Talking about home labs again. Go into a little detail of some sample hardware setups.
My Dell 8500 Setup
My XPS 15 Setup
Link to the Blacks In Technology Site.
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2013 may FINALLY be the year of VDI and BYOD
January 14, 2013 By Leave a Comment
I am thinking that maybe 2013 will finally be the year of virtual desktop infrastructures (VDI) enabled BYOD. This is not because of some fancy new feature in VMware View or Citrix XenDesktop but due to a new feature of Windows 8. I said a LONG TIME ago that Windows 8 should be a hypervisor based OS. I was close in my prediction. One of the great features of Windows 8 that hasn’t gotten much attention has been that it’s a Type 1 (bare metal) hypervisor. This means that basically, just like Hyper-V the hypervisor is native to the operating system. You can think VMware vSphere but with a GUI. A better comparison would be with XenClient which I wrote about here.
One of the major flaws in VDI has been its lack of support for offline support. The foundation of the traditional VDI solutions has been based on screen streaming technology which requires an always on network connection. This has limited the usefulness of the technology for mobile technologies such as laptops. I don’t know if you’ve noticed but a lot of laptops are sold into the enterprise. VMware and Citrix try to address the issue using two different approaches.
VMware adds what’s basically VMware player as part of the View Client. This allows a user to checkout an offline version of the virtual desktop. Citrix released a different type of VDI client called XenClient. XenClient is actually a bare metal hypervisor which also allows the user to check out a virtual desktop. View is actually a pretty decent solution but I haven’t performed much research on the success or failure with offline desktops in View. The largest drawback for XenClient has been its lacklustre hardware support. Not many software companies have the ability to rollout a general perpose desktop OS that can support virtually every laptop on the market.
This is where the fortunes of BYOD, Windows 8, VMware/Citrix can meet. Microsoft has done general purpose operating systems well, forever. With a built-in hypervisor, users and organizations can purchase virtually any Windows 8 Pro based laptop and have the native capability of supporting the enterprises VDI solution. The VDI vendors have the opportunity to add the much needed value add management layer and integrate their streaming solutions.
This could be a boon for BYOD. End users can just bring in their Windows 8 laptops to work, have a certificate installed, download their VDI image and their off in running. Administrators would have a wide range of options for providing the VDI instances. For thin clients the VDI session can run on the backend servers. For workstations and laptops that processing can be done at the local machine. This could strike a balance between performance/cost for hosting VDI sessions on expensive infrastructure such as enterprise class disk and server load. The management software could have checkpoints for the certificates so organizations can revoke rights to enterprise data when an employee is terminated.
I’m probably getting excited over nothing. 2013 will more than likely be another year where VDI is just around the corner. Or maybe ……
Nothing like a maxed out workstation for a virtualization lab
September 16, 2012 By 4 Comments
I debated on getting a MacBook Pro w/Ritna as my lab machine. However, I already have a XPS 15 with pretty close spec’s to the MBP w/Ritna. So, I opted for a Dell XPS with 32GB of RAM, a 256GB SSD and (2) 2TB SATA drives. I’m not disappointed.
This resource monitor is showing what has been a pretty common load I run while doing all of my data to day computing. I’m running 8 virtual machines in the background.
(1) AD Server with 1GB RAM
(1) SQL Server Running vCenter with 4GB RAM
(2) ESXi Servers with 4GB of RAM each running (1) XP workstation with 1GB of RAM each
(1) Windows Home Server running a file share and back ups for my production home network
Video – Using a dedicated physical disk for a VM in VMware Workstation 9
September 3, 2012 By Leave a Comment
I had to migrate my 1.1 TB Windows Home Server from a physical ESXi server I had running on my home network to my new Dell 8500 Desktop. Instead of doing a V2V over the network I just took the disk out of the ESXi server and put it in the new Dell desktop and booted the ESXi server as a VM from the hard disk. Saved a ton of time.
How do you perform a P2V with little downtime for large workloads?
September 1, 2012 By Leave a Comment
Since I got my big bad Dell 8500 with 32GB of RAM I have excess capacity and decided to P2V my Windows Home Server. After cleaning up the disk space on the WHS I ended up needing to “only” convert a 1.1 TB physical machine. This reminded me of my time leading a project to migrate 500 physical workloads from an enterprise data center to a hosted shared environment. If you’ve done virtualization for any period of time you’ve probably taken advantage of Insert your favorite Hypervisor Vendor tool here to do basic P2V’s. Replicating this much data within a single data center can be a challenge but, how about migrating 500 workloads from one data center to another and needing limited down time?
My team used 2 methods
- SAN to SAN replication
- Software replication using Novell Platespin Migrate
SAN to SAN replication is nice but expensive. The provider I was doing the work for and the customer used disparate SAN technologies. This isn’t a big deal today as most SAN vendors give your replication tools to migrate data from one SAN to another. The SAN replication is licensed by the amount of data being replicated. This creates a financial barrier to doing an all SAN approach. Another challenge is that the customer wasn’t leveraging SAN to do boot from disk. So we needed a solution for the local OS. This is where PlateSpin came into play.
