Technology, Virtualization and Cloud Computing
An experiement to see how many VM’s I could run on my Dell XPS 15 with 16GB of RAM.
Well, I tried the virtualization experiment again.
It worked out much better, but it still isn’t quite there.
This time though, I am going to stick with it.
It was time for me to get new development PC hardware. I went with a desktop again instead of a laptop, simply because I can get so much more power for the dollars and…
My video walk through of configuring a complete vSphere environment in VMware Workstation 8 including the networking needed for nested VM’s.
I posted an earlier lab on installing XenDesktop 5 within VMware Workstation 8. But the number 1 search term that comes up for this post is “How to install Citrix VDI-in-a-Box in VMware Workstation.” I kind of take it for granted that if XenDesktop will run in VMware Workstation then the lighter VDI-in-a-Box should be a shoe in. But, since the question gets raised and I’ve never deployed the lighter VDI solution this a good source for a lab and post.
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VDI in a Box is a much simpler solution than XenDesktop. In order to Run XenDesktop 5 Quick Deploy in a vSphere environment you need at least 4 Windows servers. In VDI in a Box you only need your ESXi server, the Citrix vdiManager appliance and your client image (Windows XP or 7) to have a complete solution. My laptop is pretty robust. I have 16GB of Ram and a quad core i7 processor. But my guess was that you could probably do this lab on a workstation with only 8GB. Also, the vdiManager is 32-bit so Intel-VT shouldn’t be needed. The instructions for installing VDI-in-a-Box can be found here on the Citrix website.
I went a very simple route for the design of this lab. I created an ESXi server with 4 CPU’s and 4GB of RAM. I bridged the network work adapter so I could access the VDI environment from any machine in my lab. The below snapshot are the VM settings for my ESXi server.
Figure 1 ESXi Virtual Machine Settings
After importing the vdiManager OVA my virtualized ESXi server should memory utilization at 1.2GB which is kind of high and is more than likely a result of VMware tools not being installed on the Linux appliance. I choose to use an XP image because I had one handy to import. This is where I enjoy the features of Workstation 8. I just added the virtualized ESXi to my list of managed hosts in Workstation and I was able to just upload the image directly from VMware Workstation.
The installation of VDI-in-a-Box is much simpler than the installation of XenDesktop. Using an OVA appliance and just a configuration screen makes it a no brainer installed in comparison. The setup for configuring the image and setup are guided and worked well. I configured a pool of 10 potential desktop with 1 desktop powered on. I went low for memory requirements at 512MB per VDI session.
Here’s a sample of the guest settings for the first VDI session Citrix configured after completion of the image deployment.
Figure 2 VDI Workstation in ESXi
This lab was fast, easy and not very intensive. If you have a system with 8GB of RAM it should work well. The one problem you may run into performance wise would be running more than one VDI session. My system capped out at 9GB of used RAM during this lab but keep in mind I had all of my regular productivity applications opened and created this post as well while preforming the lab. Here’s a snapshot of my virtual ESXi server summary while running the lab with two VDI images running along with the vdiManager.
I love to answer any questions on this lab or take comments.
Update 07/14/12: I recorded a video for the lab that can be found you YouTube
This is a follow up to my previous post on trying to run XenDesktop in VMWare Workstation 8. In my previous attempt, I wanted to try and consolidate all of the Windows Server roles into the least amount of virtual servers as possible. In my initial attempts I realized that there was no easy way to avoid having a minimum of 3 Windows Servers. The roles are as follows:
I found that XenDesktop nor vCenter can run on a Domain Controller. The other idea was to run the XenDesktop server roles and vCenter on the same server. I’ll forewarn you that installing XenDesktop on a standalone virtual machine can be difficult enough so, I avoided attempting this configuration. In my previous attempt, I basically ran out of RAM. My physical system only has 8GB of RAM and this lab the proved to be too much for the configuration. My system was unusable just after booting these 3 servers and the ESXi server. There was no way I’d be able to run the VDI workstations inside of the ESXi server.
