Aidan Finn, IT Pro

I have a week off between jobs so I’m making the most of it.  Obviously, there is going to be a lot of work done on the book.  But I spent this past weekend up in the Cairngorn Mountains in Scotland.  I drove up via ferry.  That’s a long trip but it allowed me to bring a lot of photo gear, and damn, I used it.  Over 1.5 days, I spent 14.5 hours sitting in hides (or blinds as they are called over the pond) to do some photography.

Osprey were my target:

I also got some Red Squirrels:

I’m back home now.  I’ll have a slow start this morning and then dive straight back into a Hyper-V architecture chapter for the book.

Today was my last day in the hosting business.  It’s been 3 years, and to be honest, I’m happy to be moving into other areas.  I’ve had the opportunity to do a lot of stuff in those 3 years but I thought it was time to move on.  Hosting/Cloud is too much like helpdesk for my liking.

I have a week off, giving me time to work on the book and do a little bit of photography, hopefully getting up close with some Osprey in Scotland.

After that, I return to the consultancy business as a team leader with a company in Dublin.  I’ve probably spent half of my career in the consulting world so it’ll be a return to familiar territory.  I’ll be working with all the technologies that I find interesting and get the opportunity to stretch a little.  Of course, Windows, Hyper-V and System Center will all be in the mix, especially considering that those are hot button subjects around here these days.

From time to time, I’ll be asked to power down virtual machines in our production environment.  I also run a test virtual machine on the cluster to test things like Live Migration after doing upgrade work.  Normally, I’d like to keep it powered down, just to save 512MB of RAM and the occasional CPU cycle.  But it seems to me, that Microsoft does not like us to keep powered down virtual machines on the cluster.

My first clue was in VMM.  VMM tries to protect the cluster reserve in a Hyper-V cluster.  In other words, VMM will change the status of a cluster object to a warning if you overcommit the resources.  For example, if you have 58GB of RAM for VM’s across your N+1 3 node cluster, then it’ll complain when you deploy 58GB+ of VM RAM.  One would assume that VMM would only calculate the running VM’s.  However, I can confirm that it does include the RAM assignments to powered down VM’s as well.  I can understand this conservative approach … it’s the sort of thing a banker would do if they didn’t want to bankrupt their bank’s loan book ;-)  You have to allow for a scenario where the VM will be powered up.  Who’s to say that there isn’t a tester or developer at the other end of a Self-Service Portal, consuming their quota points, and eager to power up the VM’s at any moment.

The next clue is in OpsMgr.  I’ve imported the Microsoft Windows Cluster management pack.  A highly available virtual machine is a resource from clustering’s point of view.  Surely you deployed it on a cluster (as a highly available virtual machine) for a reason?  Shouldn’t it be running?  That’s how the management pack sees it.  An object is created in OpsMgr for every monitored cluster resources, i.e. virtual machine, and its status will go to critical if the resource is stopped, i.e. the virtual machine is powered down.  You’ll get an alert and notifications will go out.  If you are running SLA reporting then you’ll get a nice red mark all over your SLA.  Whoops!

So what should you do with those powered down VM’s?  If it is going to be down for a long time then you should move it to the VMM library.  There you have cheaper storage, and hopefully lots of it.  Importantly, the VMM cluster reserve will be OK.  OpsMgr will stop complaining after a little while about a failed cluster resource.

What if this power down is a short term thing?  You should obviously add resources to the cluster to resolve the VMM cluster reserve warning because you won’t have an N+1 (or greater) cluster with enough resources to handle a failed host (or hosts).  You can use the Health  Explorer in OpsMgr to put the critical resource (the powered down VM) in the cluster into maintenance mode, thus eliminating alerts.  You should do that before powering down the VM.

Long term, if lots of VM’s will be powered down and up, you might want to create a dedicated, lower priority, cluster for this.  You can customize the monitoring not to care about cluster resources being up or down.  You can probably safely ignore warnings about VMM cluster reserve being exceeded too.

I just received this spam email from a VMware sales rep.  It was sent to a mail list <undisclosed recipients>:

“I tried to call you this morning in relation to your interest in our virtualization technology. I just wanted to know if you have any virtualization projects at present, or planned for the future. In Vmware we can help in terms of technical assistance, commercial advice, hardware setup etc. if required.

