As organizations find their server infrastructures become mostly virtualized and start virtualizing their desktops, they come to realize that vSphere alone is not enough to manage and troubleshoot this environment.  That's why you see so many ISVs offering solutions in this space, and why VMware has finally jumped into the fray with vCenter Operations.  I've been a big fan of vCOps ever since its release earlier this year.  It does a great job of boiling down all the available data points into an easy to understand format, while still providing the ability to quickly drill down during a performance problem.

Xangati is another vendor in this space that I find really impressive.  They are taking a different approach.  Their approach is to not necessarily boil everything down to über-simplicity, but to give you a more holistic vision of the entire environment, along with all the relevant data points.  They're doing this because of the inherent complexity of a virtualized infrastructure.  There are many moving parts that are all interrelated and constantly changing, and a hiccup in one subsystem can have major ramifications in another system.  They call this the "Performance Ripple Effect" (a term I found very interesting).

With their new release this week, they also now can look inside of the Windows guests using WMI and the PCoIP communications within VMware View thanks to their new partnership with Teradici.

If you have a medium or larger VMware environment, I'd highly recommend taking a look at both products.  Both offer free trial periods and can be really useful if you already have a performance problem you'd like to dig into. 

If you hadn't noticed, VMware announced vSphere 5 on 7/12.  The announcement was well handled and I enjoyed watching the first hour.  The follow-up sessions weren't working in my browser, so I wasn't able to attend any of those, but I ended up spending a lot of time on Twitter and VMware's sites looking into the new features and licenses.

There are two main topics I want to cover.  First I'll cover the new licensing scheme for vSphere 5, which has become a very hot topic of criticism for VMware.  Then I'll talk about some of the new features of this release.

Licensing

As part of the upgrade to vSphere5, customers will need to figure out a new licensing scheme.  A change in the licensing shouldn't come as a surprise, since core and processor speeds have taken out a major chunk of VMware's revenue stream from their core product, not to mention VMware's history of changing licensing with every release.

The new scheme continues the tradition of one license per socket, but now allows for unlimited cores in every edition and a new memory cap.  It's a lot more complicated than that though.  The cap is not for the amount of physical RAM in the host, but it's a cap on a new construct they call vRAM.  vRAM is the amount of RAM assigned collectively to the virtual machines.  The licenses will combine their vRAM caps at the vCenter level (or multiple vCenters when using Linked Mode) to create a pool that all VMs in the infrastructure can pull from.  One caveat is that different editions of vSphere (Standard, Enterprise and Enterprise Plus) will create different pools.  When architecting infrastructures, you'll need to now consider not only the number of sockets in all the hosts, but also the total amount of RAM utilized by all the VMs.

The vRAM caps layout like this:

Essentials, Essentials Plus & Standard - 24GB
Enterprise - 32GB
Enterprise Plus - 48GB

This cap ignited a fire storm on twitter, blogs, email lists and even the private vExpert forum over at the VMware Communities. The root of this storm is what appears to be an increase in licensing for larger environments.

I'm guilty of contributing to this storm.  But as a good community member, I wanted to back up my comments, so I started contacting my customers to get a handle on what the licensing changes will mean to them.  Based on my results, this will be problem for larger environments, but many of my customers don't fall into this category.  Working with real world numbers and theoretical numbers it looks like the vRAM cap based licensing will increase environments using 196GB or greater per host, environments with a large cluster of 128GB or greater per host or environments heavily overcommitted.  Of the customers I've pinged, only one of them is affected.  But I do have customers that are building clusters right now with hosts of 196GB, and this will be a concern for them.

