GreenPages Pushes Virtual Desktop Infrastructure to Limit with 2,400 Desktop Images on Six ESX Servers; Veeam Successfully Monitors Vast Environment

Columbus, Ohio, October 1, 2009 – Veeam Software, award-winning provider of systems management tools for VMware virtual datacenter environments, proved the importance of building scalable products from the ground up for the virtual world when its monitoring solution successfully monitored a record-breaking 2,400 desktop images on six ESX servers during VMworld 2009.

Veeam Monitor, rapidly becoming the industry standard for VMware performance monitoring, capacity planning and troubleshooting, saved the day when GreenPages Technology Solutions, a national IT consulting and integration company, built a massive virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) demonstration on the show floor at VMworld 2009. Once GreenPages achieved its goal of provisioning 400 desktop images on each of six ESX servers, the massive implementation surpassed the capabilities of the monitoring tool in place. GreenPages asked Veeam Software to step in.

With no advance notice or planning, within 10 minutes, Veeam Monitor was installed, licensed and properly configured. It accurately reported the new desktop image count, and within the next 30 minutes, it showed the full input and output load, as well as statistics that the solid-state drive fiber-connected logical unit numbers (LUNs) provided to the system.

“Veeam Monitor has exceptional scalability and is now our preferred standard for VMware management software,” explained John Ross, GreenPages Chief Technology Officer. “It monitors extremely high density levels of virtual machines, yet it has a small footprint and is very easy to install. Customers don’t want to purchase additional hardware to monitor their systems, and they certainly don’t have to with Veeam Monitor.”

Ratmir Timashev, President and CEO of Veeam Software, said GreenPages amazed the VMworld audience with its cutting-edge system. “We were thrilled with the opportunity to prove our monitoring software could successfully capture data from a system being pushed to its breaking point,” he said. “Veeam Monitor’s scalability speaks for itself and is a solid example of why we build products from the ground up specifically for the virtual world.”

[More on veeam.com]

Source: VMware Newsletter >>

Top 5 Planet V12n blog posts week 44

This was probably one of the toughest Top-5′s to write as I had the week off this week. I basically had to catch-up with a whole week of Planet V12n. One of the most annoying things about it is that half of the blogs on PlanetV12n enabled “content summary only”. Yes I know you will have a couple of extra visits, but isn’t blogging about getting people to read your content instead of being “numbers”(visits) focused? Now that I got that off my chest lets move on to what this article is about. It’s about the 5 top articles this week:

  • Vaugn Stewart – VCE-101 Thin Provisioning Part 1 – The Basics & VCE-101 Thin Provisioning Part 2 – Going Beyond
    Like the thick format, thin VMDKs are not formatted at the time of
    deployment. This also means that data that needs to be written must
    pause while the blocks required to store the data are formatted. The
    formatting operation only occurs on demand at anytime an area of the
    virtual disk, which has never been written to, is required to store
    data.
  • Chad Sakac – Solid State Disk will change the storage world…
    But surely, if you were looking for performance, you wouldn’t use the SATA disk, right? You would probably use a 15K RPM FC disk. Those cost about $1000. They do about 200 random write IOPs. So, you would need 20 of them to do what that $115 SSD could do. That’s 0.2 IOps per dollar – or 170x more expensive than the SSD on a IOps/$ basis. Oh, you think SAS 15K drives are a better deal? They are – than FC disks. A 15K SAS disk on Pricewatch costs about $210, and they also do about 200 IOps. that’s 0.95 IOps per dollar – or 37x more expense than the SSD on a IOps/$ basis.
  • Luc Dekens – dvSwitch scripting – Part 4 – NIC teaming
    The double Service Consoles and vmKernel connection might look confusing at first. But when you select one these connections, the vSphere client will show you to which uplink a specific connection is going.

    To increase the availability of the dvSwitch, I will show how to add two pNics and how to activate and configure NIC Teaming.

    When I created the dvSwitch I configured it for two uplink ports (per host). Since I’m adding two pNics, I will first have to change the maximum number of dvUplink ports.

  • Gabrie van Zanten – Design tips for VMware vSphere 4
    Recently at the Belgium VMUG I gave a presentation in which I covered some design tips for VMware vSphere 4. I talked about some business decisions that, how boring they may seem, are crucial for your design. I covered some security requirements you should check with the security department of the organisation and of course advised good capacity planning which also is very important for your design.

