VIRTUALBOY BLOG
Short notice I know, but a number of places have come available on this VDI course which may be of interest to some of you in the UK.
44CO181 - Desktop Optimisation: Implementing a VDI Infrastructure with Microsoft & Citrix Summary:
Join us for this 2 Day VDI Instructor led course with supporting Hands on Labs.
Prerequisites:
IT Professionals who have experience in virtualization technologies, but are not familiar with the construction of VDI based solutions
Objectives:
Agenda:
The course if set to run over 2 days, is instructor led, and includes hands on labs. It’s in Wokingham, near Reading, and is priced at £400 for the 2 days. Not bad, considering you’ll get exposure to both Microsoft stuff, and Citrix stuff, and understand how they all fit together.
If you’re interested, you can register here.
Firstly, apologies for the short notice on some of these sessions – the email with their details literally landed in my inbox this morning! Here’s everything you need in terms of information, and don’t forget, if you can’t make the session, register anyway, and you’ll be made aware of when the recording is online so you can watch it at a later date.
MGT80PAL: Implementing System Center Essentials 2010 Presented by: Prajyot Saran 24th June 2010 – 6pm GMT Level: 200
This session will provide the sales positioning of System Center Essentials 2010, as well as demonstrate setup of the SCE 2010 server and initial configuration of the software updates, agent monitoring, and reporting functionality. This is a recommended pre-requisite for selling SCE 2010.
Topics Include:
For me personally, if you’ve never seen SCE in action, and are just keen to understand the end to end story, understand the key functionality it provides, and see some of it in action, this could be a very valuable hour of your time.
If you are interested, you can register here.
MGT81PAL: How to Manage Servers in Midsized Businesses Presented by: Birojit Nath; Vikas Madan 29th June 2010 – 6pm GMT Level: 200
Whether those servers are physical or virtual, midsized businesses need similar capabilities as enterprise management but in an easy-to-use, unified toolset. System Center Essentials (SCE) 2010 brings together monitoring, deployment and virtual management technologies from the System Center enterprise products into a single console that is designed for midsized businesses with 50-500 PCs and up to 50 servers. In this session, we will look at monitoring those physical and virtual servers for health, deploying new servers and even migrating older physical servers to virtual for easier management.
Topics include:
I’m almost tempted to treat this like a part 2, following on from the introductory session on the 24th June, as this particular session goes that little bit deeper, into the specifics of managing key workloads like Exchange, SharePoint, and Virtual Machines. It’s also starting to introduce you to concepts like overrides, which can be very useful, trust me! Distributed Applications are also a very cool way of visualising a set of key related pieces of an infrastructure, and allow you to roll up monitoring to a more relevant, simplified level.
MGT88PAL: Understanding How Citrix Extends the Microsoft System Center Desktop Management Solution Presented by: Sean Donahue, Barry Flanagan 29th June 2010 – 8pm GMT Level: 200
This session will guide the attendees through the new integration features that are being developed by Citrix on top of multiple System Center products including the XenApp Connector for Configuration Manager that allows the System Center Admin to deliver and manage applications to the XenApp farm. Barry will also demonstrate the integration work of XenApp delivering App-V packages through Receiver and Self Service provisioning with Dazzle.
We’re seeing more and more integration with Citrix technologies now, with improvements made on almost a daily basis., which is great to see as it really does help to centralise different parts of the infrastructure. XenApp now integrates with System Center Configuration Manager, which means the SCCM, who’s in change of delivery of OS’s, patches, applications and more, can now better integrate with the Citrix technologies, which may have been, traditionally, the ‘Citrix guy’s’ remit. They’ll also talk about the inclusion of App-V components within the Citrix receiver, enabling App-V applications to be deployed more effectively with XenApp, and thus benefit from some of the ways users can access applications with Citrix, through interfaces like Dazzle.
Hat-tip to Clive for spotting this one.
A few months back, I blogged about the release of a number of RDS related resources, whether it’s the improvements in RDP7, or sizing guidance for your session hosts, but what about sizing VDI deployments? How do we accurately capacity plan for the hosts to hold virtual desktops? Well, this guide is something you may just find useful.
