TechAgility

The best piece I have read from the IT Industry in the last two weeks or so is:

Why desktop virtualization projects fail

Desktop virtualization is one of the hottest topics of interest and a major initiative of many companies. Touted benefits include lower operating costs, simpler management and desktop mobility. Below we’ll explore what the barriers to wide-scale adoption of desktop virtualization solutions are and some approaches to deal with them. It’s not a fit for everyone in a company but it can be for many.

Challenge #1: Assuming desktop virtualization makes sense because thin clients are cheap - Many people assume that virtualizing desktops is going to be magnitudes cheaper because thin clients can be found for approximately $300-400 whereas a PC can cost $500-$1200.

Tip: Client costs are only part of the picture. Desktop virtualization can reduce capital expenditures but do not expect that to be the case in the first year. Building the infrastructure is expensive (storage, servers, licenses, etc.) and may be the same in the first year. Think about using existing PCs as clients instead of replacing them with thin clients. Thin clients are cheaper than PCs but the reduction in hardware costs may not be seen for a couple of years due to the infrastructure needing to be built. More importantly, operational expenses will be seen immediately and that is where the true cost savings can be found.

………   more at source

I have also collated below some of the details I have discovered around the latest news on PCoIP and HDX-3D

From Brian Madden:

Look out PC-over-IP! Citrix announces new host-side GPU-based encoding for HDX 3D

For me the most crucial part of this post is explaining this:

How HDX 3D works

On the remote host side, Citrix is releasing a custom VDA for the environments where you want to use HDX 3D. (The VDA, or “Virtual Desktop Agent,” is the software agent you install on your remote workstation OS that lets it participate in a XenDesktop farm and gives the ICA hosting capability to a desktop OS.) Having a separate VDA shouldn’t be a problem for anyone since this is a physical workstation host solution anyway, so it’s not like you’re sharing the same disk image with remote desktop VMs.

On the client side, HDX 3D is just another plug-in for the Citrix Receiver. (That’s newspeak for “it’s just another virtual channel for the regular ICA client.”)
HDX 3D lets you configure the image quality, so you can balance the bandwidth-to-user experience. (PC-over-IP lets you do this too.)

From a technical standpoint, the HDX 3D engine replaces the existing ICA progressive display capability. It lets the OpenGL or DirectX stuff render on the host, and then it scrapes them and makes what’s essentially like an M-JPEG movie which is streamed down and played on the client. In many ways this is similar to the way HP RGS and Teradici PC-over-IP.

……….    more at source

What this tells me is that this is right in the zone for HP’s Blade Workstation’s as they have Nvidia based GPU, and that the BladePC’s would not be in at all as they are AMD/ATI based hardware. It’s also interesting to note some more details coming out via this Citrix Community Blog HDX 3D – What Happened to Projects Pictor, Apollo and Prism? and the subsequent comments from Sridhar Mullapudi, Sr. Product Manager:

Though the first release is available for only XD customers, future releases will enable XA customers to get HDX 3D using VM Hosted Apps technology. And with GPU virtualization and related technologies in the future, we will enable support of HDX 3D on virtual machines as well.

And for VMware Brian Madden had this commentary…

After VMworld, VMware still has to prove they "get" desktops. 13 questions about their desktop strategy they need to answer.

The irony of this is that I really, really want VMware to be successful with desktops. Competition from VMware has caused Citrix to put more innovation into their desktop delivery products in 18 months than they have in the past ten years combined. If VMware rolls over on the desktop, I hope that the Symantec or Quest can step up to apply pressure to Citrix or else we’re going to have another decade of innovation ice age.

But back to the main topic: VMware’s lack of desktop vision.

At last year’s VMworld, we got all these great indications of what VMware was capable of in the desktop space. (Here’s my article from then where I could hardly contain my excitement about six desktop announcements.) And how did VMware follow up at this year’s VMworld?

• We got demos of the PC-over-IP and the client hypervisor. (This has a lot of promise and looks to be really great.)
• We learned that VMware will OEM RTO Software’s Virtual Profiles technologyfor some future release of View. (Not View 4 though, from what we can tell.)

So those were two great things. (Tactical, but still great.) Unfortunately that’s kind of where the good news from VMworld stopped:

• VMware demoed their client hypervisor known as CVP. (yay!) But we learned that it won’t be available until 2H 2010! Last year they said their client hypervisor was going to ship by the end of 2009, and now it’s another 8+ months away!?!
• The View futures session was just about View 4. VMware still hasn’t announced a release date, although the rumor is it’s still coming at some point this year. View 4 will have PC-over-IP, but little else new. (Oh, it will have vSphere 4 support.)