So, this put my project on hold until I read that my laptop is capable of running with 16GB of RAM. I anxiously upgraded to 16GB of RAM and re-ran my lab. A lesson learned – document your passwords. I couldn’t remember the password to my Domain Controller which forced me to re-install the DC and rejoin all of the machines to the domain. The second problem I ran into was the XenDesktop install. There was basically something wrong with the SQL Express install and AD rights being applied to the DB. every time XenDesktop installer went to create the database tables I received an “xendesktop unhandled exception thrown service” error message. I ended up having to blow away my server hosting XenDesktop and build a fresh VM. The original Windows 2008 R2 server was a clone of a base image I’ve used. This may have something to do with the problems with SQL Express. This cleared the problem and I was to complete the deployment of 10 VDI workstations within the ESXi server running within VMware Workstation 8.
There a drawing of the final lab.
This is an extremely taxing lab. The ultimate bottleneck in my system ended up being my disk. I have a 7400 RPM spinning disk in my laptop and an SSD would have definitely made a big improvement. However, the difference between attempting this lab with only 8GB and 16GB was the difference between success and failure. I was actually able to run all 4 of the infrastructure Virtual machines, my XP golden image machine and two VDI sessions. Here’s a snapshot of my task manager with all of this running.
As you can see I had no hope of getting this to work with only 8GB of RAM
Here’s a snapshot of VMWare Workstation and the nest vCenter with the VDI desktops created by XenDesktop.
I have to tell you I’m pretty geeked that this lab was finally successful. It’s a testament to how powerful VMWare Workstation 8 is with enough RAM. I’m extremely impressed.
Related Posts
XenDesktop 5 inside of VMware Workstation 8 – First attempt
XenDesktop Lab Within VMware Workstation 8 Teaser
Citrix VDI in a Box within VMware Workstation 8
Class #2 of my series on virtualization technology. This is a introduction to client side virtualization. Client side hypervisors also known as Type 2 hypervisors is a great technology to start to wrap your head around virtualization technologies. VMware Workstation 8 is the foundation of many of the labs that I do on this site.
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Installing XenDesktop is a pretty frustrating experience. I believe that’s why Citrix came out with VDI-in-a-Box to help those interested in a POC build a quick environment. I haven’t looked at the VDI in a Box solution as I’m more interested in mimicking a production environment. I posted an earlier teaser in which I proposed using a provisioning server opposed to a Desktop Studio provisioned VM on a hypervisor. This gives you the advantage of being able to create this lab running VMWare Workstation on a CPU that doesn’t support nested VM’s inside of a guest vSphere instance.
I approached this lab in a couple of different ways. I wanted to have what I believed is a best of breed deployment where I’d have XenDesktop as the broker and vSphere as the hypervisor. I was hoping to get away with building just one beefy Windows server to support this environment. I was rudely reminded that you still need a minimum of 3 Windows servers to support this architecture. Because XenDesktop requires a domain controller and neither vCenter nor XenDesktop Studio can be installed on a domain controller. Why not just install vCenter and XenDesktop Studio on the same virtual machine? Installing XenDesktop can be a chore in itself and trying to change around default ports that in conflict with vCenter is not something I wanted tackle as part of this lab. I also discovered reduces this lab by one Windows server didn’t have a large impact of performance.
The big challenge with this approach was finding the right balance of resources dedicated to the infrastructure but leaves me enough resources to actually launch a VDI session and use it. What’s the point of creating a lab that can’t be used? My lab machine is a Dell XPS 15 laptop with 8GB of RAM and an i7 processor. You can get more details about my lab set up here.
So, I ended up with a total of 4 Infrastructure machines.
I assigned a NAT’d IP to all of the infrastructure machines included the production VM NIC for my lone ESXi server. This allows the guest running on my ESXi host to communicate with all the infrastructure machines and my XPS. My XPS served as my VDI client. The below is the network picture for this lab.
Network Laydown
I don’t think I have to tell you that this lab bogged down my pretty beefy laptop. This is a situation where the general rule of virtualization resources come into play – “Buy as much RAM as you can afford and then ask for more money for more RAM”. My CPU utilization even with the nested VDI host running didn’t really take a big hit. Memory was just about maxed out when I had all of my infrastructure components running.