For those of you not in the know…
The Remote Desktop Virtualization Host (RD Virtualization Host) role service lets multiple concurrent users run Windows-based applications on a remote virtual machine running Windows client operating systems. This white paper is intended as a guide for capacity planning of RD Virtualization Host in Windows Server 2008 R2. It describes the most relevant factors that influence the capacity of a given deployment, methodologies to evaluate capacity for specific deployments, and a set of experimental results for different combinations of usage scenarios and hardware configurations
As you can see from the table of contents below, there are a number of aspects covered, in a good amount of detail, and should give you more than enough information to get going:
Lots of bedtime reading there!
As hardware increases in scale, and new capabilities, such as Dynamic Memory, are introduced into Hyper-V R2 SP1, more and more customers are going to start to encroach on the supported limits of Hyper-V cluster nodes. As of May 2010, those supported limits stood at 64 VMs per cluster node, up to a total of 15+1 nodes, giving a total of 960 VMs. This contrasts considerably with the 384 VMs per non-clustered host, yet will still be more than enough headroom for most customers, however, in a recent announcement at TechEd 2010, we’ve decided to increase the limits on the cluster nodes. The increase is actually pretty considerable too, helping customers to scale to much greater levels, especially on smaller clusters, assuming they have resource in their underlying hardware!
So, in a nutshell, we now support 1000 VMs per cluster, providing you don’t exceed the 384 VMs per node limit, which which will still be enforced. In tabular form:
Number of Nodes in Cluster
Max Number of VMs per Node
Max # VMs in Cluster
2 Nodes (1 active + 1 failover)
384
3 Nodes (2 active + 1 failover)
768
4 Nodes (3 active + 1 failover)
333
1000
5 Nodes (4 active + 1 failover)
250
6 Nodes (5 active + 1 failover)
200
7 Nodes (6 active + 1 failover)
166
8 Nodes (7 active + 1 failover)
142
9 Nodes (8 active + 1 failover)
125
10 Nodes (9 active + 1 failover)
111
11 Nodes (10 active + 1 failover)
100
12 Nodes (11 active + 1 failover)
90
13 Nodes (12 active + 1 failover)
83
14 Nodes (13 active + 1 failover)
76
15 Nodes (14 active + 1 failover)
71
16 Nodes (15 active + 1 failover)
66
and from TechNet:
Component
Maximum
Notes
Nodes per cluster
16
Consider the number of nodes you want to reserve for failover, as well as maintenance tasks such as applying updates. We recommend that you plan for enough resources to allow for 1 node to be reserved for failover, which means it remains idle until another node is failed over to it. (This is sometimes referred to as a passive node.) You can increase this number if you want to reserve additional nodes. There is no recommended ratio or multiplier of reserved nodes to active nodes; the only specific requirement is that the total number of nodes in a cluster cannot exceed the maximum of 16.
Running virtual machines per cluster and per node
1,000 per cluster, with a maximum of 384 on any one node
Several factors can affect the real number of virtual machines that can be run at the same time on one node, such as:
· Amount of physical memory being used by each virtual machine.
· Networking and storage bandwidth.
· Number of disk spindles, which affects disk I/O performance.
Obviously many of you will look at that and say “We don’t leave 1 node free for ‘failover’'” whereas some of you will always do this, to ensure there’s enough resource for failing over VMs in the event of an issue. Now, I’m not going to say that you absolutely have to have a +1 node, but it is best practice nonetheless and something that should be considered in mission-critical deployments. So, looking at the table, even on a 4 node cluster (3+1), you can hit the big 1000, which shows huge scalability and consolidation. If you went from 1000 servers, down to 4, that would be a % saving of over 99% (assuming my aging maths is correct there). I’m going to say something now, and you should listen carefully.
Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.
If you’re going to run that many eggs, on so few baskets, you’re going to have to ensure that the underlying infrastructure is rock solid and extremely well capacity planned/architected. From networking requirements (a LOT of NICs would be needed in those hosts I imagine!) through to storage (how much I/O!?), and memory (DM will help!) through to CPU (8-12 core will help!), every little decision could be amplified up to 333 times, so you have to nail it with detailed and thorough planning and comprehensive testing,
Perhaps an area where you’re more likely to hit this limit, is when virtualising desktops, rather than servers. In most organisations, the number of desktops typically outweighs the number of servers, so hitting the previous limits was much more achievable, so this gives the organisation who happened to be creeping closer, a bit of breathing room.
