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VMware and Microsoft are ramping up their virtualization games with relatively new releases. Scott Lowe compares and contrasts some of the major features in vSphere and Hyper-V R2.

Source: http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/datacenter/?p=1820

Microsoft was late to the virtualization game, but the company has made gains against its primary competitor in the virtualization marketplace, VMware. In recent months, both companies released major updates to their respective hypervisors: Microsoft’s Hyper-V R2 and VMware’s vSphere. In this look at the hypervisor products from both companies, I’ll compare and contrast some of the products’ more common features and capabilities. I do not, however, make recommendations about which product might be right for your organization.

Table A compares items in four editions of vSphere and three available editions of Hyper-V R2. Below the table, I explain each of the comparison items. (Product note: With the release of vSphere, VMware has released an Enterprise Plus edition of its hypervisor product. Enterprise Plus provides an expanded set of capabilities that were not present in older product versions. Customers have to upgrade from Enterprise to Enterprise Plus in order to obtain these capabilities.)

Table A

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Want to manage your VMware virtual environment on the go? Now there’s an app for that! VManage is an application developed to allow the IT administrator to view critical environment data about their virtual infrastructure as well as perform fundamental tasks such as VMotion’ing from anywhere at any time. Viewing basic performance data (more advanced data to come) is as easy as selecting a Virtual Machine or Host and examining the details. Simply add a Virtual Center server address, credentials and a VPN if necessary and that’s it. So if you’re an IT administrator who doesn’t spend every waking moment in front of your PC, this is the tool for you.

Environment Configuration Note:
The Virtual Center server by default exposes port 443 for the web service. This port will need to be available to the iPhone/iPod Touch in order for the VManage application to be able to interact with it. This can be achieved via a VPN or exposing the port to the web.

Application Configuration Note:
The iPhone/iPod Touch settings application needs to be set as follows …

server: https:///sdk                 **required**
domain: AD Domain Name    **optional**
username: AD User                   **required**
password: AD password          **required**

After the installation you wont get the vsphere client working on Windows 7, it installed fine but when I try and login to an esx server,you get an error:

Error Parsing the server “192.168.1.10″ “clients.xml” file Login will continue contact your system administrator

Clicking ok gives another error

The type initializer for “VirtualInfrastrcture.Utils.HttpWebRequestProxy” threw an exception

Clicking ok returns to the login dialogue.

UPDATE: Good News – This issue has now been resolved in VMware ESX/ESXi 4.0 Update 1 (U1).

So here is the solution;

http://www.techhead.co.uk/running-vmware-vsphere-client-on-windows-7

Here’s a possible workaround for this problem.

1. Obtain a copy of  System.dll from the link above.

2. Create a folder in the Windows 7 machine where the vSphere client is installed and copy the file from step 1 into this folder. For example, create the folder under the vSphere client launcher installation directory (+%ProgramFiles%\VMware\Infrastructure\Virtual Infrastructure Client\Launcher\Lib +).

3. In the vSphere client launcher directory, open the VpxClient.exe.config file in a text editor and add a <runtime> element and a <developmentMode> element as shown below. Save the file.

……………
</appSettings>
<runtime>
<developmentMode developerInstallation=”true”/>
</runtime>
</configuration>

3. Create a new ‘System’ variable called ‘DEVPATH’ and assign the following variable value:

C:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\Infrastructure\Virtual Infrastructure Client\Launcher\Lib

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Microsoft® Hyper-V™ Server 2008 R2 is a stand-alone product that provides a reliable and optimized virtualization solution enabling organizations to improve server utilization and reduce costs. With the addition of new features such as live migration and expanded processor and memory support for host systems, it allows organizations to consolidate workloads onto a single physical server and is a good solution for organizations who are consolidating servers as well as for development and test environments.

By having the ability to plug into existing IT infrastructures Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 enables companies to reduce costs, improve utilization and provision new servers. It allows IT professionals to leverage existing patching, provisioning, management and support tools and processes. IT Professionals can continue to leverage their individual skills and the collective knowledge of Microsoft tools, minimizing the learning curve to manage Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2. In addition, with Microsoft providing comprehensive support for Microsoft applications and heterogeneous guest operating systems support, customers can virtualize with confidence and peace of mind.

