Cool Tool Update: RVTools 2.8.1

Rob de Veij has just released a new version of RVTools. The update only contains bug fixes but most definitely worth downloading again!

Version 2.8.1 (February 2010)

  • On vHost tab new field: number of running vCPUs
  • On vSphere VMs in vApp where not displayed.
  • Filter not working correct when annotations or custum fields contains null value.
  • When NTP server(s) = null the time info fields are not displayed on the vHost tabpage.
  • When datastore name or virtual machine name containts spaces the inconsistent foldername check was not working correct.
  • Tools health check now only executed for running VMs.

VMware View 4.0.1

VMware just released a maintenance release for VMware View 4.

View Manager Version 4.0.1 | 18 February 2010 | Build: 233023 (View Manager), 210930 (View Composer)

What’s New:

VMware View 4.0.1 is a maintenance release that resolves some known issues in the previous releases. For details, see the Resolved Issues section.

This release includes the following new features.
Localization of VMware View

The View Client and online help for View Client are now available in Japanese, French, German, and simplified Chinese. The View Manager Administration Guide, View Manager Release Notes, Getting Started with VMware View document, View Upgrade Guide, and View Architecture Planning Guide are also available in these languages.
VirtualCenter 2.5 Update 6 and ESX 3.5 Update 5 Support

View Manager 4.0.1 includes support for VirtualCenter 2.5 Update 6 and ESX 3.5 Update 5.
Enhancements to the PCoIP Display Protocol

PCoIP now supports the following features:

  • Virtual Printing, which allows end users to use local or network printers from a View desktop without requiring that additional print drivers be installed in the View desktop.
  • Single sign-on support for third party providers such as Sentillion and Imprivata.
  • View Client supports international keyboards when using PCoIP.

For PCoIP-related bug fixes, see the View Client Resolved Issues section.

Of course multiple issues have been fixed in the maintenance release. For more details read here.

VUM and downloading patches via PAC

When I tried to download patches via a freshly installed VMware vSphere Update Manager today I received the following error:

https://hostupdate.vmware.com/software/VUM/PRODUCTION/index.xml;
hosting the patch definitions and patches cannot be reached or has no patch data

Although we configured a proxy including the appropriate account it would not work. As suggested in this KB article I removed the “http://” part of the proxy address but still it bailed out with the error above. After trying several combinations I noticed that the proxy was actually a PAC address instead of a proxy server. A PAC basically serves a list which contains the proxy details of the environment. This comes in handy when you’ve got multiple proxy for redundancy… In this case VMware Update Manager wasn’t fond of the PAC file. When I used the address of the proxy server instead of the host server the PAC file it worked like a charm…

Impact of decisions…

I’ve been conducting VCDX Defense Interviews for a while now. Last week in Las Vegas during PEX something struck me and I guess this post by Frank Denneman is a good example

On a regular basis I come across NFS based environments where the decision is made to store the virtual machine swap files on local VMFS datastores. Using host-local swap can affect DRS load balancing and HA failover in certain situations. So when designing an environment using host-local swap, some areas must be focused on to guarantee HA and DRS functionality.

Every decision you make has an impact on your design/environment. What does a decision exactly impact? In most cases every decision impacts  the following:

  1. Cost
  2. Availability
  3. Performance

In the example Frank wrote about (see quote) a decision which clearly had an impact on all three. Although at the time it might have been a best practice the decision to go along with this best practice still had an impact on the environment. Because it was a best practice this impact might not have been as obvious. But when listed as follows I hope you understand why I am writing this article:

  • Costs – Reduced costs by moving the .vswp file to local disks.
  • Performance – VMotion performance is effected because .vswp files need to be copied from HOST-A to HOST-B.
  • Availability – Possibly less availability when the amount of free disk space on local VMFS isn’t sufficient to restart VMs in case of disaster.

As you can see a simple decision has a major impact, even though it might be a best practice you will need to think about the possible impact it has and if this best practice fits your environment and meets your (customer) requirements. Another great example would for instance be LUN sizing. So what if I would randomly pick a LUN size. Lets say 1TB:

  • Cost – As the average VM size is 35 GB, I want a max of 20VMs on a datastore and I need 20% of overhead for vswp files and snapshots I end up with max usage of 840GB. Added overhead: 160GB!
  • Availability – Although the availability of the datastore will be unaffected the uptime of your environment might change. When a single datastore fails you will lose 1TB worth of data. Not only will you lose more VMs, restoring will also take longer.
  • Performance – Normally I would restrict the LUN size to reduce the amount of VMs on a single datastore. More VMs on a datastore means more higher possibility of SCSI reservation conflicts.

The VCDX certification is not about knowing all the technical details, of course it is an essential part of it, it’s about understanding the impact of a decision. It’s about justifying your decision based on the impact it has on the environment/design. Know the pros / cons. Even if it is a best practice it might not necessarily apply to your situation.

VMware Partner Exchange 2010

I attended VMware Partner Exchange this week in Las Vegas. I must say I was impressed. To be completely blunt; I wasn’t impressed with Vegas. Vegas is definitely not my cup of tea. I love a bit of “history” and Vegas hardly has any. Give me San Francisco, New York, Boston or any other city anytime!