  …………    more at source

from Citrix Community blog:

• Desktop Virtualization is not Server Virtualization  (This title pretty much tells it like it is)
• Setting the Record Straight on XenDesktop (there’s not that much difference between XenDesktop and View apparently? )
• Interesting comment towards the bottom – Lastly, while I differ with most of what one VMware Community member, Rkelly, posted re View vs. XenDesktop, I have to say I agree with his final point for the IT team in any VMware shop:  "Download the trial versions of both products and see for yourself" . You just can’t beat a “Try before you buy”

From Alessandro and Virtualization.info

Virtual Computer partners with XenoCode

The company already has a Xen-based client hypervisor and a fairly complex web-based console which uses virtual machines,  snapshots and clones to publish the right system environment to the right user with the right customization. Now Virtual Computer also simplified the management of the application layer thanks to a technology partnership with XenoCode, the application virtualization company that already has an OEM deal with Novell.

Compared to the Novell agreement, Virtual Computer is not OEM’ing the XenoCode Virtual Application Studio. It is just supporting the applications virtualized with the XenoCode technology out-of-the-box inside its NxTop virtual machines.

It is not a revolution but this way Virtual Computer is silently building an end-to-end VDI stack that one day could rival with the upcoming ones from Citrix and VMware.

And lastly….  I haven’t see this before? The AppFactory, based in UK from the looks of it and promising to Virtualize your Apps from 149 pounds an App?
I wonder how well these guys will do? Very slick and professional web site, so it will be interesting to hear how well they do?

written by dcaddick

So I noticed some good info coming out of the MSDN Terminal Server blog, like:Introducing Remote Desktop Connection Manager and I was reasonably curious if the RDS Brokering would allow you to attach or add Physical devices like BladePC’s or BladeWS’s to the Virtual Pooling of resources available for users to RDP in to. So I figured the best way was to dive in and give it a shot?

So it seems like there are certainly no issues with installing Win 2008 R2 in a VM based on the VMware Workstation 6.5, remembering that there is no longer a 32 bit version. So here is some of what I found with the install:

Page 17 shows what the Web Access page looks
like (needs to be HTTPS – self signed cert is fine)

At this point I was able to successfully enter the details of my Windows 7 Laptop in the “Connect To” field and then the session on the WIN2008 Server was able to bring up an RDP7 (6.1) session

To double-check I’d need to access this web site remotely from another machine and check that works? But to be honest I was mainly after just figuring out  if I could attach physical units so I’ll leave that for now.

Details of what can be configured under the RDS

Page 25 shows:
Trying to specify devices that can be connected to – and it quickly
becomes apparent that you can only add Virtual Devices to the
mix – I now need to add Hyper-V to this Server (if it’ll let me?) and
then I should be able to add VM’s to the pool for assignment

Bottom line – to add additional devices apart from virtual VM’s
this would quite likely need a hack? to effect this and so here is
where my investigation ends for now.

So this is all of the post for now and I’ll try and place
a link here for the full document
(1.9Mb)

written by dcaddick

**UPDATE** I have received the following comment:

has anyone had any luck with the Automating Citrix Xenapp whitepaper, as i have issues when trying to import the deploy XenServer Altiris job as both .bin files seem to contain the same jobs, which are for deploying clients.

And yes this is the case – I have contacted the Author and the doc should be updated, but if you need the *.bin file please drop me a line?

Essentially there are two PDF’s, the first is the Overview and the second contains the detail with the scripts embedded in the PDF document.

One key take-away from the Overview is this graph of how many users *you might* get from an x64 installation :

I don’t have the facilities or time to be able to test any of this but it certainly looks quite comprehensive and appears to leverage the HP RDP (Altiris Server) component quite well to Automate things as much as possible.

Two new white papers have been released to ActiveAnswers at HP.  These papers reflect a joint development effort by HP & Citrix which, when combined, provide customer value-add specific to our partnership.

"Data Center transformation – Citrix Deliver Center enabled by HP Adaptive Infrastructure" provides an overview of the collaboration:

"Automating Citrix XenApp on XenServer deployments on HP ProLiant servers" illustrates how HP Insight Rapid Deployment Software (RDP) can be used with Citrix-developed PowerShell scripts to automatically provision and manage XenApp on XenServer on ProLiant servers.  The paper provides the instructions and scripts to deploy a XenApp farm on XenServer from bare-metal to application publishing.

Please note that the scripts provided were originally developed for each company’s internal use and are not officially supported through tech support or escalation channels.  That said, the solution has been verified by the HP and Citrix engineering team and are being released to provide the scripts to customers who may find them useful.

written by dcaddick

I recently was doing some final testing after installing a number of BladePC’s and I was pretty sure that I had connected to blade-003 via an RDP connection only to find the file that I was looking for wasn’t in the C:\Temp location at all – and I was certain that the Altiris Console had just reported the File Copy job that I had just started had gone through clean……  So what was going wrong?