PlateSpin Migrate is a pretty slick product. Platespin was an independent company that got purchased by Novell. Novell of course got purchased by NetIQ. Products like Platespin is why there are free tools from hypervisor vendors. The primary features we leveraged from PlateSpin were Scheduling and Replication. Platespin is like VMware Converter merged with backup software. It allows you to create replication jobs similar to how you’d create a backup job. So a perfect use case would be my 1.1 TB migration I’m attempting with my home server. I could configure a job to replicate the local OS volumes to my hypervisor. Once an initial replication is done and it’s time to cut the physical server over to the virtual, I can configure a job that sync’s the delta between the last replication and current data set. This meant that most workloads only required little downtime to migrate and clean up the virtual machine. An added bonus is that Platspin allowed you to disable common hardware specific services that break the OS in a virtualized environment.
Of course when you migrating 500 workloads there are going to be some workloads that aren’t suitable to being virtualized. Platespin gives you the ability to do Physical to Physical migrations as well as Virtual to Physical migrations or Virtual to Virtual.
My main complaint with Platespin was cost and stability. My team spent at least 100 hours on the phone with Novell support working through random issues that were sometimes Platespin related and sometimes VMware or hardware vendor specific.
What tools have you used to do large scale P2V migrations?
VMWorld 2012 Session Review: STO2980: vSphere 5 Storage Best Practices
September 1, 2012 By Leave a Comment
I’m making my way through the top 10 sessions from VMworld which are posted on the VMworld website. I have to tell you when I watch the experts talk about their individual domains of expertise I feel like a newbie all over again. Storage is one of these areas. I personally have a very broad skill set and don’t get lost in many technical conversations. Storage is one of those areas when you sit down with storage SME’s it can be difficult to keep up. Chad Sakac from EMC and Vaughn Stewart from NetApp did an outstanding job of keeping me engaged in this session on storage. One of my favorite bits of information as an Architect is when they referred the the debates between iSCSI, FC and NFS. Their general consensus is that it doesn’t matter. Go with what you feel comfortable with using. I’m a big iSCSI fan myself because it was my first production ESX environment.
I discovered a lot about operational challenges caused by screwing around with the default storage settings in VMware and their thoughts on Jumbo frames. This is another classic that you will want to bookmark.
My Dell XPS 8500 virtualization lab
August 23, 2012 By 8 Comments
I finally caved in a purchased a new desktop. For the past year I’ve been using my XPS 15 as a lab machine and my primary day to day workstation. It is definitely much more capable than my XPS 420 but it’s not the bump in performance I was looking for in a lab PC. Since my last couple of machines have been Dells, I really didn’t search around for a machine outside of a Dell. I considered an iMac and MacBook Pro with Ritna but the XPS 15 is comparable to the MBP and I still like the comfort of a full desktop opposed to the iMac. Interesting enough the iMac is capable of holding just as much RAM as the XPS 8500.
The main reason for choosing the 8500 was it’s ability to be upgraded to 32GB of RAM. I’ve said it time and time again that your bottleneck in a virtualized environment will almost always be RAM and/or disk. I can promise you that you can buy as much RAM and as fast disk as you can afford and look back and wish you could buy more. So, I also ordered a 256GB OCZ SSD to replace the 2TB 7200 RPM HD as the system drive. The CPU is an Intel i7 3770 running at 3.7 Ghz. Dell didn’t offer the 32GB upgrade so, I had to purchase after market memory. I installed Windows 7 Pro a few nights ago and I’m currently allowing all the 3rd party equipment to burn in before I jump all the way into using this beast.
Each chip is 8GB
One note is that I’m not very impressed with the system case. The case on my XPS 420 is really nice with a lever on the top making it a tool free case. The sheet metal of the new case seems thinner and the fastener for the cover is a thumb screw. It seems like a step back in fit and finish.
BYOD management: Using a device catalog to control users
August 23, 2012 By Leave a Comment
I’m starting to branch out and post content on additional sites. Over on SearchNetworking, I discuss how to use device catalogs as a way to limit the pains of BYOD.
Should employees pay their own service bill for BYOD
August 13, 2012 By Leave a Comment
I’ve read more than a couple of stories that claim that BYOD doesn’t save money but sends service costs spiraling out of control. The main cause is that companies either subsidize or out right pay an employees service charges. The employee selects a device and a plan and then expenses the plan. This is a different concept of BYOD than what I’ve been use to practicing. Most organizations I’ve been a part of has allowed some form of BYOD. The first organization I was at required me to purchase my own mobile device but paid my service charges. I didn’t get an option on what plan I was offered. I selected my device and the corporate communications team would provision my phone number and plan.
The other option I’ve been given or have given users is for them to bring their own device and service plan and be allowed access to the corporate network. This appealed to some users, especially marketing and sales types as they took their number with them when the left the organization. This is why I’ve always considered BYOD as a method to save money. As an IT Manager I don’t see the appeal of offering an employee to both purchase and control the plan associated with their mobile device. I’m all for giving choice of tools to allow a user to use to do their work but uncontrolled plans makes no sense to me. What has been your organization approach to expenses associated with BYOD?
