Just this week Chicago was rocked by a monster storm that knocked out power to 800,000 plus customers. This surely impacted a great number of businesses and homes. I personally was without power at home for 30 hours. I was able to continue to work by powering my home with a generator and some trips to the local Starbucks. But what would a business do if they are impacted by an extended outage?

So I ask the people reading this, how would your business be able to respond today if a large group of your end users were not able to work at their office for an extended period of time? This could be due to a power outage, winter storm, pandemic virus or terrorist attack. Would they be unable to complete any work and the business would lose revenue until access to the facility was restored?

These scenarios are great to start conversations about virtual desktops (VDI). Sure there are a ton of other benefits to using VDI, like rapid provisioning, security, compliance and many others. These are all talked about often when VDI is mentioned. But for me the notion that people cannot complete any work due to a non-business related factor in today’s world drives me crazy. Just last night on the news I saw a story about Los Angeles closing the 405 freeway for 30 hours and the panic that it was going to cause. What if your companies workers would be affected by this, would it not be of great comfort for your management to be able to tell workers to not bother attempting to come into the office during this closure and work form the comfort of their home. Sure there are some employees that have jobs that requires them to be in the office or in proximity to customers or equipment, but most knowledge workers do not have this need.

You are now probably asking well I know VDI can provide remote access to desktops but how would it help us in these types of scenarios. Well when properly designed a VDI environment will provide users access to their desktops from any device and any location. This means that if an office worker that does not bring a laptop home each day was told to not come into the office they would be able to work on their corporate virtual desktop from home using a home PC or compatible end point.

By now if you attended or watched the Tuesday morning VMworld Keynote speech by Stephen Herrod you have heard of something called ThinApp Factory. But most of you are probably wondering what is this product? Is it a place where you can drop off install media and some elves package your applications and mail them back to you for work. Not exactly, but it is something that will assist you in the packaging of common applications.

I spoke with an End User Computing (EUC) specialist today and got some of the following details. The idea behind Thinapp Factory is an appliance that will auto package Thinapps for you. You will point it towards an MSI or install file for an application. For example the Firefox install file. Then Thinapp Factory will auto spin up and Virtual Machine (VM) and do the application packaging for you. It will then generate a Thinapp EXE package for you. Right now only EXE files are available but MSI packages will be coming as the product matures.

To start Thinapp Factory will be able to package applications that follow standard MSI sequencing standards. As additional applications are certified VMware will continue to add them to the Factory. So this only leaves applications that cannot be done easy for you to have to package manually.

One thing of note also the VMware person told me was that if you point Thinapp Factor at 6 applications to install it will auto spin up 6 separate VMs and package them individually for you. I look forward to hearing and seeing more on this product.

If you found out any more details about this drop the details in a comment below and share with others.

I’ll be writing about some of the sessions and activities that I experience through the week. Since it’s my first VMworld I am trying to get down the routine and enjoy the sessions.

First thing this morning I grabbed breakfast in the massive dinning hall for VMworld. The hall is a seeming endless sea of tables. It reminded me of being directed to a parking spot at a sporting event, the wait staff was there to guide attendees to available food tables.

My first session started a 8am sharp as was VSP1682 VMware vSphere Cluster Q&A presented by Duncan Epping and Frank Denneman. The session was one hour long and was an open Q&A session about all things HA, Cluster, DRS and Storage DRS. There was a wide range of question from people stating they don’t use HA to people with advanced designs wondering how the new features will affect them.

One of the other sessions that I attended was the ESXi Quiz Show (VSP1956). This was more of a fun session than a deep technical lecture session. The idea of the session is that 2 separate of teams competed against each other with the winner moving on to battle against a team of VMware employees. The questions were mostly ESXi related with a few general VMware questions. The session was high energy and they did a good job of getting people excited and involved.

I took sometime to experience the Hands On Labs (HOL) just to see what was happening there. Most of the topics available as labs are things that I am doing on a regular basis or do not pertain to my job at this time. So there was really not anything that I needed to take a lab for but just wanted to so I can know how they stack up when talking with others. I elected to take the ESXi Auto Deploy lab which was the most appealing to me. The lab was about 70-80 minutes in length and the instructions and slides that guide you along the process were very well written and easy to follow. The only thing I would maybe improve is some of the install parts were a bit slow and could have probably already been done for the participants to speed things up.

So far one thing that I noticed and heard from several others is that most of the sessions are very high level. These are great for customers and management but do not offer enough deep content for partners. It is causing me to revisit the sessions that I have signed up for and will be spending a good deal of my time talking with vendors in the solutions exchange.

VMworld Keynote

It was now time for the keynote and with this being my first VMworld I was not sure what to expect from this large presentation. The room was huge and must have easily held 10,000+ people. It was a top notch event and the presentation was perfect, except for the boom camera guy accidentally got in the way of the other camera once.

The keynote opened with some thundering music and great visuals on the large screens on both sides of the main stage. The visuals were almost Tron like in some parts and the image below shows how they took videos from users that submitted them and the audio and incorporated this into the intro.