My concerns with this change have lessened, but have not been eliminated.  The advantages of scaling up the hosts (the exact solution Cisco is betting on for UCS extended memory servers) has less advantage that it did in vSphere 4. The costs may still make sense to scale up a smaller number of hosts as opposed to buying additional hosts for a scale out solution, but those costs are way to variable for me to swing at right now.  The burden on partners like myself will be greater now to architect the number of hosts/CPUs and VMware licenses to create the cheapest solution based on the known facts.  In some cases, it may actually make sense to upgrade to Enterprise Plus to gain the higher vRAM cap. It is also a good push to minimize the RAM each VM is allocated.  If you're worried about having to buy additional licenses, I'd start my reducing the RAM allocation of your VMs first (VMware will happily talk to you about CapacityIQ).  An interesting new PowerShell script has been created to help analyze your situation.  Finally, don't be surprised if us partners become more pushy to do a capacity plan before making recommendations. :)

VMware is clearly making a push to more of a cloud mentality for it's licensing ("utility" computing in VMware's words).  I just don't think VMware's general customers are ready to manage their envrionment in that way.  I honestly don't have many issues with licensing this way, but it's hard to wrap your mind around it and the vRAM caps are most definitely too low.  It also completely underminds the overcommitment advantages VMware has touted as one of their biggest advantages over the "good enough" club (Microsoft Hyper-V and Citrix XenServer).

My final thought on licensing (for this post at least) is to point out one big irony.  Back when vSphere 4 was released, a firestorm was created due to VMware's planned elimination of the Enterprise tier.  They introduced the Advanced tier, but it wasn't enough to justify the huge jump in cost/features that Enterprise filled.  Customers and partners both screamed and convinced VMware to keep the Enterprise tier.  The irony: Advanced has been removed in vSphere 5 and those licenses will be converted to Enterprise.

New Features

Now for the good news:  vSphere 5 introduces a ton of great new features (another expectation we have from VMware during each major release).  Here's a quick rundown of my favorites:

• A vSphere Desktop edition - This was quietly added on the partner SKU list for non-View VDI implementations.  This provides a low cost hypervisor for XenDesktop implementations (a fairly common occurance).
• Storage DRS - Provides IOPS latency and disk space balancing across a grouping of datastores.
• vCenter Server Applicance - The long awaited Linux based vCenter Server.  It is delivered as an OVF and can quickly be brought online using an embedded database or an external DB2 or Oracle database.  It can also be integrated into AD.  It's not 100% feature parity with the Windows install, but a much welcomed step in the right direction.
• vSphere web client - Ability to access vSphere functionality from a web browser without installing the full vSphere client.  Though it is not 100% feature parity with the .NET vSphere client, it will be a great alternative when needing to complete a quick task while at a machine that doesn't have the client already installed.
• HA rewrite - Changes have been made to the HA product that eliminates the traditional primary/secondary issues.  They have also made enhancements to improve reliability and easier setup.
• Auto Deploy - Using PXE, you can boot your hosts across the network and apply configurations and host profiles to customize the host.
• VMFS 5 - A non-impactive upgrade (remember VMFS2->VMFS3?) will provide improved performance.  You can also create VMFS volumes greater than 2TB - 512 bytes.
• VM version 8 -The latest version of the VM hardware adds USB 3.0 and 3D graphics support.
• VAAI Thin Provisioning - More closely integrates thin provisioning to the array itself.

In part one of this three part series, I covered the first five items I have found to help make VDI deployments successful.  Now let’s cover the final four items:

1. Plan for future growth.  Don’t spend all the money up front.  Design the infrastructure for growth and budget for cyclical upgrades.  Perhaps you skimp on the storage during the pilot, but set aside money in subsequent quarters for additional drives/shelves.  Leave room for additional RAM in the hosts and set aside money to purchase that RAM later.  You will never know for sure where all the bottlenecks are during the design phase, so having a quarterly upgrade budget will allow for easier resolution of unexpected bottlenecks.
2. Don’t expect the solution to be perfect on day one.  Of course we will all strive for it, but prepare for a rocky road to start out with.  Hope for the best, but expect the worst.  How will you handle grumpy accountants?  What is the best approach for the doctors who don’t feel like they need to comply?  Do you plan to teach the customer service representatives all about their new environment before you even turn it over to them?  Secondarily, budget or prepay for your consultant to come back on site during or after the launch.  This way you can have your (hopefully trusted) consultant available to help with any odd issues that may pop up.  My sales team will often pitch a block of hours to our customers during the presales phase for this specific purpose.  If all goes well, our customers can use this prepaid time to do a six month review of the implementation, help design the next phase, clean up group policy, or help with something else totally unrelated to the VDI environment.
3. Manage your users as closely as you manage your infrastructure.  Train them ahead of time on any changes they’ll need to endure.  Be ready to have technical feet on the floors when they go live on the new system and make sure those feet carry a smile along with them.  Try and utilize superusers in each department to augment the technical staff.  These people will best understand the intersection of business process and technical infrastructure and will be more trusted by the end users.
4. Ask your consultant ahead of time what you can do to prepare your current environment to make the implementation go smoothly.  If you can predefine all the IPs you need before hand, you’ll save valuable time that will greatly benefit everyone later.  I have a document I have developed over the last couple of years that details out exactly what will need to be done to their existing environment so I don’t have to deal with it when I get on site.  I simply make sure the document gets into their hands a week before the project starts and we can start right away with installing the VDI components.