    What the average geek found most interesting where topics like: “What size of ESX host will you buy?”, “How to run vCenter in a VM”, “VMFS best practises”, “Understanding queue depth and lun size” and more….

  • Simon Gallagher – iSCSI LUN is very slow/no longer visible from vSphere host
    Due to too many SCSI reservation conflicts, so hopefully it wasn’t looking like corruption but a locked-out disk – a quick Google turned up this KB article – which reminded me that SATA disks can only do so much :)

    Multiple reboots of hosts and the OpenFiler hadn’t cleared this situation – so I had to use vmkfstools to reset the locks and get my LUN back, these are the steps I took..

    You need to find the disk ID to pass to the vmkfstools –L targetreset command, to do this from the command line look under /vmfs/devices/disks

      
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Top 5 Planet V12n blog posts week 43

Compared to the weeks before this week I had an easy week. A design review and some pre-sales related work, it is something else for a change. Something else that’s new and exciting; I started working with John Arrasjid and Steve Kaplan on revising a book. It’s not going to be a deep technical book, but it will focus more an introduction to virtualization. More on this later. It’s top 5 time again, here we go:

  • Scott Sauer – Get Thin Provisioning working for you in vSphere
    So now that we have some of the basics out of the way, I wanted to
    share my thoughts on thin provisioning.  Like many organizations, we
    get requests from our customers that err on the side of caution.  They
    want to plan for the worse case and ensure that their project and/or
    application isn’t setup for failure.  I don’t blame them really, I do
    it myself all the time when I make coffee at home.  I always end up
    making more coffee than I typically drink, just in case I might need
    that extra charge.  The best way to do that is pad it, request more
    than what you might really need, just in case something comes up down
    the road.  Virtual machine disk storage in some cases fits this same
    profile.  If my coffee maker granted me access to hot coffee on demand,
    I would stop making extra coffee.  Thin disks can give your end users
    that capacity on demand so you can gain control of the padding effect
    that typically takes place in most corporate organizations.
  • Rich Brambley – Thoughts and Images of vCloud Express
    When vCloud Express was announced along with the vCloud API at VMworld 2009 in September I decided to sign up and try building VMware virtual machines (VMs) in the Cloud for myself. Being able to provision infrastructure as a service (Iaas) virtually with only a credit card has a certain useful appeal to me, and I wanted to see firsthand exactly what can be done and how much it costs.

    This post summarizes my experience and touches on Terremark’s various options for building VMware Cloud VMs. I also quickly describe/illustrate the difference in charges for Linux versus Windows Cloud servers. This post contains a lot of screen shots, and at the end I’ll offer some opinions on the usefulness of vCloud Express and where this service might make sense for IT shops.

  • Chad Sakac – Cloud Storage – what the hell is EMC building?
    The implications on storage infrastructure of these internal/external cloud models profound. Think of it this way… The vast majority of storage users in enterprises today have a provisioning model where the first step is “tell us whether you want 250GB or 500GB, whether it’s SAN or NAS, and the protection level – then wait a couple weeks as we process the request”. Of course, to fulfill the request, they purchased a wad of storage a year ago. How much did they buy? More than they needed – because god forbid they err with not enough (and in doing that ensure that they err completely in the opposite direction!). And, of course, it’s generally pretty “thickly” provisioned – and even if it is thin, it’s doled out and managed app by app, so the “pools” tend not to be too wide.
  • Vaughn Stewart – VCE-101: Oracle On VMware Without Limits
    After a brief hiatus I am very eager to return to the ‘Virtualization Changes Everything’ series, and today’s post is an impromptu addition to our syllabus. Recently fellow VMware vExpert Steve Kaplan of INX published a rather thought provoking post rallying for the acceleration of the transformation to a 100% virtualized datacenter. Steve waxes poetic advocating acquisition decisions spanning compute, storage and network should be driven by their contribution to data center virtualization success and I would encourage everyone to read it.
  • Duncan Epping – DRS Deepdive Part 1 and Part 2
    Keep in mind that when you change the “Migration Threshold” the value of the “Target host load standard deviation” will also change. In other words the Migration Threshold dictates how much the cluster can be “imbalanced”. There also appears to be a direct relationship between the amount of hosts in a cluster and the “Target host load standard deviation”. However, I haven’t found any reference to support this observation. (Two host cluster with threshold set to three has a THLSD of 0.2, a three host cluster has a THLSD of 0.163.) As said every 5 minutes DRS will calculate the sum of the resource entitlements of all virtual machines on a single host and divides that number by the capacity of the host:

    sum(expected VM loads) / (capacity of host)

