Virtual Architect

Tonight I joined the VMware Community Roundtable Podcast at Talkshoe. During the podcast I’ve been taking notes from the audio stream and the chat so I thought why not share these notes with you.

It was a very interesting podcast tonight with a lot of questions, which unfortunately could not be addressed all during this hour. The main guest of tonight was John Dodge (@VDIInfo on twitter), Services Architect at VMware.

VMware is expecting to get Offline desktop production ready in next release of VMware View (4.5).  In the next release “Offline Desktop” will be called “Local mode”.

The release of CVP (Client Virtualization Platform or Client Hypervisor) depends on the intel vPro processor, several vendors like Dell have adopted this. In the initial release the use of only one (1) vm will be implemented, in a later release it will be possible to run 2 (or more?) VM’s. CVP will not be in the next release, yet.

Future of View Portal is changing, the portal will be a place to get the view client. Connecting through the portal as it is now will be dropped as a future feature. Question I asked as a reaction on the future purpose of the view portal was if that means that using the internet cafe with the portal will not be possible anymore? In the chat the suggestion of a thinapped View Client was mentioned, the answer unfortunately did not make the podcast.

Linux virtual desktops are not on the roadmap just yet according to John Dodge.

Q: What is RTO profiles significance? A: The ideal desktop is persistent in behaviour but not in connection, so very significant. Make a non-persistent desktop look like a persistent desktop.

The other RTO products are going to be integrated into other VMware products.

My opinion is that profile virtualization is a absolute necessity when using large scale VDI (non persistent) desktops, at the moment I see combinations in the market with other products like Scense and RES Powerfuse.

The key factor for providing desktops today (New World Of Work/ “Het Nieuwe Werken”) is to have your desktop available anytime/anyplace/anywhere and device independent.

Carter Shanklin, VMware’s powershell “chief”, preached at the London VMUG and revealed there that View 4.5 will be manageable through PowerCLI.

Warren Ponder of VMware announced a maintenance release of VMware View: 4.0.1 at the Virtual Desktop Blog!

Next to being a maintenance release also a couple of new enhancements are introduced with this release. So bug-fixes and new stuff!

Overview of the new stuff:

• Single sign on support using PCoIP for 3rd party providers
• Thinprint support for PCoIP <- a major improvement!
• Localization support for View clients (language) <- to give it a boost in Europe and the Far east.
• Support for international keyboards

download View 4.0.1 here:
http://www.vmware.com/support/product-support/view/
The release notes can be found here:  http://www.vmware.com/support/pubs/view_pubs.html

A while ago VMware released Update 1 of vSphere 4 and some time before that it released vSphere 4. In my homelab I have one ESXi host and vCenter as a VM running on top of it. Upgrading from ESXi 3.5 to vSphere was quite easy using the special Host Upgrade Utility shipped with the vSphere client.

Upgrading from ESX4 to ESX4 Update 1 is something different. As I run ESXi from a USB flash device I did not feel like creating a new USB device with the latest version and importing all VM’s etc.

I wanted an upgrade without too much re-configuration. Normally I would use Update Manager to do this, but since it is installed on my vCenter server and that runs virtual and there is no other host to migrate it to, this is not an option.

I used a virtual clone of my vCenter server and took it to my laptop running with VMware workstation. Since the vCenter now left the ESXi host I was able to perform the upgrade of ESXi.

1. Shut down the vCenter Server;
2. Install VMware Standalone Converter somewhere, except on vCenter;
3. Using Standalone Converter export vCenter in Workstation format to an location outside ESXi;
4. Using VMware Workstation power up the exported vCenter server;
5. Reconfigure the Network (IP-address) of the workstation vCenter instance;
6. Create a baseline containing ESX (i) Update 1 and assign it to the Host;
7. Make sure all VM’s on the ESXi Host are powered off or suspended;
8. Connect to the Workstation instance of vCenter using the vSphere Client;
9. Scan & Remediate host using vCenter Update Manager

Today (Feb. 9th) the pre-registration opened for both VMworld 2010 in San Francisco (August/September) and VMworld Europe 2010 in Copenhagen (October).

You can register to be notified by email when registration becomes available.

go here

It is no secret VMware has its focus on cloud computing. VMware is presenting itself as the datacenter enabler for cloud services. A short while ago VMware acquired Springsource, a java development framework. Also Vmware changed it’s logo to get rid of the VM’s. These are all signs of VMware changing focus from hypervisor to services and applications around and on top of the hypervisor/cloud technologies they provide.

Today VMware announced it has bought Zimbra – an open source collaboration suite – from Yahoo!. In five year time over 55 million paid mailboxes.