If you’re a Microsoft Partner, and you’re interested in learning more about the recently released System Center Data Protection Manager 2010, or System Center Essentials 2010, here’s a couple of webcasts that you may want to check out:
MGT77PAL: Technical Introduction to System Center Data Protection Manager 2010 Presented by: Rahul Jacob 15th June 2010 – 6pm GMT System Center Data Protection Manager 2010 provides new backup and recovery capabilities at a low cost. Because of the significant new capabilities in DPM, it is highly important that the field, partners and customers are aware of the various solutions and opportunities we have with DPM 2010. This session will help you get started with easy setup and configuration.
Register Here
MGT78PAL: Application Workloads and DPM - Better Together Presented by: Rahul Jacob 17th June 2010 – 6pm GMT Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager (DPM) is designed for IT generalists and uses wizards and workflows to help ensure that you can protect your Exchange, SQL and SharePoint data without any advanced degree of storage and backup knowledge. This session will help small and medium business IT administrators plan backups, recoveries and plan for further Disaster Recoveries. The solutions will enable you to take advantage of Exchange 2010 and DPM 2010.
MGT79PAL: Technical Introduction to System Center Essentials 2010 Presented by: Ashok Kumar G 22nd June 2010 – 6pm GMT System Center Essentials 2010 has now hit RTM, so it is important that the Microsoft field and our partners who focus on midsized businesses with less than 50 Servers and 500 clients, learn about the value of this new offering for physical and virtualization management. This session will help you get started with easy setup and configuration. Come see it first, and get ready when your customers ask you about it. Topics include: SCE 2010 Overview, Architecture, Demo, Market challenges, Solution, Licensing
If you’re interested in understanding more about the sheer choice you have in front of you for the future of desktops, this handy guide could come in useful. It covers a variety of topics, from ‘What is Desktop Virtualisation’, through to ‘Thinking about your Organisation’s requirements’, and also helps you to ‘choose between the options’. You can use the controls in the bottom-right corner of the screen to create a PDF if you want to take the content offline.
For those of you who caught my Dynamic Memory post a couple of days back, and are desperate for more information, you can actually watch, online, the session delivered by Ben Armstrong, Senior Program Manager Lead (and Dynamic Memory owner!), focusing on explaining Dynamic Memory in depth.
The session, which runs for just under 80 minutes, delves into a number of different areas of Dynamic Memory, from why’s it required, to how it works, so if you’re curious about it, it’s definitely worth a watch. If you head on over to the TechEd Online page, you can actually download it, for offline usage.
For those of you, like me, who aren’t lucky enough to travel over to New Orleans for TechEd, you’re pretty much restricted to catching up on the gossip via blogs, and news feeds. Whilst this is fine for some, there’s nothing quite like seeing the technology for yourself. It’s good news therefore, that the keynotes are being made available, on the web, on Demand, for you to stream, or download so you can hear first hand, Bob Muglia, the President of our Server & Tools business, talk about Dynamic IT, Cloud and more. If that’s not enough, you’ll also see a selection of speakers from Microsoft show you, live, some of the currently available, and future technologies, that can help you to transform your infrastructure. For those of you who don’t want to watch it, or perhaps don’t have time to watch it all, here’s my highlights…
3m 50s to 10m 30s – Visual Studio Lab Management & System Center Integration
I’m not a dev. Far from it! Sure I know the odd bit of PowerShell (Get-VM) but for those of you who do work in that world, having process around the development, testing, and rollout of an application or workload can be difficult, and expensive. Having watched this demo in action, I have to say, I’m impressed. I’ll reiterate, I’m not a developer, but I could see how the combination of these technologies could easily benefit that type of environment, and leverage tools, like System Center, that can also benefit other areas of the infrastructure. Stephanie Cuthbertson, a Group Program Manager in the Visual Studio TFS team, explains how easy it can be, with the right technologies, to, for example, update troublesome applications that are live in production. Using recording capabilities, IntelliTrace, and more, I was actually blown away with what it gives you. I used to code Java whilst at Uni, ad it was very different then! (it wasn’t that long ago, for those of you thinking the worst!)
Once the application has been fixed, it needs to b deployed into production, and that’s where System Center, in particular, Operations Manager, Virtual Machine Manager, Opalis comes in. Opalis, for those not familiar, is an orchestration engine, helping you to build out workflow with little or no scripting involved, saving time, effort, and grey hairs. It really does enable some compelling scenarios, and, like many of the System Center technologies, the framework they provide means the more you put in, the more you get out.