      
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Latest Updates

These are the changes or updates made to VMware Compatibility Guide since it was last published:

  • Added support for SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 SP3 on ESX 3.5 Update 4 and ESX 4.0

Check the VMware Compatibility Guide here: http://www.vmware.com/resources/compatibility/search.php?deviceCategory=software

      
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Latest Updates

      
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Storage performance improvements in vSphere 4.0

We made a huge number of performance improvements in vSphere
4.0. The ESX storage stack was no exception. We ran a wide variety of micro and
real world benchmarks to thoroughly evaluate and optimize vSphere’s storage
subsystem. It is now even more efficient for the enterprise and ready to
support the cloud.

A wide variety of I/O intensive applications will run
efficiently on vSphere with all the improvements.  You can find details on the architectural
changes and storage performance improvements made in this white paper.

Some of the noteworthy improvements are:

·        
VMware
Paravirtualized SCSI (PVSCSI driver):
vSphere ships with this new high performance
virtual storage adapter. Bus logic and LSI logic were the only choices so far. PVSCSI
is best suited to run highly I/O intensive applications in the guest more
efficiently (reduced CPU cycles). This is
possible with a series of optimizations explained in the paper.

·        
iSCSI
support improvements:
We made significant improvements in the iSCSI stack
for both software and hardware iSCSI. The improvements are not just in terms of
performance but features as well. Noteworthy among these is CPU efficiency
improvements that range from 7-52% depending on the type and size of I/O.

·        
Software
iSCSI and NFS support with Jumbo Frames:
vSphere adds jumbo frames and 10Gbit
NIC networking support for both NFS and iSCSI. This helps drive bandwidth that
is many times faster than previous ESX releases.

·        
File
system improvements for enhanced Virtual Desktop experience and scalable cloud
solutions:
We made several optimizations in VMware File System (VMFS) with
a special focus on enterprise desktop and cloud solutions. File system along
with other improvements in different parts of ESX improves performance of
several provisioning operations dramatically. An example is “boot storm”
performance (where several hundreds of virtual machines are booted
simultaneously in a virtual desktop environment). With these improvements time
taken to boot a large number of virtual machines simultaneously is many times
faster compared to ESX3.5.

ESX supports
several different storage protocols such as Fibre Channel, iSCSI and NFS. We published a white
paper that compares I/O performance using each of these protocols.  Results
show that line rate can be achieved with each of the storage protocols for single or
multiple virtual machines
. The paper also highlights CPU efficiency
improvements in vSphere compared to the previous release. This means that more virtual machines can now run on
the same hardware.  Graph below shows one
example (sequential read, 64KB block size) of the relative CPU cost for each of the storage protocols.
Results on ESX 4.0 are shown next to ESX 3.5 to highlight efficiency
improvements on all protocols.


Hardware configuration and detailed results can be found in
this protocol comparison white
paper
.

Storage-protocol-efficiency-comparison-ver3



 (Lower is better)

 

Figure: Relative CPU cost of 64 KB
sequential reads in a single virtual machine

 

      
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Source: VMware Partner Central >>

VMware
Workstation is the gold standard in desktop virtualization that transforms the
way technical professionals develop, test, demo and deploy software. Innovative
features help developers, QA engineers, sales professionals, and IT
administrators reduce hardware costs, manage risk, and streamline tasks that
save time and improve productivity.

Check out the Workstation Zealot blog or see get the details and resources on VMware.com.


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Source: VMware Partner Central >>

The Mac revolution is here, but your customers don’t want to have to sacrifice Windows functionality. VMware Fusion 3 is the best way to run Windows on a Mac. Run Mac and Windows applications side-by-side at maximum speeds without rebooting. With over 50 new features and a new ultra-fast Migration Assistant for Windows, it’s never been easier for your customers to run Windows on a Mac. Open more doors with Fusion 3 for anyone who wants to purchase a Mac or has one, or enhance your sale by attaching a copy of Windows, more memory, or more storage.

Check out the Team Fusion blog for all the details


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Source: VMware Partner Central >>

On October 22, 2009 Microsoft announced the General Availability of Windows Server 2008 R2, which includes Hyper-V R2. We have released a Competitive Flash to help VMware Partner Sales Teams understand the VMware positioning in regards to Microsoft’s virtualization offerings and to respond to customer questions about Hyper-V R2.

Get the Competitive Flash on Partner Central


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