Note: This is a pre-release version of Microsoft® Hyper-V™ Server 2008 R2 and not intended to be used in a production environment.

Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 Release Candidate! (Free Live Migration/HA Anyone?)

The Virtualization team is pleased to announce the availability of the Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 Release Candidate for download. Hyper-V Server 2008 R2, our free standalone hypervisor, represents our continued commitment to providing high performance, hypervisor based virtualization for everyone, especially small and mid-market customers. This release underscores our customer focus by adding key new capabilities such as Live Migration and High Availability (and more.). The Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 Release Candidate is available here:

http://www.microsoft.com/hyper-v-server/en/us/default.aspx

Free Live Migration and High Availability? Really?

A couple weeks ago, Zane Adam first blogged the news that Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 would include Live Migration and High Availability at no charge. The response from our customers was "AWESOME!! When is the final release?" Understandably, the phone’s been ringing off the hook, my inbox has been on overdrive and some folks in the blogosphere have been trying to imply <cough, cough, FUD> that there are some strings attached. So, I wanted to take a moment to provide more details about the upcoming Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 release and free Live Migration & High Availability.

Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 Availability

When Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 goes gold and is released to manufacturing (RTM) the bits will be available as a free download here:

http://www.microsoft.com/hyper-v-server/en/us/default.aspx

Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 will be available worldwide in 11 languages. (continue reading…)

There’s hardly any point in covering the announcements of today. There are so many people blogging right now that no one will have the chance to keep up with reading. That’s why I decided not to write or copy any of the announcements. Of course I just might give my thoughts on the webcast this evening but that’s probably it… Anyway, I divided it up in two major sections “News” and “Previews” and within these sections VMware and of course “Bloggers Community”. I will keep updating this post, make sure to visit it again.

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Here’s a small how-to based on my experiences:

1) Uninstall VM tools from your VM

2) Shutdown the VM

If your VMs are based on SCSI drives (like mine were – because VMware recommends SCSI) and the operating systems are Windows XP, 2003 or earlier then you have to add the IDE driver to your VM before you shut it down in VMware.

Otherwise you will end up with a converted VM that starts up in Hyper-V with a blue screen of death (BSOD) and 0×0000007B – “Inaccessible Boot Device” error. This is due to the fact that your converted VM will have no Primary IDE Channel and Hyper-V will presume that your converted disk is IDE type and located on the Primary IDE Channel.

Doing a Windows Repair Install can fix the 0×7B Inaccessible Boot Device error – but it’s both time consuming and the result might not be good. (Believe me – I had to redo a migration of a SharePoint installation because a Windows Repair Install messed it up. Luckily I then came up with the solution described below instead).

Please note that adding a temporary IDE disk to your VM is not necessary with VMs running Windows Vista or Windows 2008 – they seem to detect the Primary IDE Channel during initial boot phase.

3) Add a new IDE disk drive to your VM: (any size will do)

Make sure that you select “Adapter: IDE 0 Device: 0” under “Virtual Device Node” while creating the new disk (otherwise you might end up with yet another SCSI disk)

4) Boot up your virtual machine with both drives connected and check that it detects your new IDE drive (along with a primary IDE channel and a disk device driver). You should be able to see the new drive as "not initialized" in Disk Management.

5) Power off your virtual machine and remove the newly created IDE disk from your VM (you can delete it from disk as well). Do not power on your VMware Machine again!

6) Now convert your VMDK file to VHD format using the newest Vmdk2Vhd utility (currently version 1.0.13) that can be downloaded from http://vmtoolkit.com.

7) You can now uninstall VMware Server and install Hyper-V + current Windows Updates on your host server

Create a new Virtual Machine in Hyper-V. Make sure you select “Use an existing virtual hard disk” and select the VHD file that you just created.

9) Power it on, Install “Integration Services” and reboot when prompted:

10) Assign the original IP address(es) to your new network card(s)

11) Check device manager

12) Do another reboot

13) Check that all your applications and services are running

14) Done!