Please drop me a line when you have a moment and don’t hesitate to ask any questions that may be helpful to your objectives”.

So, VMware is cold calling people and then emailing them to drum up business.  Hmmm ….

I know nothing about WebSphere other than it exists; as you may have gathered, I try to avoid IBM products.  I was talking to an engineer yesterday and he mentioned that WebSphere was a product he was never able to run successfully as a virtual machine on ESX 3.X.  The memory was constantly being paged and the hypervisor couldn’t keep up.

That got me to thinking: would W2008 R2 Hyper-V’s SLAT (second level address translation) feature help with this?  I suspect it probably would make virtualising this application more feasible.  SLAT leverages AMD RVI and Intel EPT to remove the hypervisor from the role of mapping physical memory to virtual machine memory.  The CPU is able to do it more efficiently than software can.

It’s something that might be worth testing in a lab if a WebSphere server has appeared on your radar as a candidate for conversion.  Just make sure you are using SLAT capable CPU’s in your host servers.

ESX 4.0 has something similar to SLAT so I guess it is probably worth trying there too if that is your hardware virtualisation platform.

As usual, check with the vendor for virtualisation support and recommendations.  Then balance the risks and decide for yourself.

This is another TechEd North America 2010 presentation.  This one is by MS Program Manager, Soumya Das Bhaumik, a nice guy who I’ve talked with on the phone once or twice.

Dynamic Memory can be a little confusing at first so I thought I’d give it a go.  It’s a new feature in Windows Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1, the beta of which will appear some time in July 2010.  Dynamic Memory will support virtual machines running:

• Windows Server 2003, 2003 R2, 2008, and 2008 R2 Web, Standard, Enterprise, and Datacenter editions.
• Windows Vista/7 Ultimate and Enterprise editions.

The process is a mixture of memory hot-add and ballooning.  First …

Each VM will have a bunch of settings:

• Do you want statically defined or dynamic memory for the VM?
• What will be the minimum amount of memory in the VM?
• What will be the maximum amount of memory in the VM?
• How much free memory/buffer should the VM have?

OK.  Now the tricky bit.  How does it work?

The VM will boot up with the minimum amount of RAM.  Let’s say this is 1GB.  As the VM’s requirements grow, a VSC (Virtual Server Client) driver running in kernel mode in the VM will pull in memory from the host and supply it to the VM.  This consumes more physical memory from the host.

It is important to note that memory doesn’t magically appear from thin air.  The host must have the memory that is required by the VM – otherwise we get into a nasty performance situation.

What happens on the way down when the memory requirements of the VM reduce?

As the VM no longer needs memory, the ballooning process kicks in.  Memory cannot be physically removed from the VM.  Windows wouldn’t like that!  Instead, the VSC “tricks” it.  This driver simultaneously:

• Reports to the VM that it is consuming the RAM that is being freed up.  It isn’t really.  But this prevents Windows in the VM from trying to allocate those blocks of memory that won’t really be there.  This is the balloon.
• The VSC returns the free/ballooned memory to the host so that it can be made available for other memory hungry VM’s.

As you can see in some of the demo’s that I’ve linked to recently, it’s a pretty simple, rapid and easy thing to use.

The trick here is not to abuse what Dynamic Memory can do.  There’s no point in over committing host servers.  If you know that you have an average of 75% memory utilisation across your VM’s then don’t try to get twice as much out of the host.

I think the sizing of the settings will be tricky.  I think OpsMgr reporting will prove very useful in figuring out what is best to do and how to configure the settings.

Where will Dynamic Memory be useful?

• VDI: No doubt!  The big cost here are the GB’s of RAM and that’s usually the bottleneck in a host, not the CPU.
• VM Sizing: Just like in the physical world, it’s hard to accurately size memory for VM’s.  Software vendors can be very conservative with requirements and you can end up with too much RAM in a VM.  Now you can set a range and let the VM consume what it really needs.
• Labs: We usually have limited budgets so squeezing that little bit more for a couple extra VM’s will be very nice.  I wish I could do this right now for my book lab!!!