In the final post of this series, I’ll cover a few things I’ve found that can severely harm a VDI project.

I have recently wrapped up my most successful View deployment yet.  As I look back on the project and reflect on its success, I found this blog post writing itself.  In fact, it wrote itself so well, I plan on breaking it up into three different parts.  

Here are the first five items I have found to be critical success factors I in this and several other projects I consider successful:

1. Trust your consultants.  Keep them on board and informed through the entire process.  Make sure they understand both IT’s goals and the business’s goals.
2. Deliver a complete infrastructure.  It doesn’t have to be completely greenfield, but it should be well planned and completely integrated.  Duct tape should not be taken out of the toolbox for this project.
3. Run a complete and thorough proof of concept and pilot.  Nothing beats running the proposed infrastructure for real.  You might find it won’t work and have to throw away all the time and money, but that’s better than building the entire environment and have to make it work due to the size of the investment.  This also helps you to see around all the vendor half-truths and smokescreens and get a true appreciation of the capabilities of each of the products in the solution.
4. Don’t mold VDI into your current processes, take a fresh approach to both and design and deliver them as a single package. This includes both business and IT processes.  If you can, introduce it along with another major process disrupter.  If you’re introducing a new CRM package that completely changes the way the organization will manage its data, introduce your new VDI processes at the same time.  One is bound to fail if you try to retrain your users twice, so why not completely turn them upside down and only train them once?
5. Completely understand your infrastructure.  A consultant may have designed and built most of your solution, but you need to support it.  Learn all you can from the consultant while you can.  Attach to their hip and don’t allow yourself to be distracted.  Ask where the weak spots are and where the bottlenecks will be.  If you develop a good rapport with the engineer, you’ll learn stuff that the pre-sales team won’t give up easily.  This will lead us into the next tip, but you’ll have to wait for the next post.

After about one week of playing with the lab gear EMC has loaned us to use for the upcoming VMUG, I’m ready to share my first impressions.

First off, let me say that these drives deliver on the promise the SSD drives offer.  They are FAST.

Generally, I’m seeing an XP template deploy in ~2 min (template is a thin-provisioned 10GB hard drive that is ~2GB on disk).  Windows 2003 templates (10GB thin provisioned HDD, ~4GB on disk) are deploying anywhere between 2 and 20 min depending on how many I’m deploying at once.  The average is around 8 min.

Boot times are even more impressive.  Windows 2003 VMs are powering on in 20-50 seconds, while Windows XP VMs are coming up in about 15 seconds (or less).  This is the time between the completion of the vCenter “Power on Virtual Machine” task and the Ctl-Alt-Del prompt.  There have been several times when I don’t even see the BIOS screen or the Loading Windows screen because they boot faster than the VM console can refresh.  This obviously has huge implications for VDI or DR environments that require tens, hundreds or even thousands of machines to power up in a short timeframe.

We’ve done some rough IOMeter testing as well.  I’m not ready to talk specific numbers, but generally we’re seeing almost 4x the IOPS on SSD disks than on 15k disks in the same array.  Latency increases from sub-millisecond times on the EFDs to tens of milliseconds on the 15k drives.

Overall, very impressive.  Of course, the EMC engineer that was helping us setup the arrays thought we should’ve seen better results.  I’d say good enough for now.