Note: if you have Win2008 VM’s then it’s not necessary to add a temporary IDE disk during migration but you might want to copy the relevant KB949219 (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/949219) update package to your VM before converting it. Otherwise it will start up with three warnings in the Device Manager for “Microsoft VMBus Video Device”, “Microsoft VMBus HID Miniport” and “Microsoft VMBus Network Adapter” – hence you will have no network access. I worked around it by “burning” the KB949219 updates to an ISO file using “ISO recorder“ (http://isorecorder.alexfeinman.com) and mounting the ISO file to my VM.

First ESXi shell access;

How to get shell access to your VMWare ESXi server?
By default the VMWare ESXi server don’t offer shell access (through the menu).
But by doing the following, you will be able to access the shell (although its limited):

1. Hook up a screen and a keyboard to the VMWae ESXi server.
2. Press “Alt+F1″
3. Write “unsupported” and press Enter (if you screw up, and think you’ve typed something wrong,
you can use Ctrl+U to clear the input field).
4. Enter the root password, an voila, shell access.

Then enable ssh on ESXi 3.5

By default, ssh access is disabled on VMware ESXi 3.5, so how do i enable ssh on VMware ESXi 3.5?

1. Type “vi /etc/inetd.conf” and press “enter”.

2. Locate the line that starts with “#ssh     stream  tcp     nowait  root    /sbin/dropbearmulti…….”

3. Move the marker over the “#” and press “x”.

4. Press “Escape” and write “:wq”, then press “enter”.

5. Type “/sbin/services.sh restart” and press “Enter”. Note: If you are running ESXi 3.5 Update 2, the services.sh no longer restarts the inetd process. You will have to manually kill the inetd process, in order to restart it and enable ssh access without a reboot.  Type “ps | grep inetd” and press “enter”. You will then see something similiar to “1289 1289 busybox              inetd”. Then write “kill -HUP 1289″, and remember to write the number “ps | grep inetd” returns to you!

If you have been working with ESX for a while, you might remember VMKUSAGE on the MUI (the old ESX web interface), well it is finally back again. VMware released yesterday Update 4 for VC2.5 and ‘included’ a new plugin. It is not part of the normal install or in my case upgrade, and the install procedure might scare you away, but it is worth it!

If you want to use this, please check out this knowledge base article (http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1008296 ). If you are like me, upgrading your VC, make sure you stop your webaccess service before the upgrade, else you have to uninstall the service and start over again (see this kb article http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1008330 ). One more tip, if you are using SQL Express, read this KB article (http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1008329)

Well after you get it all working, you will see that on any host, resource pool or VM view you have a new tab (not on your datacenter for some silly reason).

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Before you begin, make sure that you do not have an active snapshot on the VM, extending a virtual disk with a snapshot will cause corrpution

Extend the boot volume of Windows Server 2003 Virtual Machine
To start, I have a Windows Server 2003 Virtual Machine that has a 5.3G disk allocated to it, I need to expand this disk to 10G.

Step 1: Power off the virtual machine that holds the boot volume that you want to extend.

Step 2: Make a backup copy of your virutal disk, this is optional but if you mess up don’t call me unless you’re willing to pay.

Step 3: From the service console, increase the size of the .dsk or .vmdk virtual disk file. This can also be accomplished through the Virtual Infrastructure Client if you are using VirtualCenter 2.x+.

[root@esx-test local]# ls -lah test.vmdk
-rw——- 1 root root 5.4G Jul 18 13:57 test.vmdk

Extend the virtual disk with vmkfstools. The input to the -X switch is the size that you want the disk file to be not the size you want to extend the disk file by .

[root@esx-test local]# vmkfstools -X 10G test.vmdk

View the new size of test.vmdk

[root@esx-test local]# ls -lah test.vmdk
-rw——- 1 root root 10G Jul 18 13:57 test.vmdk

Step 4: For this step you will need an additional Virtual Machine running Windows Server 2003. Power off the second Virtual Machine, and add the disk from the first Virtual Machine to it through the mui. Power up the second Virtual Machine and verify that the imported disk has unallocated space on it.

From the run menu type "diskpart.exe" to enter the command line utility to resize disk partitions in Windows Server 2003.