As the Service Pack 1 beta and RC releases develop, I’m sure MS will release more information about Dynamic Memory and engineering recommendations.

This deals with a scenario where you run the Configuration Operations Manager setup routine for VMM 2008 R2.  The setup fails at the Administrator Console stage with the following error:

<Problem>

"Setup was not able to retrieve the service account from the specified Virtual Machine Manager server.

Specify a different VMM server and then try the operation again.

ID: 10207"

I had this issue while setting up my lab environment for the book.  I’d never seen it before.  No matter what I did, it kept repeating and stuffed the schedule for a chapter, forcing me to move to the next chapter (after wasting 4 or 5 days).

I searched all over and found no help at all, but plenty of people who had seen this problem.  Some solutions included setting up the prerequisites.  I was 100% sure that I had done that: management packs, console installs, OpsMgr admin rights to the VMM service account, etc.  AD and accounts were all healthy.  I uninstalled and reinstalled VMM (retaining and reusing the database) and even created a new VMM server from scratch.

Eventually, I opened a call with MS PSS.  Within a couple of hours an engineer named Ganesh called me up – well ahead of the 8 hours SLA (nice!).  We fired up an easy assist session and went through all the steps.  We were both sure of a problem on the VMM side; OpsMgr was behaving perfectly.

Note: A handy troubleshooting step is to install a VMM Admin console on another machine and try that.  That can ID a cause of this issue – there appear to be many including dodgy DNS records and missing prereqs.   The setup log in the hidden (by default) ProgramData folder doesn’t give very much detail on the integration setup failure so you have to go through everything.

Ganesh wanted to look at the service account in ADSIEdit.  We browsed to it.  The first suspect was the SPN records.  SPNSETUP –L led us to believe everything was OK there.  We opened up the properties of the VMM service account and confirmed that.  However, when we expanded the service account we did notice something.  The SCP (it appears like a sub-folder in ADSIEdit under the VMM service account and is called CN=MSVMM) was missing.  This should be created by the VMM setup on the VMM server.

We reinstalled VMM on the VMM server once again.  Still no sign of the SCP.  This was a very unusual one.  Ganesh needed some time to do some research and to contact Redmond.

<FIX>

A day later I got an email from Ganesh.  There was a way to create the SCP.  Pop the VMM 2008 R2 media into the VMM server.  Browse to the <architecture>\Setup folder using command prompt.  Run CONFIGURESCPTOOL.EXE –INSTALL from that folder.  This will create the SCP; I confirmed this in ADSIEdit.  I reran the integration setup and it completed perfectly.  After a while all of the VMM content started appearing in OpsMgr.

Note: If you do uninstall/reinstall VMM then make sure you patch it to the level it was at before.  Up-to-date VMM agents cannot communicate with out-of-date VMM servers.

Thanks to Ganesh over in PSS for your help!

Last week at TechEd, Microsoft announced an increase in the number of supported virtual machines in a Hyper-V Cluster.  You may know that a Hyper-V host supports up to 384 running VM’s.  But up to now, only 64 VM’s were supported on a clustered Hyper-V host.

That changes now.  Microsoft supports up to 1000 VM’s in a cluster, regardless of how many Hyper-V hosts are in the cluster.  With one exception,of course: You’ll see that a 2 node cluster is limited to 384 VM’s (N+1 hosts) because of the Hyper-V limit of 384 per host.

• 16 nodes: ~62 VM’s/node
• 8 nodes: 125 VM’s/node
• 4 nodes: 250 VM’s/node
• 3 nodes: 333 VM’s/node
• 2 nodes: 384 VM’s/node

This is nicely timed with Dynamic Memory and new CPU’s allowing for greater numbers of VM’s per host.  Now we can host them in a supported manner.

Work continues on Mastering Hyper-V Deployment.  We’ve hit a few snags along the way.  We had a bit of a project shakeup over the last 2 weeks.  I hit a technical issue (VMM and OpsMgr integration) last week that has delayed one chapter while I engage support from MS.

But work continues.  One chapter might be pushed out but others come forward.  It’s all hands on deck right now as I enter the most intense part of my schedule.  Sleep is at a premium: I have a day job and the book is worked on at night and at the weekends.