For those of you in Omaha and surrounding areas, I'd like to you to mark off March 24, 2010 on your calendars. 

My company is teaming up with CoSentry and the Omaha-Area VMUG team to sponsor the next VMUG meeting on that day and I'm currently in the heavy planning and implementation phases for it.  It's going to be a great one, and possibly the biggest one yet for the Omaha VMUG.  We're working on providing hands-on labs, presentations, architecting/whiteboarding sessions and plenty of networking opportunities.  We'll also have lots of great Engineering talent available to answer questions.

It's difficult and rewarding work, which is hard to balance with lots of new opportunities popping up this year, but it's going to be totally awesome for everyone.

The VMUGs are intended to be technical meeting grounds for the VMware user community, not a place for sales pitches.  We respect that mantra and are doing it to be a contributing member of the VMware community in Omaha, not to sell you stuff. 

Please try and make it.  Keep an eye out on the VMUG Event Page or let me know for more details as they become available.  I look forward to seeing you there (even if you work for a competitor)!

Oh...and there'll be free food and prizes to give away.

Well, today was the big day that all of us with VMware NDAs plastered all over our cube walls have been waiting for: The official launch of VMware vSphere 4 (and the lifting of a heavy gag order).

There has been much going on today between the regular line up of expected blog posts and Twitter feeds going off faster than I can read.  It all started off at about 11:30 pm Central Time last night when Twitter started going crazy and VMware's site was updated.  The last 24 hours has seen lots of pent up writing and screenshots dumped all over the Internet by people who have spent a lot more time with vSphere betas than I have.  Therefore, I will not only link to the best information, rather than recreate it, but I will rely heavily on linking to link compilations that other trusted bloggers have created.

Condensed version of the press release:
http://blogs.vmware.com/vmtn/2009/04/introducing-vmware-vsphere-4-the-industrys-first-cloud-operating-system.html

I'm assuming most of the people who are going to find value out of this post will not be perusing the regular blogs, so I'm going to start with the basics:

New licensing and pricing structure

Instead of the old three tier pricing of VI3, vSphere now has six price/feature tiers (two of which are targeted at the SMB market).

The details are here:
http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/vsphere_pricing.pdf

Edition comparison chart:
http://www.vmware.com/products/vsphere/buy/editions_comparison.html

Jason Boche notes some specific observations on the new licensing:
http://www.boche.net/blog/index.php/2009/04/21/vsphere-licensing-notables/

New features

Particular notables from my perspective: 

What's new overview:
http://www.vmware.com/products/vsphere/upgrade-center/overview.html#whatsnew

Extensive listing of features (old and new) and related editions:
http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/key_features_vsphere.pdf

Again to Jason Boche for a series of screen shots of some updated and new features:
http://www.boche.net/blog/index.php/2009/04/20/a-random-collection-of-whats-new-vsphere-eye-candy/

Learn more

http://blogs.vmware.com/vmtn/2009/04/vmware-vsphere-resources-and-webcasts.html

http://vmetc.com/2009/04/21/vsphere-announced-now-what-for-vmware-customers/

http://www.mikedipetrillo.com/mikedvirtualization/2009/04/vmware-launches-vsphere.html

Performance notables:
http://www.ntpro.nl/blog/archives/1075-VMware-vSphereTM-4-Sets-New-Records-in-Virtualization-Performance.html

A bit of everything (the relinking links)

http://www.yellow-bricks.com/2009/04/21/vsphere-linkage/

http://vmware-land.com/vSphere_Links.html

Upgrade process

VMware has done a pretty good job providing information to enable customers to upgrade.  I will add that you should immediately go out to VMware's licensing portal and make sure you can log in.  Then validate the data they have is accurate and complete, including SnS.

Upgrade advisor:
http://www.vmware.com/products/vsphere/upgrade-center/advisor/

Upgrade prereqs:
http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/vsphere-migration-prerequisites-checklist.pdf

Hardware compatibility (note that vSphere is x64 only):
http://www.vmware.com/resources/compatibility/search.php

I'm sure there's more, so I may add to this list, but this will keep you busy for awhile!