It turned out that when I checked the host name of the Blade I was actually on blade-051 and not 003 after all (we were still just finalizing the images and hadn’t added BGInfo at this stage, so it wasn’t immediately obvious)

As I started to dig in to this with the local Admin it became clear that quite a lot of changes had happened to the system in the past few months and there was a still a lot going on, but the upshot of it was that the DHCP and IP address info I had received on my Laptop was inconsistent with what the servers were using.

The Altiris Server was using:

written by dcaddick

A colleague of mine was after some info on a tool that I had mentioned before and while I was at it I had some extra tools and links and other handy stuff that I thought I’d share?

The details regarding Fixed Mode below have proven to be very useful today in getting PXE working across multiple VLAN’s – very nice to see it burst in to life

Gui tool to check AD/LDAP context etc. (30 day free trial)

Softerra LDAP Browser

Altiris DS 6.8 Docs… (Very useful for additional info)

chapter-1-preparing-your-server-ds68sp2-installation
chapter-2-installing-deployment-solution-68sp2
chapter-3-introducing-ds-console
chapter-4-introduction-imaging-using-pxe
chapter-5-ms-dos-a-pxe-automation-option
chapter-6-winpe-pxe-automation-option
chapter-7-hidden-bootworks

Troublshooting PXE

Altiris KB – PXE not crossing subnets or VLANs
Altiris KB – Configuring PXE to work across VLANs
Altiris KB – Error: PXE-E53: No boot filename received (very comprehensive list of 11 possible causes and 14 possible resolutions, and a reminder that when using Wireshark filter down to BOOTP packets to focus on PXE)
Installing Altiris Deployment Server and Altiris PXE Server in a VLAN Environment this lead me to this link of a PDF (PXE Modes of Operation) regarding setting PXE in “Forced Mode” that has just worked a treat in a multi VLAN environment and essentially it means that you simply set Options 60, 66, 67 and 43 on the DHCP with the relevant details of where to find the PXE Server

Now setting the Option 43 correctly is not quite that simple, so I have added my explanation here:

All figures/values need to be in HEX
Example: 06 01 0B 08 0F AA AA 03 C0 A8 02 C8 C0 A8 03 68 C0 A8 01 66

06 01 0B 08 and AA AA are set by Altiris and should not be changed

0F = Specifies the number of octets that exist to be read after this one (the fifth octet) in this particular case it’s 15

03 = Number of PXE Servers, change as needed, in this example there are 3 PXE Servers

C0 A8 02 C8 C0 A8 03 68 C0 A8 01 66 = the IP Address of each PXE Server, defined in HEX, octet by octet

C0 A8 02 C8 = 192.168.02.200

Once you have crafted the Value of Option 43 as described above you simply need to add a zero value of 00 to indicate the end of the Value and then add this to the DHCP Server, paying particular care not to add any spaces or CR’s?

Alternatively I have also discovered a tool that can help in making this calculation at PXE Forced Mode Utility

written by dcaddick

Well thanks to an article by Alessandro at virtualization.info I have become aware of a company called iCore Software that appear to be heading down the virtualization path similar to Parallels in that it is OS based Virtualization.

iCore brings OS virtualization to the clients, selling its containers, called Virtual Accounts, as different user personalities for working, gaming, browsing, etc.
At the moment the company offers its product for free on Windows XP only and claims just 1-2% overhead.

So I popped over and reviewed the details on Parallels, and it appears to me that their Desktop and Workstation products are more like a Hardware Hypervisor product – but it’s the Virtuozzo Containers product that is the OS virtualization product (see diagram below) – and from what I can see this is clearly focused around the Server and Enterprise space
(Please feel free to correct me if I’m mistaken on this?)

The two diagrams below show the hypervisor or hardware virtualization technology in comparison to OS virtualization.

Click to Enlarge

So why is this new entrant so interesting? well it appears to be clearly focused at the desktop level in that the free download is all set to help you create as many multiple Virtual Accounts as you want based on XP Pro’s Smart Switching so this can initially be very useful even for the home PC.

So, given that it’s already set to work nicely with XP Pro in an OS Virtualization model, it almost begs the question of how well this might work as a mechanism for providing VDI?

Surely this has the potential to really shake things up in the VDI world? Without even testing the product I’d have to be thinking that this might actually be able to deliver a better video or graphics experience than ESX (or hypervisor) hosted Desktops seeing as it is “calling” for Graphics resources via the underlying OS as opposed to through a hypervisor call?

