM enabled, Resource Pools, Health)
• ESX/ESXi Hardware configuration (NICs/HBAs)
• ESX/ESXi Hardware Health Sensor via CIM
• ESX/ESXi State
• ESX/ESXi Configurations (for detailed information, use detail-hosts option)
• ESX/ESXi Multipathing Info (only available in host or detail-hosts option)
• ESX/ESXi Datastore summary
• ESX/ESXi LUN summary
• ESX/ESXi Portgroup summary
• ESX/ESXi Hostd logs
• CDP Summary
• Recent Tasks
• Virtual Machine summary
• VM Storage summary
• VM Network summary
• VM w/Snapshots
• VM w/Snapshot delta age
• VM w/RDMs
• VM w/NPIV enabled
• VM w/connected CD-ROMs
• VM w/connected Floppys

Here’s a sample report that the tool can generate.

Labels: Tools, VMware

Less than two weeks ago VMware launched a new online facility simply called Labs.
It hosts a number of R&D project developed by VMware engineers and not yet included in the official product portfolio (thus not supported).

The facility opened with 10 open source, downloadable tools. Yesterday a new one surfaced: Weasel.

Weasel is an Operating System installer similar to Redhat's Anaconda.

When you insert the ESX Installation DVD, this program guides you through the steps of network configuration, disk selection, etc. Or it can perform an automated install based on a script similar to Redhat kickstart scripts.

VMware published a video of it in action:

Labels: VMware

Earlier this week, the startup VKernel announced that it has appointed a new President and CEO: Doug McNary.

McNary comes from Atlas Venture, where he spent less than one year as Entrepreneur In Residence (EIR). Before that he was President and CEO of Onaro, the storage startup acquired by NetApp in January 2008.

McNary replaces Alex Bakman, the Vkernel founder that will continue to work as CTO.

Labels: Leadership, VKernel

CRN reports that VMware just hired a couple of new sales executives in Australia and New Zealand.

The first one is Duncan Bennet, former Managing Director of ANZ region at Sun.
Bennet, who worked at Sun for almost 10 years, is now Director of Sales at VMware.

The second one is Steve Coad, former Sales Leader of ANZ region at XIV, a storage vendor acquired by IBM in January 2008.
Coad now is the VMware Enterprise Sales Director for Australia.

Labels: Leadership, VMware

virtualization.info reports today about another couple of high level departures at VMware: Wendy Perilli, former Director of Cloud Computing Product Marketing and Jeffrey Engelmann, former Executive Vice President of Worldwide Marketing.

Perilli arrived in VMware in 2006, with the acquisition of Akimbi Systems. She has been in charge of the SMB product marketing first, moving to the Cloud Computing business in January 2007.
She left in December to join OpTier, a company focused on business transaction management, as Senior Vice President of Corporate Marketing.

Engelmann has been in VMware at least since 2005 (we don’t have a complete curriculum about him).
He joined now EazyBusiness, a provider of cloud-based business applications, as its new Chairman and CEO.

Labels: Leadership, VMware

At the beginning of this week the company Satcon, a company focused on clean energy, announced that Donald Peck joined the company as its new CFO.

Peck was Executive Vice President, Chief Financial Officer and Treasurer at Egenera, where he worked for three years.

Peck has been replaced by Kevin Kerrigan, who is at Egenera since February 2008, as Vice President of Finance.

Labels: Egenera, Leadership

One hour before starting a joint webcast with Citrix about its new virtualization strategy for desktops, Microsoft briefly announces a number of new initiatives, upcoming technologies and licensing changes.

About hosted desktop virtualization:

• The Windows XP SP3 virtual machine that can be run on Windows 7 Virtual PC, called XP Mode, will no longer require hardware virtualization to be executed.
  This is probably the best way Microsoft found to solve the problems that Sony created to many customers with its shortsighted strategy.
  
  The new version is available now as a hotfix.

About bare-metal server virtualization:

• Windows Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1 will introduce a memory overcommit technique for Hyper-V R2 called Dynamic Memory.
  The news leaked at the beginning of February.

About VDI:

• The remote desktop acceleration technology acquired by Calista in January 2008, now renamed as RemoteFX, will arrive with Windows Server R2 Service Pack 1 and will be integrated in Remote Desktop Services (RDS).
  RemoteFX can be considered an accelerator for RDP over the LAN for Windows 7 SP1 clients only.
• Beginning July 1, 2010, Windows Client Software Assurance (SA) will include the VECD license for free.
  Customers that don’t wont to subscribe the SA will be able to buy a new Virtual Desktop Access (VDA) license: $100 /device/year instead of $110 of the VECD.
• Beginning July 1, 2010, Windows Client Software Assurance (SA) and new Virtual Desktop Access (VDA) license customers will have the right to access their virtual desktop and Office applications inside it on secondary, non-corporate network devices, such as home PCs and kiosks.
• Microsoft and Citrix signed a new technology agreement to integrate and extend Microsoft RemoteFX with Citrix HDX.
• Microsoft and Citrix launched a joint trade-in program dubbed “Rescue for VMware VDI”, offering up to 500 licenses to VMware View customers at no additional cost, and offering to new customers a 70% discount on Microsoft VDI Standard Suite subscription license and a 50% discount on Citrix XenDesktop VDI Edition annual license ($28 per device for up to 250 devices for one year).

Update: Brian Madden just published a video of RemoteFX in action.

Labels: Citrix, Microsoft, VDI