Alliances & Partnership Advising
Here is a nice little Friday treat, VMware’s Srinivas Krishnamurti introduced vCenter Mobile Access today. Were you ever on the road, or just out to lunch (physically) when you needed to check something on your VMware infrastructure? With vCMA you would be able to do that from your mobile phone. Check out the demo video:
vCMA will be available as a technology preview sometime in April. You will need to install a virtual appliance to run the vCMA server and connect it to your vCenter.
A customer of mine today asked about the the results from a recently run benchmark of hypervisors published by Virtualization Review in which ESX, Hyper-V, and XenServer were compared. There is a post on the VMware blog questioning the configuration of the benchmark environment, and thus the results and conclusions from the benchmark. I wanted to share both of these links for those who may hve seen only the report and were scratching their heads as well.
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Since the benchmark was highly based on SQL server running in a VM, this seems a good time to also share additional research recently done on SQL Server and shared at VMworld 2009 in France. This performance research sheds some light on that fact that SQL Server Performance Problems are Not Due to VMware. After hearing lots of customer complaints about poor SQL server performance last year at VMworld in Las Vegas, VMware’s performance team spent three months looking at every way increased performance could be sqeezed out of SQL Server by tweaking ESX, the guest OS, and SQL Server. The net result was that most performance issues seen in running SQL Server virtualized on ESX come from mis-configurations in the other components and not from ESX.
I have been doing quite a bit of work lately on Desktop Virtualization, obviously with VMware View. As a number of analysts and non-analysts had predicted, 2009 is definitely the year that desktop virtualization is taking off. Partially because of the technology has reach a level of maturity where it is usable for most use cases and partially driven by the cost savings potential that it can provide. As I have indicated in previous posts, there are real conversations happening within corporate desktop IT discussing getting rid of corporate owned laptops or desktops all together.
While reading Chris Wolf’s descriptiong of the demo he saw of PCoIP at VMworld in Europe, it struck me that the sizing metrics used to describe dekstop virtualization tend to vary. Chris mentioned in his post:
“…with a virtual desktop consolidation density ranging from 30-60 VMs (densities commonly found by our clients piloting or running VDI today).”
While there are times when we need to simplify measurements to keep complexity in check, it can be misleading to talk about virtualization densities without mentioning the units for that density. I’m assuming that Chris was referring to VMs per Server, that would make sense given the number.
I would have to argue that this is the wrong unit to use for desktop virtualization, the proper unit that should be used for desktop virtualization density is VMs per Core. As the number of Core’s per CPU socket keep increasing and as the size of servers, measured in number of sockets, keep increasing in the data center we should be measuring virtualization density in VMs per Core. This is the best metric to guage technology advancements against.
When talking with my customers about VMware View deployments, we are always talking about the density in VMs per Core and cost of solution per desktop for a given use case (common population). The cost can be impacted by playing around with how you package those cores in the data center. As long as the server can contain as much memory as needed by the total number of VMs your golden. And the memory limitations won’t be as great of a limitation for much longer.
The use case is the other key aspect. When looking at a desktop virtualization solution, I have found that you need to keep the solution contained to a single use case which describes a single virtual desktop size. Call center desktops have their own unique size (hard drive space, memory, and hard drive usage) while a knowledge worker desktop has a different unique size. Each use case’s different size will impact the costs and ROI/TCO model.
So, when analyzing virtual desktop solutions, keep in mind your sizing metrics and keep your use case scopes focused. Like any solution, desktop virtualization should be taken in bites and these two suggestions will help keep in that task.