This blog is proving to be critical.  One of its purposes is to act as my notebook: I collect bits of information from other sources and I record things that I’ve learned along the way.  As part of my day job, I often refer back to it.  For the book, I find myself coming back here to pull out bits of information.  The book allows me to tie them together, order them, experiment a bit, and expand on the information.

The current chapter I’m working on is a perfect example of this.  I’m pulling in information that is anywhere from 2 weeks to 2 years old.  A lot of it is plain text, discussing architecture and configurations.  The second half of it is pure step-by-step of some very new stuff. 

Another key source of information is the MVP community.  I’ve had help and continue to get help from countless people.  Sometimes it’s stuff I’ve picked up in general conversation.  Sometimes they’ve been kind enough to answer questions.  When the book comes out, you’ll see how big a role MVP’s have played in its writing.  I’ll have say a BIG “thank you” to a big bunch of people who’ve helped shape it.

In a way, the timing of the book has worked out well.  Sure, we are well into the life of W2008 R2 Hyper-V.  Typically a book tries to be released in the first few months of a product in order to maximise its lifecycle.  We’ll be about 1 year into the life of W2008 R2 when we hit the shelves.  But this book is about enterprise deployments: and a lot of the accompanying products in that sort of deployment have just hit the shelves.  Heck, some of our content isn’t even available in an RTM form yet!

I saw this one in my tweet feed this morning.  It’s an important one for anyone doing host level backups of virtual machines on W2008 R2 Hyper-V host servers.  Ben Armstrong has explained how the registry file of the host will grow over time as you back up virtual machines.  This eventually leads to slow boot up times for the host.

Here’s how I understand the description:

• A VSS backup at the host (W2008 R2) level backs up a VM
• The backed up copy of each VHD is temporarily mounted by the parent partition for some cleanup work.
• This mount causes a registry entry to be created.

Imagine doing this with a VSS enabled and optimized backup product like DPM 2010.   Maybe 15-20 VM’s, with an average of 2 VHD’s per VM, per host being backed up every 15 minutes.  That’s a lot of stuff going on.

Ben also warns that the fix, KB982210, is titled incorrectly.  It says Windows Server 2008 when it should say Windows Server 2008 R2.

By the way, this fix is thanks to the way that a number of MS people have embraced social media.  Ben asked people to contact him if they encountered issues with Hyper-V backups.  A number of people raised this issue, and we go this fix.

Some sessions from TechEd North America 2010 are being posted online.  Here’s some of the virtualisation ones:

That should keep you going for a while :-)

I have a customer that is using Windows Network Load Balancing for a fault tolerance web service across two web servers.  They started running W2003 x86 a few years ago and recently decided that they should “upgrade” to W2008 R2 to take advantage of some of the better web hosting features.  Each server has 2 NIC’s.  The first is the normal one we use to log into the servers and manage them.  The second is used purely for the NLB clustered web traffic.

This meant a rebuild of the servers.  For some architectural reasons, it was also decided to build a new NLB cluster.  We would do this one web server at a time.

We rebuilt the first server.  I brought up a new NLB cluster, with just itself as the only member for the moment. We would add the second server when it was rebuilt.  To bring it into production we would:

• Change the production IP address on the old NLB cluster to a temporary one.
• Change the temporary IP address on the new NLB cluster to the production on.

Then we could rebuild the second web server and away we go!

Muggins here drew the short straw and I was awake at 06:00 this morning to VPN in, do some prep work and switch the IP addresses to bring the new server into production.  I did that and tested.  The websites would not respond.  I had no idea what was up.  Network monitor showed external traffic coming in on TCP 80 and reaching the server.  I could even see my IP address coming in.

I checked the website bindings which were set to the default of *, that is all assigned IP addresses on the server.  I verified with IPCONFIG that the production IP was live.  I could ping it from other machines and see the traffic in Network Monitor.  I decided I would configure the site in IIS7.5 to just use the NLB cluster IP address.  That’s where issue #1 arose.  I could not select that IP address.  After a quick google I learned that W2008 R2 IIS7.5 cannot pick detect the NLB cluster IP address and load it into the drop down list box.  I had to type it in.

It should be OK now?  I tested.  And no joy.  At this point I had to roll back the changes. The site had been offline for too long.