So as soon as I get back from the holidays in Perth I can see my Home rig might have to be redone with this in mind and I’ll update this as I progress? I was halfway considering looking at instigating SteadyState to keep the home unit stable, but now I think I’ll check this out first.

written by dcaddick

Recently I found myself at a school down near Melbourne carrying out what should have been a relatively simple PoC (Proof of Concept) of 20 x BC2500 BladePC’s in an Enclosure with some T5730 Thin Clients, and initially all went pretty well and then I found that I had some issues with the SAM Registration service….. from the BladePC’s not communicating very well (or at all) with the SAM Server

BTW – SAM = HP’s Broker, Session Allocation Manager

So then I was thinking through some ideas about what the next steps might be to help isolate it?

Initially I was getting a note in the Application Event Log for all the BladePC’s that they are unable to contact the SAM Server, and yet:

• they can ping it successfully
• I can connect to the blades using RGS fine
• The Windows Firewall is disabled for now
• There are exceptions in the firewall any way for the SAM Service

So I then used WireShark to take a trace and isolated one conversation with a blade and the SAM Server and got it to translate the TCP conversation and the resultant HTTP reply from the SAM Server indicated an internal error – so I simply rebooted all the Blades and the SAM server and I finally got the devices registered – hurrah!! I thought I was out of the woods.

Then as the day wore on it appeared that after a period of time the Blades would become “Offline” with a red circle and the diagonal slash indicating they were offline and they would no longer respond – a reboot will get them going again.

Now if I was just troubleshooting this it would not have been too bad – but I was also seeing some other very curious issues like:

• When I connected from the T5730 to the BladePC via RGS direct (no SAM) it is verrrrry slow (5 – 10min login)
• When I connected from the T5730 via the SAM Client it is verrry slow just to start the Login process (even longer?)
• Once connected the experience is not too bad (not real snappy, but just about useable)
• Connecting a USB device to the T5730 to test Video causes the RGS session to drop – with no warning – before the Media Player comes up

Now was I right to suspect the network at this point? I’m not a Network/Switch expert, but I know enough to be dangerous? but it was starting to look like there was more than just a hint of coincidence with what was going on?

Curiously enough I’ve also found that while my laptop is connected to their network and using the proxy to gain access to the ‘net to get email that the connection to exchange keeps bouncing quite a bit and when I send an email it can sometimes hold in my Outbox for hours before finally getting under way….

Outcome – all now sorted – it would appear that even though the SAM/Altiris Server AND the BladePC Enclosure was plugged in to the Core Switches there was a ProCurve 2650 that was throwing out FCS Errors and causing a ruckus – this also happened to be the unit that I was trying to go through with the T5730 Thin Clients……

This morning a Network Guru from their integrator turned up and updated all the firmware on the Cores and 2650 alike, found the issues were related to the 2650 only, this was then swapped out for a temp unit – then it seemed like nothing was working at all with no connectivity to the Enclosure, then it was discovered that Spanning Tree was the cause of this, so that was hit on the head – and now everything has settled down nicely.

Good news is that apparently HP’s ProCurve Switches come with a lifetime warranty – I learn something new every day? – so as it turns out it’s not too bad?

So a day or two late, but finally back on track.

Incidentally, when I was trying to update the Firmware in the Enclosure for the Switch and the IA (Integrated Administrator) via a simple TELNET I was getting timeouts and errors, after this wayward Switch was replaced it all worked a treat.

Lesson:
As with Citrix and VDI, as well as BladePC/BladeWS, it’s always worth remembering that this is typically the first time that a network will have been asked to provide “real time” network performance. Up to this point even things like email are effectively only “store and forward” process’s so do not be surprised when a relatively simple PoC (Proof of Concept) shines a Spotlight on any Network issues?

I hope this helps others?

written by dcaddick

After a wet and wild weekend camping Dugie pulls out all the stops again…

Thanks Dugie, I wasn’t aware I needed to install the 64bit version to make it work?

URLs for Windows 2008 RC0 and WSv

WSS, Virtualization September 25th, 2007

If you want to download Windows 2008 RC0 with the Windows Server virtualization preview, the URLs are below:

• Windows Server 2008 RC0 Enterprise – 2.6 Gb
• Windows Server 2008 RC0 Datacenter – 2.6 Gb

Remember to grab the 64 bit version (6001.16659.070916-1443_amd64fre_Server_en-us-KR1SXFRE_EN_DVD.iso) as it is the only version that will run WSv

John Howard has some great install primers in his post , “How to install the Windows Server virtualization role in Windows Server 2008 RC0“, a snippet is below:

more at source…

written by dcaddick