Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

Desktop

Home Lab expansion…

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I’ve posted an overview of my homelab a while back and it changed a bit over the course of the last couple of months so I wanted to do an update of the article. Let me disclose first that Drobo was kind enough to provide me with a test-unit. Thanks Drobo!

My Workstation which runs Windows 7 with VMware Workstation on top of it. The most important change is the addition of an SSD drive. I ran two nice Seagate Cheetah 15k SAS drives in RAID-0 for a while, but started to get annoyed by the ticking sound these drives produce. It’s not a defect it is part of the mechanism, but very annoying background noise.

And another substantial change is the lab storage. I used to run on two Iomega IX4’s. Although these are very cool devices unfortunately they are “limited” to four drives and I was looking for some more capabilities to extend some of the tests I am conducting. I just received a brand new Drobo B800i with 6 x 7.2k Sata drives. Which means I have two slots left which I might just fill up with SSD for the sake of it.

  • Drobo B800i (new)
  • 6 x Western Digital 7.2k Drive

If I would give one tip though to the Drobo folks, make the dashboard available over http/https rather than a separate utility. Hopefully I can do some performance testing next week or the week after when I have some more time on my hands.

VMware View without HA?

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I was discussing something with one of my former colleagues a couple of days ago. He asked me what the impact was of running VMware View in an environment without HA.

To be honest I am not a View SME, but I do know a thing or two about HA/vSphere in general. So the first thing that I mentioned was that it wasn’t a good idea. Although VDI in general is all about density not running HA in these environments could lead to serious issues when a host fails.

Now, just imagine you have 80 Desktop VMs per host running and roughly 8 hosts in a DRS only cluster on NFS based storage. One of those hosts is isolated from the network…. what happens?

  1. User connection is dropped
  2. VMDK Lock times out
  3. User tries to reconnect
  4. Broker powers on the VM on a new host

Now that sounds great doesn’t it? Well yeah in a way it does, but what happens when the host is not isolated anymore?

Indeed, the VMs were still running. So basically you have a split brain scenario. The only way in the past to avoid this was to make sure you had HA enabled and had set HA to power off the VM.

But with vSphere 4 Update 2 a new mechanism has been introduced. I wanted to stress this, as some people have already made assumption that it is part of AAM/HA. It actually isn’t… The question for powering off the VM to recover from the split brain scenario is generated by “hostd” and answered by “vpxa”. In other words, with or without HA enabled ESX(i) will recover the split brain

Again, I am most definitely not a Desktop/View guy so I am wondering how the View experts out there look against disabling HA on your View Compute Cluster. (Note that on the Management Layer this should be enabled.)

VMware Desktop Reference Architecture Workload Simulator (RAWC) 1.1

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VMware has just released version 1.1 of the VMware Desktop Reference Architecture Workload Simulator (RAWC). As I know many of my readers are actively working on View projects I thought it might be of interest for you.

VMware Desktop Technical Marketing & TS Research Labs are jointly announcing the availability of VMware Desktop Reference Architecture Workload Simulator (RAWC) version 1.1.    With RAWC 1.1, Solution Providers can better anticipate and plan for infrastructure requirements to support successful VMware View deployments for Windows 7 Migration.

RAWC 1.1 now simulates user workloads in Windows 7 environments and can be used to validate VMware View designs to support Windows 7 Migrations.  RAWC 1.1 supports the following desktop applications in Windows 7 and Windows XP environments: Microsoft Office 2007, Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Internet Explorer, Windows Media Player, Java code compilation simulator, Adobe Acrobat, McAfee Virus Scan, and 7-Zip.

RAWC 1.1 also includes bug fixes and several enhancements in test run configurations, usability and user interface.  Please see RAWC 1.1 product documents for more details.

VMware partners can download RAWC 1.1 software and the product documents from VMware Partner Central:Sales Tools > Services IP.

VMware View 4.0.1

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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.

VMware Partner Exchange 2010

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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!