A few hours later I had the time to start investigating some more.  I used another public IP address with a NAT rule to another internal IP address that I could use on the new NLB cluster.  That would leave the production, old NLB, websites up and running and unaffected by my tests.

I still couldn’t access the site.  I tested the sites from another server in the same VLAN.  I could access the sites from there.  Strange!  This means that I either had a firewall or a routing issue.  It couldn’t be a firewall issue.  The same NAT rule was being used on the new server.  I was simply moving the IP address and we don’t do anything crazy with MAC addresses.  It couldn’t be an ARP cache issue because I could see web traffic actually reaching the server in Network Monitor 3.3.

I scratched my head.  I could route out from the server.  I could surf the web and traceroute out.  Both the server’s management IP and NLB IP are in the same VLAN.  The server management IP had the correct default gateway.  The TCP configuration was identical to the W2003 R2 configuration.

What if … now I was reaching … what if NLB doesn’t route correctly?  What if the NLB NIC’s IP configuration doesn’t pick up the default gateway set up on the management NIC’s IP configuration.  If it was a normal NIC it probably would.  I set up the default gateway on the NLB NIC.  It was identical to the server management NIC configuration.  I got the warning about multiple default gateways on a computer and clicked OK.

Now I tested web site access from an external IP and it worked perfectly.  My conclusion?  You have to configure the default gateway on an NLB NIC if using Network Load Balancing on Windows Server 2008 R2.  Otherwise it will not route correctly to other networks; it should pick up the default gateway from the management NIC but it does not.

I had an appointment early this morning.  I was there early and decided to read the news on my Windows mobile phone.  I’m a reader of the Irish Independent on http://www.independent.ie.  I was reading a couple of pages and then suddenly I could no longer access the site.

I was presented with this error:

HTTP Error 403: The service you requested is restricted.

The service you requested is restricted and not available to your browser.

That was funny because the site was OK 10 seconds before hand and had been since December when I bought the phone.

The page in question is hosted by 10.163.236.214 at http://10.163.236.214/lnk000/=http://imgvip.local/loc/local/home.aspx.  This is not an independent.ie server telling me I cannot get onto their site.  Hardly!  This is a Vodafone Ireland server blocking me from accessing the site for no good reason.

This is different to the usual block which comes from another server in the 10.163 range.  That message blocks access to content for under 18’s (or those who haven’t cleared themselves in a Vodafone Ireland shop).  I can easily bring up that different warning when I try to access Facebook or Twitter.

So what is it Vodafone Ireland.  I know you read my blog.  I get about a dozen hits from you folks every day.  Are you censoring legitimate content?  This is odd, because my cousin (a IT security expert) did suspect that the dodgy performance on your home broadband suggested that there was a transparent proxy being used.  Every Vodafone Ireland employee he and I spoke to denied that there was.  Now I am seeing a block – that means there most definitely is a transparent proxy, at least on your mobile network, and I am left to suspect that there is one on your fixed line broadband.

This censoring of legitimate access to a newspaper site that is critical of the ruling (and some would say corrupt) government is very suspicious. 

Come on, let’s hear it then?  What have you done?  Be very honest because you know I will be when I write to the Independent and let them know about this.

The “Virtual PC Guy”, Ben Armstrong, presented at TechEd yesterday on the subject of Dynamic Memory.  I guess you could call it DM’s coming out party.  Ben posted his presentation on his blog.  It won’t surprise me if there are a number of public webcasts in the coming months.

Microsoft has just announced a rollup update for System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2.  It fixes:

• A high availability virtual machine with a GPT pass-thru disk is reported is reported as “Unsupported Cluster Configuration.” 
• When you manage VMware Virtual Center that has distributed switches, the Virtual Machine Manager service (Vmmservice.exe) crashes.
• After Quick Storage Migration is completed, the Failover Cluster Management MMC snap-in reports that the VM still uses the old CSV volume.
• If a VM is configured with 3 virtual processors, the SCVMM Admin Console crashes.
• The settings for the virtual network are incorrect after a Refresh-VMHost cmdlet job is completed.

