Virtualfuture.info

Normally when multiple datacenters are created in Virtual Center it is because they located at different sites aka physical datacenters. In this case the administrator created a datacenter that spanned multiple physical locations, which isn’t a good idea.

That’s why he created a new datacenter and cluster at his own location for the hosts at that site, VMotioned all running VM’s to other hosts and set the host in maintenance mode, believing that he could VMotion the running VM’s to the new datacenter. Well it went a bit different than he thought: although Virtual Center wasn’t happy VMotioning the VM’s to the new datacenter (it gave a clear warning that in the new datacenter vSwitches might be missing) it gave an OK, but when the Finish button was clicked it failed all together stating that VMotioning between datacenters isn’t allowed. 

Ok this is what he eventually did: he disconnected the host from the original Datacenter\Cluster with all VM’s still running on that host and reconnected that host to the new Datacenter\Cluster. I must admit it was pretty bold to do but it all worked because no ip-addresses/names etc were altered in this process. Whether it is a supported method I really can’t say, the only thing I know it worked for him.

In my opinion it is better to have good design and stick to it because good designs are ment to be flexible, easy to maintain and easy to expand.

Here are 2 great articles of best practices for creating templates for virtual machines. I’m referring them here as my own bookmarks:

VM Template best practices (Windows)

VM Template best practices (Linux)

One thing I learned is that you already can create thin provisioned disks in VMware ESX 3.5:

vmkfstools -c 20G -d thin /vmfs/volumes/datastore/virtualmachine_name/virtualmachine_disk1.vmdk

Big thanks to lraikhman

So our application virtualization comparison chart seems to be very popular. We get a lot of positive responses, but one thing that we get a lot is the fact that we mention ThinApp has no central management for deploying the virtualized apps, and that it can easily be done with Active Directory. Although that is true, we still say that ThinApp has no central management for deploying the apps, just to compare it with other products that do come with a central deployment tool, like InstallFree or Microsoft App-V.

Okay, so how can you distribute ThinApp Applications? There a a lot of possibilities, I will explain 2: through Active Directory and with a login script. Read the rest of this entry »

User settings and profiles always make the design of a new Architecture with virtualisation products (are there still any others?) a lot more difficult. Users want to be able to save application preferences, favorites etc etc. and administrators want a good managed performance (network and servers). Due to the different ways to provide a workspace to users (SBC, VDI, Old fahioned deployment etc.), the way of moving user preferences with the users becomes more and more of an issue. Because profiles are becoming bigger and bigger, a roaming profile isn’t much of a solution anymore. So a new way of user profiling is needed, I’ve found three solid options.

Read the rest of this entry »

Now that the sessions from VMWorld 2008 are available online (for registered attendees), I thought I could share some of the good stuff with you. Here are some recommendations for implementing XenApp 4.5 on VMware. I’ve posted recommendations before, so there could be some overlap. Of course, not all recommendations may apply to your situation, but I find some of them very useful. These come from session VD2591: Lessons Learned While Deploying Citrix Presentation Server (XenApp) 4.5 in a Virtual Datacenter.   Read the rest of this entry »

Wow there’s a new buzz word in the IT world. Virtualization isn’t hot anymore, everybody knows what it does and everybody knows how to use it with the single products. And most of us know how to combine several virtualization products and create a super flexibel and redundant environment. Great but virtualization isn’t flashy anymore. So let’s give it a new name and call a combination of products Cloud Computing.

Question: What is so very different about Cloud Computing?

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Last week I’ve been testing with the new version of XenApp (Formerly known as Presentation Server). First thing that different from the Technical Preview was the ease of installation on a Windows Server 2008. All components (except for Sun Java) install automatically. Next thing that’s a big difference is the occurance of the Web Interface, Black, very Black and very good looking.

I’ve created a dual mode streaming site to be able to test the new Isolation 3.0 features. Best improvement is Read the rest of this entry »

We (Matthijs Haverink and I) have updated our application virtualization chart with the latest release of Citrix XenApp 5.0, Microsoft App-V and Xenocode 2008 SP1. We also changed Symantec Appstream in the chart by combining it with SVS pro, a more commonly used combination. Read the rest of this entry »

That Virtualization is going strong and still growing more and more mature are showing VMware and Microsoft. So during the past few days major changes happened on the licensing front:

VMWare joined Microsoft in their Microsoft Server Virtualization Validation Program Program (SVVP), this is great news because it makes virtualization even more attractive

and

Microsoft changed their License agreements for running their software in a virtualized environment and most surprisingly not only their own platform (Hyper-V) but others as well. Read all about the changes here.

Sure, you’ve read about the Update 2 troubles. VMWare made a huge mistake by releasing something with trial-code in it, and the impact can be huge when put into production but there’s what’s bugging me : the whole world is acting like the impact it has is catastrophic.

Virtualization.info started with the topic title ”VMWare mistake shuts down thousands of Virtual Infrastructures”, later on nuanced by “may shut down”. They also state that 95% of the Fortune 500 customers use VMWare and over 50% uses VMotion. Yeah, sure they do, but do you really think that administrators working at a Fortune 500 company think : “hey wow a new patch; it’s from VMWare so it’ll be good; let’s put it into production right now!” ?

Really, lots of people are acting like there are hundreds of thousands of virtual servers around the world that have been down and we should all stop using VMWare and switch to the “beautiful” Hyper-V or XenServer solution but: Read the rest of this entry »