The bottom line is that this lab failed. Too many VM’s for my configuration. I’m fairly certain this lab would have worked if I had 16GB of RAM but 8GB is not enough. My next step is to try and run this lab on a ESXi host with 8GB of RAM. The two GB freed up from the overhead of the Windows 7 host may be enough. I also have the option of using the ESXi host as my VDI hypervisor.
Better luck next time.
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XenDesktop in VMWare Workstation 8 teaser
I’ve posted more than a couple of articles on running vSphere inside of VMware Workstation. One thing we haven’t done a deep dive is how to setup networking in the environment to do things such as vMotion, DRS and Storage. Also, the ability to access nested VM’s from your production network.
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In this post, I’ll show how to create the sample lab in VMware Workstation 8.
Just as in a production environment we have 4 isolated networks in this configuration.
Management: This network will be used for VMkernel traffic dedicated to the management of ESXi.
iSCSI: This network is used for SAN traffic. This can be iSCS, NFS or NAS
vMotion: Traffic is dedicated to vMotion/DRS traffic.
Production: This network is for our Virtual Machines.
To support the hardware configuration in ESXi we need to add 3 additional NIC’s to our virtual ESXi host. Each NIC needs to be in a dedicated vmnet as shown below.
I normally assign a NAT’d IP address to my management interface. This isn’t required but since my vCenter is normally on a NAT’d interface my Management network ends up on the same interface. Once we’ve added the NIC’s we need to configure the virtual network to support our “Production” switch. This is done by using the Virtual Network Editor that comes with VMware Workstation 8. The vmnet we are utilizing for the “Production” network should be in Bridge mode. This will allow access to the nested VM’s via your physical network.
This configuration will furhter enhance your value from VMware workstation 8. If you have enough memory this makes for a great foundation for a VDI lab to test using physical workstations.
Update 7/20/12: I’ve added a tutorial video to my YouTube channel on how to setup this entire environment.
See if I can encourage some interaction between you guys and myself. I’ll throw this nugget out and see who bites. So, if you have a pretty beefy VMware ESXi server (16GB to 32GB) in your lab you should be able to build a pretty basic XenDesktop lab with a XenDesktop Studio Server, your physical ESXi server providing desktops and a vCenter server. Yelp that sounds like an environment that would run pretty smoothly on a single host with 16GB to 32GB of RAM.
Update 7-11-12: For my VDI in a Box lab look here
But what if you are a mere mortal with only a similar setup to mine? You are running a single workstation running Windows 7 with 8GB of RAM. Does this preclude me from doing XenDesktop labs?
Answer: Nope.
One of the large challenges for running this lab within a VMware Workstation 8 is having an ESXi server with nested workstations. It’s one of the practical memory limitations I’ve run into in trying to create this lab. But remember that XenDesktop has morphed over the years. One of the “new” features of XenDesktop 5.x was the addition of the Desktop Studio which allows provisioning of VM’s to the supported hypervisor (Hyper-V, XenServer and vSphere). XenDesktop 5.x still supports a standalone Provisioning Server.
Actually as I’ve engaged folks out in the real world they still architect their XenDesktop 5.x environments with provisioning servers. The single deployment I did I avoided using a Provisioning Server and used XenDesktop Studio’s sleek integration with vSphere.
You can use this “Legacy” technology to build your lab in VMware Workstation. The basic components are a Citrix Provisioning Server, XenDesktop Studio (web interface and management) and your workstations.
If you want to play around with XenDesktop and get a feel for the technology this isn’t a bad approach. This is a theoretical lab that I haven’t built. Let me know the interest level and I’ll actually build it and blog my experience.
Update 05/23/12: I attempted a similar lab here
Update 06/23/12: I was successfully able to get a work XenDesktop environment working inside of VMWare Workstation 8 running 16GB of RAM. Post is located here.
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Configuring VMware Workstation network for nested VM’s