This update is being released through Windows Update.  That’s totally convenient and I love it.  Microsoft says that “if the Virtual Machine Manager or Virtual Machine Manager Agent service is running when the hotfix rollup package is installed on the Virtual Machine Manager server, you have to restart the computer”.

Ben Armstrong has posted details about the virtualisation sessions that are on this week at TechEd North America 2010.  Check out his post if you want to learn about the basics or want in-depth details, e.g. Dynamic Memory tomorrow afternoon.

TechNet’s Channel 9 posted a demo of Dynamic Memory in action.

Due to another engagement, I couldn’t watch the Muglia keynote from TechEd today.  I missed the expected announcement regarding the beta release of Windows 2008 R2 and Windows 7 Service Pack 1.  We should expect it by the end of July.  For you Hyper-V heads, that’s when we get the first official public glimpse at Dynamic Memory.  For you remote desktop services heads, RemoteFX is in there too.

To be honest, I was hoping the release would be tonight.  But it isn’t :-(

Last week we heard the sad news that David Houston had died.  David was a prominent member in the Irish IT community.  He was one of the founders of the SBS user group and continued to run it with impressive events.  David also spoke at the Windows user group last year.

The funeral will be at 14:00 today in Delgany, Co. Wicklow.

This session is by Lait Kaushal from Citrix escalation in Dublin.  I’m totally out of touch with Citrix so I’m looking forward to this session.

This is normally a long 70 minute presentation but he only has 45 minutes.  The room has to be closed because this session is too popular.

XenApp6 is designed for Windows Server 2008 R2 application delivery.  Work on devices such as PC, Mac, Smartphone and netbook.  Android, iPhone 2.0 and Windows mobile supported.  So is Linux.  There is a plug-in for App-V.

HDX provides high quality real time media playing, e.g. CD quality audio.

AppCenter is built for W2008 R2.

XenApp provides session virtualization and application virtualization.  The former works with central servers or virtual machines.  Power and capacity management will power down and wake up servers that are not needed.  Thus you get power savings.  Physical machines require WOL.  Alternatively the servers can be virtualized – power up and power down the VM’s to save host resources.

There are advanced, enterprise and platinum versions, each with more features than the previous one.

Installation has been simplified greatly.  There is zero-config deployment, post-installation config and auto-config using GPO.  Pre-requisites are automatically installed (nice).

It includes the ability to do self-service application provisioning (the Dazzle feature).  The user goes to a website and subscribes to an application.  It can download and pre-cache apps.  Current support for Windows and Max.  Linux support on the way.

If you have apps that don’t support Terminal Services then you can run them from dedicated virtual machines and get the same effect.  That’s kind of a mix of VDI and application publishing.

XenApp provides three app delivery mechanisms:

• Server hosted: Lowest TCO but requires bandwidth.
• Locally running virtualized applications: Self service and offline execution.  More management.
• VM hosted application publication: Centralized applications but requires more management.  Requires XenDesktop for the back end VDI infrastructure.

App-V packages can also be streamed by XenApp.

There’s a lot of common ground between MS and Citrix in the desktop delivery market.  ConfigMgr tramples all over Citrix’s toes, especially v.Next.

The licensing component will eventually be a virtual appliance, making it easier to manage and deploy.

“There is no backdoor to hack the license server if you forget the admin password”.  A delegate says that’s not true: there’s an XML file where you can delete the encrypted password string, thus setting it to blank.

Licensing has a WMI interface for reporting to OpsMgr.

HDX uses 90% less bandwidth to give CD audio quality.  Echo cancellation for VoIP.  WebCams are supported.  Tested wth MS OCS.  Plug’n’Play for USB devices is supported.  There is enhanced colour and multiple monitor support – basically, if Windows supports it – XenApp6 supports it.  Smart Card readers are supported. 

This is the first session I am attending this morning.  It is being presented by Saša Mašić.

3 comments for ESX from the audience:

• OS Support
• Administration tools easier to use
• Available appliances from third parties

Some incorrect comments from the audience about backup at the host level.  Claims that only VMware supports this with third party products.  Untrue.  You most certainly can do this with Hyper-V.  It’s even better because it has cascading VSS from the host/file system, into the VM and then into the VM’s VSS writers.  I make a brief response/correction but leave it there … I smell fanboyism and am not here for an argument.