More on Zimbra (Zimbrablog):
Zimbra Collaboration Suite has become a great open source platform because of the people who provide input and guidance each day.  Our recent launch of ZCS 6.0 was a direct result of community and customer feedback.  ZCS 6.0 includes powerful new collaboration features for enterprise users, new capabilities for system administrators, better mobile device management, and the ability to manage Twitter, Facebook and other social networking sites (find out what’s new in 6.0 here)…
Zimbra products were designed from the ground up with virtualization and the cloud in mind, with a modular architecture and APIs to allow distributed access to data and storage.

Steve Herrod CTO of VMware just posted an article on blogs.vmware.com/console where he explains why VMware bought Zimbra, in short it says: It helps Vmware to “Simplify IT” (as in their mission) and it expands the portfolio for Cloud partners. Simplify IT by presenting Virtual Appliances build for virtualization and the cloud. Expanding the portfolio for cloud partners to be albe to deliver SaaS (Software as a Service) on top of the IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service: vSphere) and a PaaS (Platform as a Service: Springsource).

New opportunities to come for sure, maybe competition for Google Apps/Wave?

A couple of days ago Eric Siebert started a poll on www.vmware-land.com to get the most awarded top 25 bloggers of 2009.

Eric Siebert’s site contains a list of 20 top bloggers and he is now expanding this list to 25 as more top blog sites appear in the virtualization era.

To my surprise I noticed I am also among the nominees and I am honored to be on the list between all these famous bloggers!

In the poll you can choose 10 of your favorite bloggers.

The poll will last until coming Friday, so do not longer hesitate an enter your votes now…

Click on this link to go directly to the voting page: vote.vsphere-land.com

My blog: Gerben’s Blog : http://blog.virtualarchitect.nl

Opening Viktor van den Berg

11th December 2009 the Official Dutch Vmware Usergroup (VMUG) took place in Nieuwegein’s Business Center (NBC). Viktor van den Berg started by opening the event with a welcome and an overview of the past events.

Video message Steve Herrod

At the end of Viktor’s welcome speech, there was a video message by Steve Herrod CTO of VMware in which Steve spoke a few words to the crowd.

Steve handed the the microphone over to Richard Gartshagen senior evangelist at VMware.

Keynote Richard Garsthagen

Richard Garsthagen started with the Keynote in which he explained VMwares change of the logo: virtualization is not the main focus anymore, but the management of it is.

Fault Tolerance originated from the record and replay feature developers at VMware first shipped with Workstation, FT will probably be expanded to be able to prevent or to do automatic fast recovers i.e. blue screens.

Richard also mentioned vCenter ConfigControl that is will become available in 2010. vCenter ConfigControl is an application that tracks changes in your virtual environment.
From the VMware site:

vCenter ConfigControl automatically discovers configurations, dependencies and compliance across your environment, including all virtual configuration elements. This intelligence puts historical and real-time data at your fingertips with powerful search, modeling and contextual visualization.

Last but not least Richard pointed us to the new VMware knowledge base TV (VMware KBTV) where you can watch video instructions on the KB topic…

and to the Dutch VMware webinar that is hosted every Friday morning at 10:00 http://vmware.xfl.nl a free Dutch spoken webinar.

Today Eric Sloof presented at the Dutch Vmware User Group Meeting.

Eric presented about the Virtualization EcoShell in which he gave a demo.

I was able to capture a large part of this demo (10 min).

Recently Update 1 for vSphere 4.0 came available. It seems there is a serious issue when upgrading from 4.0 to 4.0 Update 1 using Update Manager and where ESX-hosts make use of 3rd party Monitoring agents (in COS).

Upgrading to U1 using Update Manager with 3rd party management agents active may result in a failure by timing out and/or PSoD (Purple Screen of Death).  To recover from such a situation a fresh install of your host is necessary.

To avoid a fresh install disable the 3rd party management agents before upgrading and enable them afterwards.

Note that ESXi is not affected.

UPDATE (VMware Knowledge base blog):

A quick note: The problem with U1 is now known to be limited to HP Proliant systems and HP Insight Management agents are running. See the updated KB article.

Read more in VMware’s knowledgebase article KB 1016070

I noticed a small cosmetic thing while upgrading my homelab to vSphere Update1.

With the Update 1 release of vSphere, VMware also introduced her new logo into the applications area. Here’s a screenshot:

Before upgrade (vSphere 4.0):

After upgrade (vSphere 4.0 Update 1):

Another change with this update is the ability to run the client on Windows 7 out of the box without using workarounds!