VMware View with Composer Virtual Desktops - Screenshots

I just got done doing a 20vm test deployment with Composer linked clones. One thing I noticed is that time to deploy isn't much less than the old fashioned way. I haven't had a chance to try it on an enterprise class system and SAN (right now I am using a 3 HP c-class blades with 8GB of RAM each and and HP AIO SAN. All vmotion / ISCSI / Live network traffic runs over just 2 nics). Anyway, the big news is that the space savings is amazing. Inside the wizard for the Desktop Collection I specified that the personality drive should be 512 and mapped as a D drive. After the desktops were deployed I checked the datastores and found that there were 2 VMDKs, 1 was a replica, the other was a 1.3GB VMDK. I will dig into it deeper, but I figured I would post some screenshots while I was working on it.

Vizioncore vOptimizer Pro - Comments on first look at demo

This morning I was able to see fist hand a demo of Vizioncore's new storage optimization tool, vOptimizer Pro. My first impressions on the ergonomics of it were that it was clean and simple and very "vReplicator" like. The workflow was easy to understand and could be configured in minutes. As for features, what the product tackles is the problem of vm space under-commit and over-commit. Based on rules the product will scale the virtual machine's storage up or down based on rules.

For example if you have a 5gig vmdk on ServerA with 4gig used and a 50gig vmdk with 5gig used on ServerB and applied a rule that said you should have 50% freespace available, it would resize ServerA to 8gig (enlarge vmdk) and would resize ServerB to 10gig (shrink vmdk).

The aforementioned scenario explains the meat of the product, but there is so much more. It also provides for optimization of Windows partitions based on the 64k block offset (Link to VMware doc on topic). And in the future will be able to optimize Windows VM's even more by removing unwanted services and other tweaks.

For those managers out there and people in charge of budgets, it is important to note that you can assign cost per Gigabyte to your datastores. This is used for reporting after an optimization pass to show cost savings from using the product overall or by pass (this type of thinking was a real plus in the old vCharter but now missing in vFoglight).

There were only a couple of negatives I saw. The first one is a current necessary evil; you have to shut down the running vm to optimize. This is due to application quiescence and system stability. I understand the need, however it does not take away from the fact that a maintenance window must be created and services will be offline. I have found that one of the major selling points and strategic directions of virtualization is "online all the time" (see also VMware Fault Tolerance). The only other minor negative is that it is only supported on a physical box. This is due to licensing issues, and I am sure that it would run fine virtually, however YMMV when getting support.

As for pricing, like all Vizioncore products, you get a lot for your money. The pricing is going to be $299 per ESX host socket (like all thier other products, even vReplicator now) list price. Obviously if you go through a reseller you will get a better price (please email me to get a quote from my company if you would like).

All in all this is a product that is well worth the money, will show an immediate ROI, and should be in every virtualized datacenter. As soon as I get my copy I will have some youtube demos up.

ThinApp - VMware's Application Virtualization - Try It

For those out there that weren't aware, VMware acquired Thinstall in January (along with Foedus) and rebranded it ThinApp. Thinstall was a company that provided application virtualization. Application Virtualization is a very vague term, as Citrix, Softgrid (now App-V owned by Microsoft), and even web based apps can be classified as virtualized. Each vendor does it differently, but the end result is delivery of an application without having to install it the traditional way.

• Try ThinApp'd Firefox and more here: http://www.thindownload.com/

In lay mans terms, ThinApp allows you to create distributable msi's / exe's that behave like standalone apps. Remember the applications on Windows 95 that would just run when you clicked the exe, no registry, no writing to system32? Well that's the idea here. What happens under the covers is that an administrator uses a clean machine / snapshot method of capturing an install. Then the ThinApp software uses it's intelligence to to create a project. From that project an administrator can create exe's and/or msi's for delivery. When delivered through logon script etc as and exe the user can launch the exe without admin privileges and all dll's / registry entries are put into a virtual space. So the app thinks it has full access to the system, when in fact it is writing to a harmless virtual space. The MSI works very similarly, however it can also be deployed via Group Policy / SMS / etc and provides a better method of file association.

One of the major benefits of delivering applications this way is that there is no dependence on build of machine. As long as you are running Windows, the application will run. It runs in it's own space, so it is even possible to run ie5 / ie6 / ie7, all at the same time. The other major benefit comes from the fact that you are just launching a file. If ie7 was pushed out for example and you wanted everyone to run ie8, you would just need to replace the exe or shortcut target on the file server. There are also options for offline applications etc.

If anyone has any questions or would like more information, please email me at Morgan.Hamilton@dyntek.com.