The speaker rarely gets customer requests for XenServer implementations and asks the audience about their experiences.  It appears that it tends to be restricted to organizations who are heavily invested in Citrix licensing.

1 person has done Xen in production – using Essentials for management.  The conversation has switched to management.

Only a few of us (including me) think Storage VMotion is a valuable feature.

It turns out that I am the only Hyper-V user in the audience.  I’m not very surprised – PubForum folks are very ahead of the curve and they would have been invested in VMware a long time ago.

I’m exhausted.  I’ve done 2 presentations this week at Pubforum, one after the other with a quick break.  3 hours of me talking.  Phew – those poor people who had to listen to me!

I’ve posted both presentations.  As usual, they are only my cue cards.  Most of the content is me speaking or answering questions.

This is the 2 hour class that I presented:

The theme is move work to a more optimal place.

We were going to get a demo of a Citrix client on an iPad but the projector interface just woulldn’t work.  Guess it’s dodgy hardware ;-) OH you know the fanboys will flame me over that.

XenClient

72% of corporate machines will be laptops.  Synchronized VDI VM’s will be critical.  Citrix launched XenClient, a client hypervisor.  Question/Comment: There are only a few models of computer that have support for the client hypervisor.  I guess it is monolithic.  No AMD support.  The adoption rates of this will be quite limited without massively expanding the supported hardware list.

Synchronizer allows you to check out a VDI VM to your laptop running XenClient.  Nice.  Imagine that with OVF – could check out a VM to any client virtualization then – assuming OVF support in all products.

XenClient can passthrough the graphics card for 3D.  This is experimental and only supports 1 VM at a time. 

CItrix pitch the idea of the user having a public and private VM.  Good luck with that.  A user will not do that.  They’re either too lazy, will forget or find it to be a waste of time.  Another idea is that the user can supply their own laptop and a corporate build VM can go onto it.  Uh uh! THe hardware list is too limited, mainly to pricey h/w I guess, and end users will bring non-supported hardware in.  Also, the drive will be wiped when a XenClient will be done.  A P2V must be done before hand of the user’s build because thew will have an OEM install with no media, not to mention their personal data.  There will be a compliance issue regarding access and retainment of that P2V image on the corporate network.

Nice idea – but it needs to be a complete solution that is fully thought out.  I don’t believe it is anywhere near that yet, based solely on what I am hearing here

XenApp 6

Windows applications on demand, anywhere.  Out since March.  Dazzle provides serlf0service apps.  HDX provides “RealTime” and plug’n’play.  We may see some System Center integration.

FlexCast for Apps is a streaming solution including support for services.  A next release may include support for streaming drivers.

HDX provides USB PNP, 3D graphics, etc. 

NetScaler VPX

I guess VPX is their network traffic optimisation solution?

NetScaler VPX for Hyper-V will run as a service for Hyper-V to accelerate it.  Hmm, interesting.

Virtual Appliances

Workflow Studio, XenApp EVA and XenDesktop EVA are appliances that are based on Hyper-V.

XenServer 5.6

Citrix have 11% of the market share.

I see XenServer for the very first time.  It appears to have something like Dynamic Memory: minimum and maximum RAM setting per VM.  No shared paging in XenServer – the response to a question from a VMware user I guess.

I’ve been meaning to do this for a while.  We’ve been using TS Gateway for remotely accessible solutions for our customers at work for a while now.  This evening, I set up my Hyper-V/Virtual Server/vSphere lab to be remotely accessible from anywhere.  This will allow me to access my lab and work on the book even if I am commuting on public transport or am in remote locations.

It was simple enough to configure.  I added the Remote Desktop Services role (I’m using W2008 R2.  Use Terminal Services on W2008), choosing only the TS Gateway Role Service, to my Hyper-V host (don’t add any roles other than Hyper-V to hosts in production!!!).  The TS RAP allows my user account to access all devices.  It’s all configured on my netbook so I can use it while at PubForum.

Yes, this would be all easier with Home Server but I have my reasons not to deploy that for a while yet.

Now I can RDP into the lab and work away, just as if I was sitting in front of it.  Pretty sweet!  It even works perfectly well over 3G connections.