The VMguy

Update: Some readers are reporting issues with the links on this page.  At 10:54 EST this Sunday morning it appears that the technical section of VMware’s web site is offline.  I’ll check it back in a couple hours to see if they have come back and update the article accordingly.

Update: It appears the links are back.  Be aware they may be flaky if VMware is working on the site today.

Anti-Virus Deployment for VMware View – Great article on what to consider when deploying an anti-virus solution for your View desktops.  Great reading on how to best protect your desktop VMs.  My favorite part is the detailed exclusion list for the anti-virus scanners – very helpful.

Analysis of IBM System x3850 M2 Performance and Scalability with VMware vSphere 4 and SAP Solutions – a very specific read but has some very nice scailibility charts in it for the IBM x3850.  There’s also a nice listing of the optimized IBM BIOS settings on the server.

ESRI ArcGIS Server 9.3 for VMware Infrastructure – a good read if you are deploying the ESRI ArcGIS mapping software in your environment.  Very specifics on configuration of that software on ESX 3.5.

VMware View 4 & VMware ThinApp Integration Guide – A very nice paper on how to integrate ThinApp packages into pools of desktops in View.  It has a lot of items to consider when deploying apps this way.  I’m personally hoping for some native VMware integration coming in the future.

Application Registration with VMware ThinApp – Here’s the question: how can I associate a specific file type with a ThinApp’ed application so when I click the file, it opens in the ThinApp’ed App?  Bingo, the doc goes through how to set this up in your environment on virtual or physical desktops.

Lots of new technical papers for the month of December:

Workload Considerations for Virtual Desktop Reference Architectures Info Guide – Great paper on the RAWC (Reference Architectures Workload Code) tool.  It allows you to simulate desktop workloads in VM’s to help size them in a VDI deployment.

Reference Architecture Brief: Dell Virtual Remote Desktop Featuring VMware View 4 – A paper from Dell on a reference architecture to use for VDI deployments.  Good reading if you plan on doing VDI on Dell in 2010.

VMware Reference Architecture for Cisco UCS and EMC CLARiiON with VMware View 4 – A good reference architecture for VDI using View, Cisco UCS and a EMC Clariion CX4-480.  Good read for using VDI on this platform.

VMware View 4 Evaluator’s Guide – The standard read if you are planning on Evaluating VMware View.  This one is a must-have to make sure you test out all of the features and functionality in View.

Deploying Virtual Desktops with VMware View 4 on EMC Celerra NS-120 Validation Test Report – A paper on the results from EMC’s testing of their NS-120 as a platform for View.

VMware View on NetApp Storage Solution Brief – Nice overview of the benefits gained from running View on NetApp storage.  Lists and itemizes the integrated functionality and benefits.

VMware View 4 with PCoIP Info Guide – A nice little paper overviewing the features built into the PCoIP protocol built into View4.

Management of VMware ESXi on HP ProLiant Servers – (what? something not View related?) A good paper listing the integration and monitoring options of HP Servers running ESXi and HP Insight Manager.  Many HP customers have asked me for this information.

VMware vCenter Server 4.x: Using Database Views – A very good listing of fields stored on the vCenter4 database.  Customers have asked me many times for this kind of info and there are not many publications on it.  Great read if you want to extract some custom info from your vCenter database.

HP Reference Architecture for VMware View 4 – Good read if you are thinking of running View on HP blades.  Nice reference architecture from HP.

SAP Solutions on VMware vSphere 4 – Best Practice Guidelines – A must-read if you plan on virtualizing your SAP deployment on vSphere.  Many customers have asked for this doc.

VMware View 4 Deployment Guide – (had to end it on a View article) A must read when you are planning a View deployment.  Great points to remember and pitfalls to avoid.  Definitely a keeper if you are deploying View in 2010.

I had a couple questions surface about this recently.  A couple of users have asked me how they can grab some details out of their vCenter for reporting on their VMs.

1. Open the client and connect to the vCenter server
2. From the menu bar select view/inventory/virtual machines and templates
3. on the left pane, select the level of the vm list you want to grab (if you want all of the vms, select the top-level folder)
4. on the right pane, select the virtual machines tab which will show you the list of vm’s at whatever level you’ve selected on the left pane.
5. one suggestion I have here is to right-click the titles on the right pane, this provides a list of all the fields available.  Select “DNS name” as one of the fields and it will add the “dns name” field to the rightmost column (very helpful in case you have named your vm’s in vcenter different than their actual dns names).  Another helpful field that you may want to use is “Guest OS” IMO.  You can also add any other fields that you want (or don’t want) to report on.  You can re-order them by dragging and dropping the field titles in the right pane.
6. when you have the right pane looking the way you want it, go back up to the menu bar and select File/Export/Export List…
7. Pick your format (Excel is available) and export it.  It will export everything in the right pane including your field titles in the spreadsheet.

Enjoy and good luck.

Just a few technical papers released this past month on vmware.com but I thought I should review them because I think some of them are very important.

Dynamic Storage Provisioning – A very nice introduction to Thin Provisioning in vSphere.  The concept of Thin Provisioning is explained as well as when you want to use it.  Some interesting points I noted in the article: Thin disks expand in chunks the size of the vmdk’s block size (1MB by default) and the only way to defragment a vmdk currently? – Storage vMotion.

Performance Study of VMware Thin Provisioning – Very good read on the performance impact of thin provisioned disks vs. thick disks.  I was somewhat surprised by the results.  There’s not nearly as much of a performance impact as I thought there would be.  A very good read if you are looking to justify Thin Disks for some applications within your organization.

VMCI Socket Performance – This was a very interesting paper that I’m still scratching my head on.  VMCI is the interface that programmers can use to communicate between VM’s on a given host.  So if a programmer is writing an app and it requires 2 VMs that do a lot of communication to each other, they can communicate on the VMCI interface instead of traversing the TCP/IP network and going thru all of the networking stack.  This paper shows the performance of using VMCI instead of TCP/IP for Windows and Linux boxes.  I’m scratching my head because the results are not as linear as I would have expected and there are scenarios that perform much better or worse than others.  Take a read and make your own conclusions.

VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager 4.0 Performance and Best Practices for Performance – I’m probably the #1 fan of SRM.  I think what SRM does for DR is like what a conductor does for an orchestra.  As you may know, SRM 4.0 now scales to 1,000 VMs.  It can take a while to optimize that number of VMs for recovery.  This paper is an excellent resource for optimizing the setup and config of SRM to scale effectively to a very large number of VMs.

Today I ran into this issue with a customer and wanted to write on it so it does not happen to everyone.  Fault Tolerance on vSphere is an awesome solution to maximize uptime.  There is a CPU scenario that may be a challenge however:

This KB article (http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1008027) reads:

For VMware FT to be supported, the servers that host the virtual machines must each use a supported processor from the same category as documented below:

Intel Xeon based on 45nm Core 2 Microarchitecture Category:
3100 Series
3300 Series
5200 Series (DP)
5400 Series
7400 Series

Intel Xeon based on Core i7 Microarchitecture Category:
3500 Series
5500 Series

AMD 3rd Generation Opteron Category:
1300 and 1400 Series
2300 and 2400 Series (DP)
8300 and 8400 Series (MP)

Please note the requirement “same category.”  As an example, if you have a server with a 54xx series Intel Processor and a Intel 55xx series processor (both have the technology for FT), you can vMotion and DRS between them (via EVC) but you cannot run a Fault Tolerant pair across them.  The Lockstep technology from Intel changed in the 35xx and 55xx CPUs and is not compatible with the previous generations of lockstep.