15m 55s to 23m 10s – System Center Virtual Machine Manager vNext
For me, this is a big one. Anders Vinberg, Technical Fellow in the Management and Security Division, shows us that firstly, the interface has been overhauled, to bring it in line with Office. It’s going to manage the fabric of your infrastructure, as oppose to just the VMs that run on it. It’s going to transform the way you deliver a virtual infrastructure, through integration with things like Server App-V, DAC Packages (Data Tier Applications), and MSDeploy Packages. This separation of these intelligent components, combined with the Service Model wizard, enables construction of tiered applications very quickly, in a very powerful manner. Core Elasticity is how Bob describes the system – a good term to slip into presentations me thinks ;-)
26m 10s – 36m 45s - Building Cloud Applications and Integration with On-Premise Technologies
As I said earlier, I’m not a dev, so anything that’s development related, usually goes over my head, but this demo, very much like the first one, just makes sense. Doug Purdy, CTO in the Data and Modeling group, shows us things like extending your identity up to the cloud from AD make it seamless for the user to utilise cloud services, but also, how this can integrate into on-premise platforms like CRM. Very cool. Doug also announces that as of now, you can start to construct applications on Azure utilising .NET 4. The key thing that is apparent to me, is the deep (and getting deeper) integration from Visual Studio up to Azure, whether it’s looking deeper inside the databases on SQL Azure, or actually deploying applications straight to Azure, utilising tools that were highlighted in the first demo of the keynote. We’ve also released AppFabric to RTM, so you can really start to connect pieces of your infrastructure to the cloud.
The final part of the demo, and my favourite bit of Doug’s section, was the extension of Azure to enable monitoring, side by side with your on-premise elements, with System Center Operations Manager. Very cool indeed.
40m 55s – 43m 15s - Chicago Tribune and it’s use of Azure
OK, not a demo as such, but a useful insight into how a real-world customer is benefiting from Windows Azure to run their business, scaling on demand, and reducing their 32 datacenters, 75000 square feet of raised floor, and 4000 different servers running a variety of different applications. The result was 2 datacenters, and 1 Azure based platform. Massive savings!
46m 28s – 57m 14s Microsoft Unified Communications – Wave 14
Gurdeep Singh Pall, Corporate Vice President of the Office Communications Group, walks us through a number of the capabilities of the next wave of OCS. I don’t know about you, but I’ve come to heavily rely on OCS, as a way to quickly communicate and collaborate with my colleagues, and Partners, through the mediums of Instant Messaging, Voice, or Video. It’s fundamental to my productivity at home too, seeing as my mobile phone signal is so bad, OCS is the only reliable (and cost effective!) way of communicating. One of the big changes in Communicator, is its personalisation. It’s much more of a ‘Corporate Windows Live Messenger’, with a very social experience, with photos, activities and more. The big thing, I guess for many organisations, is cost savings associated with going to a soft-phone based VOIP infrastructure, and to give you an idea of Microsoft saving’s, we’re actually saving over $1million per month using this technology versus our prior phone-based solutions. Impressive stuff. Gurdeep also talks about the integration with SharePoint, and the intelligence around searching for people based on different pieces of information. I have to admit, the high-def video stuff was awesome. I’d like to see how it behaves on my pitiful internet connection in Chorley, Lancashire, but still, it’s extremely promising, and will work perfectly with my LifeCam Cinema!
59m 25s – 1h 5m 28s - Windows Phone 7
I’m excited about Windows Phone 7, as it looks incredibly slick, and as long as someone converts all the iPhone Apps across to Windows Phone, it stands a great chance of having a good crack at the Smartphone market. If that doesn’t happen, and the applications aren’t produced, to the standard, and price that people expect, it could be a long hard slog for Windows Phone to make a breakthrough. Augusto Valdez, Senior Product Manager for Mobile, walks us through a number of capabilities of the new platform. As I said earlier, I’m excited about this. The interface inevitably, will be compared to other touch-screen devices, yet there are both similarities, and differences. Overall though, the general look and feel, the quality of the experience, and the integration with Exchange, Office, and SharePoint is first class, which for businesses, is very important. The use of the Live Tiles is very neat, although I’d be interested to know the effect it has on the battery! I’d like to change the colours of the different tiles if possible – time will tell if that can be done. I’m sure it can be!
