VMware View online bootcamp
VMware is organizing a nine-part VMware View Bootcamp: every day a new video is published for you to view. At the end of this bootcamp, you will have a good understanding of the VMware View solution, how to roll it out and how to optimize View in your environment. A free e-book of all the presentations is included in this bootcamp series.
“We will lock the discussions for the video each night and move on to the next video.we will show you how to get started and successfully roll out and deploy your virtual desktops and applications. We will have sessions covering everything from storage and networking best practices to PCoIP tuning and optimizing your base image. We will also touch on VMware’s new security server for PCoIP and how you can take advantage of powershell to write your own scripts for View.”
Starting July 19th, a new video will be released daily:
Design Considerations Guidelines for VMware View – Overview
- Speaker – John Dodge, Sr. Manager PSO Services, VMware
- Overview of the technical considerations to keep in mind while you’re designing a View environment
vSphere 5 for Desktops license
Just within 2 days after my blogpost about Xendesktop says goodbye to vSphere on vSphere anymore with the new license model, VMware published a document which “introduces” the vSphere 5 for Desktops license. This is the exact same license as a vSphere 5 Enterprise Plus license, only there is no vRAM limit, you’re only allowed to use it for desktop VMs and it is priced per powered on VM.
We are happy again 
What happens to the example I used before:
I need to host 500 Windows 7 desktop VMs on a cluster. Each VM needs 2 GB of vRAM. Suppose I can host 7 VMs per core and I use servers with 2 CPUs with 6 cores each. Per server I’m able to host 2*6*7= 84 VMs. Because of the memory technologies used in vSphere, I don’t need 84 x 2GB = 168GB RAM in each server, but 128GB RAM should be enough (I know, it depends, but it’s an example and pretty close to what I see in real environments). Using 6 of these servers, I’ll be able to host 504 VMs. For this calculation, let’s use 500 VMs.
XenDesktop says goodbye to vSphere? (update 2)
In a lot of VDI deployments VMware vSphere is used as the hosting platform. There a couple of reasons that you can think of about why this is:
- The company uses VMware vSphere as a platform for virtualizing their servers. They don’t want to manage other types of hypervisors for the VDI environment, so they want vSphere for their VDI as well.
- VMware vSphere has multiple memory management technologies (TPS, ballooning, Memory compression) which work extremely well in an environment where the VM’s are very similar.
- In case of VMware View, there is no choice of hypervisor, vSphere is the only option.
In case of Xendesktop deployments (or Quest vWorkspace or other VDI vendors that supports vSphere), VMware vSphere is often used because of the first two reasons. This may change this year, unless VMware takes action.
UPDATE: I’ve just learned that VMware will release a Desktop edition of vSphere 5. This is very good news!
“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).” (source: Knudt Blog)
vSphere 5: What’s in Enterprise Plus?
One of the most popular posts on VirtualFuture.info is about licensing vSphere 4 and the difference vSphere 4 Enterprise and Enterprise Plus. Apparently, the information is hard to find or not simply explained somewhere. Now that vSphere 5 is announced, I might as well blog about this version as well.
First of all, the limit on the number of cores are gone. With vSphere 4 Enterprise you were limited to 6 cores per CPU socket. With Enterprise Plus, this limit was 12 cores per CPU socket. The new vSphere licensing model eliminates the restrictive physical entitlements of CPU cores and physical RAM per server, replacing them with a single virtualization-based entitlement of pooled virtual memory (vRAM). This will simplify the process of purchasing deploying and managing vSphere while facilitating the move to shared infrastructure as a service. The vSphere 5.0 licensing model is per processor (CPU) with pooled vRAM entitlements.
The vRAM licenses come in a number of flavors:
Iomega IX4-200D review
This is the third post in the SMB/LAB NAS review. This review compares the following products on features and performance:
- Cisco NSS324
- Iomega IX4-200d
- Netgear ReadyNAS Ultra 6
- QNAP TS-859U-RP+
- Synology RS1511+
Today I describe my experiences with the Iomega IX4-200D. It was a pretty wanted device among virtualization fanatics somehow. Iomega, part of the EMC legacy these days, has come up with a couple of different 4-bay NAS devices.
One of the strong points of the Iomega is that it dynamically allocates space for iSCSI LUN’s, NFS shares, AFP shares, SMB shares; you don’t have to worry about that at all. Another unique feature is the Bluetooth upload (additional usb Bluetooth dongle needed). It is a bit of an outdated feature when you ask me; every device these days has wifi, but nevertheless a unique feature. … Continue Reading
