confiscatedThoughts » James B.

Planning for vSphere

James B. — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 14:00:43 +0000

The fundamental assumption in all my vSphere4 articles is obviously that you are intending to carry out all the work yourself, rather than bring in outside experts to do it for you. I believe that none of the procedures involved should be beyond the skill level of the average IT Manager, provided they put in the necessary preparation and practice. However evaluating systems in a lab is a major step away from deploying them in a live business environment, with both the immediate cost of hardware/software and the potential cost of disrupting business productivity to take into account. Therefore please consider carefully whether you are ready to take this on yourself, or if it would be more prudent to seek assistance. At the very least this article should help you to gain a much better understanding of what is involved, and so ensure that you are getting value for money if you do outsource the work.(...)
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Post tags: virtualization, vmware

ESXi over ESX! Why?

James B. — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 15:00:45 +0000

Good question isn’t it! IT admins at VMware were asked the same question and they decided to push ESXi instead of regular ESX. VMware has started to roll out ESXi on all their servers and the job is still in progress. Listen to Jeremy Hunt at Talkshoe.com talking about how they provision their own applications at VMware on ESXi.

So if VMware does it, eats its own dog food as we used to say, why shouldn’t we do the same and deploy ESXi? Is there any issue NOT to deploy ESXi? Is ESXi a better hypervizor than ESX or less featured? What are the differences between both versions if any? Do I need to change my monitoring system? Do I have to change my procedures? How do I deploy ESXi? Can you deploy ESXi using PXE? How can I troubleshoot my host without a COS? That’s a lot of questions isn’t it and I will try to give some answers here.

(...)
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Post tags: virtualization, vmware

Organizations and VDI Deployment – Part 3

James B. — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 15:00:51 +0000

I finally found sometime to finalise the third and last part of this article. In the first part of this article I discussed the Business Drivers and Operational Benefits, Technology Savings and Operational Improvements of a properly deployed Desktop Virtualization project - and in the second part I talked about the underlying technology, design considerations and the site-wide architecture for a multi-site VMware View rollout.

In the meantime VMware released it’s new VDI solution, VMware View 4.0, that promises to solve latency problems that represented an obstacle for deployments over WANS and Internet. The new PCoIP remote display technology is a dynamic solution that adjusts the compression/quality level depending on the available network resources.

(...)
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Post tags: VDI, view, virtualization, vmware

Organizations and VDI Deployment – Part 2

James B. — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 15:00:02 +0000

In the first part of this article I discussed the Business Drivers and Operational Benefits, Technology Savings and Operational Improvements of a properly deployed Desktop Virtualization project.

Lower Cost of Desktop PC Management
Quickly and Easily provision Desktops to Clients Anytime, Anywhere
Satisfy Different Regulatory Security Requirements e.g. HIPAA, SOX, PCI
Reliable Desktop Disaster Recovery Plan

In this second part I will focus my attention on technology and how to architect a successful Desktop Virtualization infrastructure.

Organizations and VDI Deployment – Part 2

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Post tags: VDI, view, virtualization, vmware

Organizations and VDI Deployment – Part 1

James B. — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 15:00:33 +0000

I see many organizations going through the desktop virtualization process without being able to answer simple questions like – What are your primary drivers for desktop virtualization? or – How will your organization benefit from desktop virtualization? or even – What is the estimate cost and payback?

Nonetheless it is not their fault. Vendors make it as difficult as possible for us mere mortals to understand and be able to respond to these questions. They try to make the licensing options as different as possible from one another so not even a master in mathematics would be able to predict what solution is more affordable or best suit your organization. Nether less to say they keep changing the licensing model.

What I will try to do here is to give an insight on how a VDI project should start and then each one of the phases it should go through up to the POC (Proof of Concept).(...)
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Post tags: VDI, view, virtualization, vmware

Cleaning the Replica Closet

James B. — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 15:00:42 +0000

If, like me, you have been through all the versions of View Composer and the broker since its introduction, various bugs and broken recompositions will have left you with a large amount of detritus in your VMwareViewComposerReplicaFolder, making it hard to keep an eye on the proper operation of the Composer, and in my case, causing a datastore to run out of space and subsequent operations to fail. Time for a clean up.

This is decently documented here, but how do you know which ones you can delete?(...)
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Post tags: VDI, view, virtualization, vmware

VDI + Storage = Big Impact

James B. — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 14:00:18 +0000

Introduction

Virtual Desktop Infrastructure, or VDI, is hot. It’s cool, secure, centrally managed, flexible–it’s an IT manager’s dream.

VDI comes in two flavors: Server-Hosted VDI (centralized, single-user remote vDesktop solution) and Client-Side VDI (local, single-user vDesktop solution).

The advantages of a VDI infrastructure are that virtual desktops are hardware independent and can be accessed from any common OS. It’s also much easier to deploy virtual desktops and to facilitate the freedom that the users require of them. And because of the single-user OS, application compatibility is much less of an issue than it is with terminal servers.(...)
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Post tags: storage, VDI, virtualization

What Does Your Desktop Service Strategy Look Like?

James B. — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 14:00:13 +0000

If you believed in ITIL v3, what would your Desktop (as a) Service Strategy look like?

If using VDI technology to deploy Desktop Services is a great idea (according to the alleged market size, and vendor/consumer bustle in that market place, it seems to be so) then how do you do it? Well, according to ITIL, you start with a Service Strategy.

I’m no ITIL kung fu master, and this is by choice because I consider ITIL a minor tool that, at best, needs to be used in conjunction with other tools to do the job and it’s not the be-all or end-all. ITIL’s better than nothing, but it’s not everything. And I have a hunch that ITIL pushers are like other religious groups: generally benign, often nice, thoughtful people, but very sensitive if you dare to criticize their church (itSMF), books or practices.

How does ITIL (seek to) help in developing a Desktop Services Strategy?(...)
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Post tags: itil, VDI, virtualization

Over Subscribing or Over Capacity

James B. — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 14:35:07 +0000

There’s been a very interesting set of discussions lately regarding performance anomalies across Cloud infrastructure providers. The most recent involves Amazon Web Services and RackSpace Cloud. Let’s focus on the former because it’s the one that has a good deal of analysis and data attached to it.

Reuven Cohen’s post (Oversubscribing the Cloud) summarizing many of these concerns speaks to the meme wherein he points to Alan Williamson’s initial complaints (Has Amazon EC2 become over subscribed?) followed by CloudKick’s very interesting experiments and data (Visual Evidence of Amazon EC2 network issues) and ultimately Rich Miller’s summary including a response from Amazon Web Services (Amazon: We Don’t Have Capacity Issues)

The thing that’s interesting to me in all of this is yet another example of people mixing metaphors, terminology and common operating methodologies as well as choosing to suspend disbelief and the reality distortion field associated with how service providers actually offer service versus marketing it.(...)
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Post tags: cloud computing, virtualization

Moved Hosts

James B. — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 06:50:50 +0000

I have completed moving the site to my new choice of host, (mt) MediaTemple. This site and a couple of other sites that I have are running in their (gs) Grid Server layer. Let me know if you see anything out of line on here that might be due to the move.