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First and foremost: this tuning list is my own experience and the experience of several users on the VMware forum . Your mileage may vary.

The goods:

• Virtual Infrastructure 3
• Windows 2003 Std (or Enterprise) Edition R2 (x86, not x64)
• Citrix Presentation Server 4.0 (yes, I know, the old one )

The tips:

• First this: it all depends on the applications used! Context switches is the key here…
• Use Windows 2003 , not Windows 2000
• Don’t P2V your servers, but use clean templates
• Make sure the correct HAL (single or multi) is installed in the virtual machine. Otherwise, your vCPU will spike.
• Always assign 1vCPU . If necessary, add a 2^nd vCPU. Do not use 4 vCPUs!
• Use 2 GB to start. Scale up to +-4 GB of vRAM if necessary
• Use 1 .vmdk for your system partition (C:\ or other remapped drive letter) and 1 separate .vmdk for your program files.
• Put the page file on the 2^nd .vmdk
• Important: disconnect any .iso file in your virtual CD-Rom
• Use roaming profiles and cleanup your profiles at logoff
• Disable sound for your published apps
• Install the UPH service (download it here )
• User sessions: for me, 30 users on a VM is the sweet spot. Do not expect to get as many users on it as on a physical box!
• Scale out, not up. A major advantage of VM is to clone/NewSID/sysprep existing servers and put them into your existing Citrix farm. Just stop & disable your IMA service , clean up your RMLocalDB (if you use enterprise) and NewSid the thing. Refer to this support article for more info.
• Use dual core or quad core systems. This because ESX will have more CPU to schedule its vCPUs on.
• Don’t ever use a 2 vCPU Citrix virtual machine in a 2 pCPU physical machine!
• Do not install the memory ballooning driver while installing the VMware Tools
• Do not use a complete installation Vmware tools : there is an issue with roaming profiles and the shared folders component. See my previous article for more info.
• Disable COM ports, hyperthreading, visual effects & use speedscreen technology where possible.
• Use snapshots when installing applications or patching your servers (yes! With VMware you can do this!). In case of disaster, you can still revert to the original working server without using backups. Make sure all snapshots are removed ASAP when finished!
• Always check that there are no snapshot leftovers (f.e. the infamous _VCB-BACKUP_ when using VCB)
• Don’t forget you can use DRS rules to run your citrix servers on separate physical hosts.
• Check out this vmworld 2006 presentation
• And last but not least: do not forget to read ESX’s (excellent) performance tuning white paper .

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Days ago, this announcement was made by Citrix:

XenServer, our enterprise virtual infrastructure platform is now free (including resource pooling and live relo), and we have announced Citrix Essentials for XenServer, and Citrix Essentials for Hyper-V as our virtualization management portfolio that offers a rich set of automated functions that drive the compatible virtualization layers beneath – the free Hyper-V hypervisor from Microsoft, and the free XenServer Enterprise virtual infrastructure platform from Citrix.  Finally, and most importanly, we announced a powerful go-to-market roadmap with Microsoft.

Response to our announcements has been extremely positive, from our partner Microsoft to our channel partners and resellers, and many many customers and users.  There are the expected nay-sayers too, but someone had to drink the only thing that you get free from our competitor – VMware koolaid.

That’s a pretty serious offering for free. Here’s a comparison chart they offer at their site:

Companies who are just now seriously looking into virtualization are going to be hard-pressed to pony up the cash VMWare is asking for their VI product when you can pretty much get the same functionality for free from Citrix. VMWare is going to have to do something in response to stay competitive, especially with the economy in the shape it’s in right now. I can’t wait to see what that will be.

VMware vCenter Converter can run on a wide variety of hardware and supports most commonly used versions of the Microsoft Windows and Linux* operating systems. With this robust, enterprise class migration tool you can:

• Quickly and reliably convert local and remote physical machines into virtual machines without any disruption or downtime.
• Complete multiple conversions simultaneously with a centralized management console and an intuitive conversion wizard.
• Convert other virtual machine formats such as Microsoft Virtual PC and Microsoft Virtual Server or backup images of physical machines such as Symantec Backup Exec System Recovery or Norton Ghost to VMware virtual machines.
• Restore VMware Consolidated Backup (VCB) images of virtual machines to running virtual machines.
• Clone and backup physical machines to virtual machines as part of your disaster recovery plan.