Opening of things like Excel, and PowerPoint retain the level of fidelity you expect from a PC-based device, and sure, not every command will be available, but it’s certainly a great way of interacting with data, in a rich manner, whilst on the move. It’s this kind of functionality which will ensure that I wait for WM7, instead of jumping on the iPhone bandwagon…
1h 10m 22s to 1h 19m 35s – Combining Business Intelligence and the Cloud
Amir Netz, Distinguished Engineer in the Microsoft BI Team, showcases the power of Excel 2010 to present rich views of information. What impresses me here, not being a BI specialist, is it’s done without the need for coding, making it instantly more accessible to a greater number of users.
1h 21m 28s to 1h 24m 5s – The use of Windows Server & SQL Server in Avatar
Now, before anyone jumps in and says ‘I didn’t see Windows Server or SQL in Avatar’ – you obviously weren’t paying attention in the film! Just kidding. Product placement in films is common place, but seeing WS & SQL isn’t something I expect to ever see! Unless it’s a film about databases, in which case, I still don’t expect it’s something I’ll go to see with my own free will!
It’s not often you think of technologies like Windows Server or SQL being involved with something like Avatar, but in this short video, you’ll learn about Gaia, and how that, along with Microsoft technologies, was fundamental to the movie. Very impressive stuff indeed.
Summary
I wish I could have gone to TechEd. We have our internal equivalent in the next few months, where' I’ll get immersed in new and upcoming technologies, which is something I’m really excited about so it’s not all bad. What’s clear to me is, Microsoft is innovating on multiple fronts. The stuff that’s here with BI, and Visual Studio, along with Azure, and it’s integration into System Center is really starting to take shape, and I cannot wait for future releases of System Center, as, release on release, things are getting stronger, and more relevant for customers’ infrastructures. Windows Phone 7, from a personal usage perspective, is high on my agenda as my current phone, whilst functional, isn’t giving me the experience I’m looking for in a phone anymore. Times have changed, across both desktop, datacenter, cloud and mobile, trends are changing, technologies are moving, and the keynote gives just a small glimpse into what’s possible.
If you want to watch the keynote for yourself, or download it, you can get it from here.
If you know, or have heard of App-V, chances are, you’ll know it exists as part of the Microsoft Desktop Optimisation Pack, usually abbreviated to MDOP. If this is the first time you’ve heard of MDOP, it’s a Software Assurance benefit, and is effectively suite of technologies designed to help you optimise the desktop, and contains the following:
Microsoft Application Virtualization (App-V) turns applications into centrally managed services that are never installed, never conflict, and are streamed on demand to end users.
Microsoft Enterprise Desktop Virtualization (MED-V) provides deployment and management of virtual PC images to enable key enterprise scenarios, primarily resolving application compatibility with a new version of Windows.
Microsoft Advanced Group Policy Management (AGPM) enhances governance and control over Group Policy through robust change management, versioning, and role-based administration.
Microsoft Asset Inventory Service (AIS) is a hosted service that collects software inventory data and translates it into actionable business intelligence.
Microsoft Diagnostics and Recovery Toolset (DaRT) reduces downtime by accelerating troubleshooting, repair, and data recovery of unbootable Windows-based desktops.
Microsoft System Center Desktop Error Monitoring (DEM) provides insights into application and operating system failures, allowing helpdesk to be more proactive in managing PC problems, without installing an agent to the endpoint.
If at this point, you’re intrigued about some of the technologies within MDOP, you can read more about them, and see some of them in action here!
Anyway, the point of the post. MED-V: The Movie? Really? Well, not really a movie, but more of a 8-part series dissecting the different areas of MED-V, so you can learn more about each different area of the product. If you’ve never heard of MED-V before, the aim of the product is to smooth the transition to a newer OS, by providing an application-to-OS compatibility solution, which is seamless to the end user, but centrally managed and configured by the IT Admin. The 8-part series, courtesy of the MED-V blog, highlights the following key sections:
You can grab all the videos from here.
If you’re a bit of a PowerShell guru, and have NetApp filer’s within your environment, the release of the Data ONTAP PowerShell Toolkit could be something you find very useful. The toolkit provides a collection of PowerShell cmdlets to facilitate integration of Data ONTAP into Microsoft Windows environments, by providing easy-to-use cmdlets that map to low-level Data ONTAP operations (i.e. ZAPIs).
The toolkit has been released via the NetApp Community, and is available free of charge to NetApp partners & customers (NOW login required to download). The Data ONTAP PowerShell Toolkit Community site has been set up under "NetApp Community > Developer Tools" (or here) for discussions, feedback and sharing scripts that use the toolkit.
If you’re interested, and want to learn more, make sure you head on over to the Developer Tools section on the NetApp Community site.