I do however was impressed with Partner Exchange. From a logistics standpoint PEX was well organized so my compliments to the organization. The labs, the sessions, the workshops… I wish I could have joined any of these. I’m not complaining though as being part of the VCDX Panel is also a great experience. Seeing the creative solutions people come up with is a learning experience for me as well. Some people have a different view on a concept or solution and this also gives me food for thought. Another thing what I love about being part of the panel is making people think about their own design. I can’t say much about the interviews I conducted though as the NDA police would kill me. I hope to see some of you who are taking the defense in Munich!

I did manage to see the keynote by Steve Herrod by the way. I was impressed with all the insights Steve gave in terms of upcoming products, brand new projects and even a couple tech previews. I am looking forward to the upcoming version of VMware View and a new project which I can’t disclose as the VMware NDA Police would again kill me. I am also looking forward to start using Zimbra.

Especially “Zimlets” seem to be really powerful. Zimlets are basically hook-ins for your email/colaboration tool. A good example would be an Oracle plugin. When an email for instance contains a PO number the PO number will appear as a link to the PO system. But not only a link, when hovering over the link a pop-up will appear with for instance the total amount for the PO and the approval status.

Other upcoming new features that were revealed are IO DRS, Memory Compression and a new View management interface. I recommend reading some of the other blog posts on this topic as there is a lot I can’t write about:

And by the way; Congrats Frank and Andrew Mitchell for becoming VCDX 029 and 030!

Definition of the advanced NFS options

An often asked question when implementing NFS based storage is what do these advanced settings represent you are recommending me to change?

VMware published a great KB article which describes these. For instance:

NFS.HeartbeatMaxFailures
The number of consecutive heartbeat requests that must fail before the server is marked as unavailable.

The KB article does not only explain the separate NFS settings but also how you can calculate how long it can take before ESX marks a NFS share as unavailable. Good stuff, definitely highly recommended!

Should I buy ThinPrint? Real-world numbers

Those doing planning might well be interested in these stats from a real-world ThinPrint deployment in respect of how well it compresses jobs.

We started by testing a job typical of the users; a PDF consisting of scanned black and white pages. He we measured the data passed on the network for each of ThinPrint’s compression settings.

Setting Job size (%) Quality
None 100 Original
Optimal 90 Near perfect
Maximum 58 Good; useable
Extreme 19 Medium; readable
No images Not tested

Pretty decent, we thought, for a test document that is all A4 images. Now to try a pilot.

One all VDI office has 63 users. All of them use Wyse terminals, so using the ThinPrint compression built in to VMware View is not an option. We wanted to test whether or not ThinPrint was worth buying. Of the 63, 40 use only ThinPrint printers. For them, their print jobs go from VM to the .print Engine for VMware View in the datacentre, to the Windows print server in the office. The others print direct from their VDI desktop hosted in the datacenter to the Windows print server in the office.

There are four printers, three HP A4 monochrome lasers and one Xerox A3 colour printer (with the colour drums removed…). Each printer is accessible via ThinPrint and directly. ThinPrint is set to ‘Optimum’ compression.

I dragged out the stats on the amount of print data transferred for each of six consecutive business days:

Day ThinPrint data (b) Uncompressed data (b)
1 26340958 234708630
2 67133657 121979299
3 113838547 189902846
4 46067764 145088982
5 42741516 155059692
6 55769733 172241368

Not that interesting in and of itself, unless you know how many jobs were sent by each method, but it gave me an idea of the degree of variability. So then I chose to look into day 6 a bit further.

Type Data (Kb) Jobs Avg. size (Kb/job)
Original job as listed in event viewer 1556467 277 5619
Uncompressed print data over network 168204 186 904
Compressed print data over network 54462 277 196
  Total: 463  

So over that day over a whole range of print jobs, the average ThinPrint job was 21% of the size of the normal job. Pretty good – and much better than the 90% we experienced with the single test document. This shows if you want to test its performance, use a real world selection of documents.

The real question is, if I switch all the office to ThinPrint, or abandon it altogether, what is my predicted print data for a day?

Type Jobs Avg. size (Kb/job) Predicted data (Kbits) Flat rate (Kbps)
Uncompressed 500 904 3617300 125
Compressed 500 197 786464 27

Hmmm. The amount of data transferred over the line would be equivalent to a constant background rate of 125Kbps. I know my print traffic is peaky, but QoS settings on the link will smooth that out. That’s just 6% of a 2Mbps line for 60 people. Hardly a killer. In fact, since we can only get 30 RDP sessions on a 4Mbps line, I will need 8Mbps of capacity for my 60 users, making the print traffic just 3% of my line.

What about the other features of .print Engine for VMware View? We pretty quickly had to abandon driver-free printing to get features such as double-sided printing and A3 to work, and none of the other features have been of any practical use to me. You might find the ability to limit the print traffic to a certain rate useful if you don’t have that level of control over your line.

At €23 per user, and my SDSL line at €200 per month, it would take me 19 years to recoup my investment in ThinPrint. I think I’ll pass, thanks…

Ian

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