Download your copy here: https://www.vmware.com/download/converter/

*Linux P2V support is available for Standalone version only

I just saw a nice present in one of my RSS feeds:

1. ThinApp-Stencil- Objects for ThinApp
2. Build your Own-Stencil – Stand-alone objectsto create your own diagrams
3. VM-STencil – Objects that are related Virtual Machines
4. VMware-Stencil – General Objects for VMware
5. Products-Stencil – Diagrams and objects that are related to VMware products or technologies

Grab your own copy here: http://viops.vmware.com/home/docs/DOC-1346

In this three-part article series, Roland van der Kruk, a freelance consultant in The Netherlands, takes a look at the new features of VMware View 3, as well as best practices learned while doing a deployment for a customer. Part 1 provides information and insight on new features, Part 2 looks at Linked Clones, and Part 3 will look at special considerations and best practices for deployment.

Part 1 of 3 – An introduction to VMware View 3 features and best practices

http://www.brianmadden.com/blogs/guestbloggers/archive/2009/01/15/an-introduction-to-vmware-view-3-features-and-best-practices-part-1-of-3.aspx

Introduction

Early December 2008, VMware released their new product for the VDI market, VMware View 3.0. As a rather substantial update to the former version, VMware VDM 2.0, apparently the product name also had to undergo a change to underline the differences between the new product and its predecessor. In this article I will discuss the (new) features in View 3.0 and the way they work. I will first describe the components on which the product is based. Then I will focus on the different deployment types possible with View 3.0 and what happens during and after deploying different types of ‘desktop pools’.

My experience with the new product is mainly based on an implementation that I did for a customer, who had a specific use case to provide desktop operating systems to developers around the globe. I will sometimes refer to other use cases as there are quite a few, however perhaps the biggest question that everyone probably has will remain unanswered, as the technology that makes up VDI is still developing. Where we can speak of an accepted and well known technology like Citrix XenApp, VDI is not nearly there yet. The question of how VDI will result in better return on investment than desktop deployment methods being used for many years now is not clear. It all depends on use cases and things like high availability requirements and hardware cost. Financial differences and justifications for using VDI or a traditional desktop model are not discussed in this article.

Part 2 of 3 – Linked Clones

http://www.brianmadden.com/blogs/guestbloggers/archive/2009/01/18/an-introduction-to-vmware-view-3-part-2-of-3-linked-clones.aspx

Linked Clones

The big question to most people is probably: ‘What are linked clones and how do they work?’. Some of you may expect similar functionality to Citrix Provisioning Server where optimization in disk space can be significantly realized, and indeed VMware does somewhat the same, but with very different technology. Let’s see how VMware does it.

The essence of linked clones is Thin Provisioning; saving on expensive storage cost. Thin provisioning with View 3.0 can be realized using a “master virtual machine”, which is just a regular virtual machine that you create and then take a snapshot. That virtual machine will be used as the basis for rapid and thin OS deployment. Please notice that I mentioned a virtual machine “snapshot”, not a virtual machine “template”.

Part 3 of 3 – Special Considerations and Best Practices

http://www.brianmadden.com/blogs/guestbloggers/archive/2009/01/26/an-introduction-to-vmware-view-3-part-3-of-3-special-considerations-and-best-practices.aspx

High available, secure remote access

Unfortunately, a high available configuration to access VMware View while being outside the corporate network can be very different between organizations. I have been doing some research reading the VMware VDM 2 Load Balancing Guide to find out more about load balancing and secure remote access. In today’s enterprise environments, gateway devices like Citrix Netscaler/Access Gateway or Cisco ASA are more or less common practice. They are configured as a mandatory termination point for sessions originating from outside the corporate network connecting to resources inside the corporate network.

Jason Boche (http://www.boche.net/blog/ ) has posted a nice network port diagram for VI.

You can find the high res diagram over here: http://www.boche.net/blog/?p=655