First up on stage was Rick Jackson who presented the agenda for the Keynote. Rick also gave an attendee count of over 19,000 people for this conference. He mentioned that VMworld 2012 will be back in San Francisco and will be August 27-30. Then he spoke about how they originally created the Hands On Labs cloud in 2009 as an internal cloud. Then in 2010 the HOL cloud because a Hybrid Cloud and the 2011 HOL Cloud is not a Public cloud with 3 separate data centers in different geographical regions. A goal for the labs this year is to deploy more that 200,000 VMs in the 4 days of the conference. This will be a tall task even with the number last of 140,000 VMs.

Then it was time for Paul Maritz to come out and speak. I think Paul usually does a good job and it helps to have some exciting technology to talk about. I will cover more of the specifics of the Keynote shortly but I have to say that a large part of the keynote content was focused on application platforms which are very important but the audience that was there is largely VMware admins and infrastructure people and they were just not that interested. I saw a steady stream of people leaving the keynote after the halfway point.

In Paul’s presentation he talked about creating the Cloud Suite and getting all version numbers in alignment. He stated that he expects that by next VMworld they will be announcing version 5.1 of each product within the Cloud Suite. This would continue the aggressive pace that VMware has been on over the last few years by announcing a major update to their base hypervisor offering.

Some fun facts that he spoke about during the keynote are listed below.

• About 800,000 VMware admins globaly
• There are now about 68,000 VCP’s from 146 countries
• A new VM is created every 6 seconds, more thamn 20 Millions VMs around the globe exist
• A 5.5 vMotions every second, there are more VMs in flight than plains

It was announced that View 5 is expected in the future. This is a product that I am heavily involved with and would like to find out any new details possible. Below are a few bullet points that were mentioned.

• Bandwidth improvements
• View clients will be available for almost every device you can think of
• VOIP / Unified Communications

Paul did talk briefly about the mobile phone virtualization offering that they are working on. This seems like it would be pretty cool and once they figure out how to perfect it and phone technology is powerful enough to support I can see this catching on.

 The remaining parts of the show were all vFabric and application platform discussions. I’m not going to write about this because it’s not a focus for me or this blog at this time and someone else can probably do a much better job at it. I do think these products are important but not in my area.

I was very lucky to be awarded the vExpert award for 2011. This is an award that is presented to community members for helping to evangelize VMware and help others with VMware related issues. There are many different ways to earn this award. A few things that people do is write books, blog, write scripts or tools, lead a VMUG or be very active in the VMware forums. There are other ways also but these are some of the common things that gain people status within the VMware world.

For 2011 there are 332 vExperts in the program. This is a global program so it’s a big honor to be part of such an elite and small group. I hope to be able to continue to be productive and earn the award in future years.

On the day prior to VMware 2011 a meeting was held for the current crop of vExperts. The meeting was lead by John Troyer the main man over at VMworld social media. The session offered an overview of the expanding features of the vExpert program.

As part the meeting a couple of people from the VMware Product Marketing team came to give use some futures and NDA info. There was a lot of talk about the Virtual Data Center (VDC) and how things might have changed from it’s announcement back at VMworld 2008. The people in attendance had a bunch of questions and while it gut pulled down in the trenches for awhile it was good to hear various takes on the challenges of watching Cloud technologies mature into a product.

There was talk about what people thought would be the driving factors for companies to move workloads into a Cloud model. Many thought that similar factors that first drove the move to Virtualization would be a factor in this. So those are things like cost savings and some of the first things to move would be Test and Dev workloads. Also there was a lot of talk about the difference between how an enterprise and an SMB would adopt cloud.

In this post I will cover the new Web Interface that is available in vCenter 5 that was announced this past Tuesday. This is something that should be welcomed by non Windows users. With growing number of admins using Apple computers these days they have been long waiting for a way to manage their vSphere environment without having a Windows VM running also. The vCenter Web Interface is a Flex based console that is not fully featured yet but does offer many of the things you would need on a daily basis.

You definitely will not be using it to setup hosts and networks and that type of setup & configuration work. But you can create VMs and other daily functions as well as look at performance charts.

To get started point your browser to your vCenter server using a link similar to below. If you pint straight to the vCenter without the port and trailing string you will get a page similar to what your used to seeing in the past. It will allow you to download the regular vSphere Client and will also have a link to the web client.

Below you can see the login screen for the Web Client, nothing earth shattering from this view. Only thing to point out is at the bottom of the screen there is a download link for the Client Integration Plug-in. This is necessary to view the console of a VM through the web client. So download and install to get all of the functions opened up to you.

Manage a Virtual Machine with Web Client

The image below shows the summary view of a virtual machine. Its got pretty much all of the same details were used to seeing in the thick client. You get power status and details about VM hardware and storage. From this view you can control the power of the VM and edit its settings like in the past. At the end of this section I have included images of all the options located in the menu for a VM.

 From the next image we can see that the Monitor section includes sections for Tasks, Events, Performance and Alarms. These are all things you should be used to seeing also and are easily accessible in the Web Client also. I was pretty impressed with the performance chart options that are available with this being the first attempt by VMware. They have had practice by  using the Flex client model for View manager and vCloud director now.

The last section of the VM menu is resource management. You can have a look at the familiar looking CPU and Memory bar charts that we use in the regular client.

The group of images below show the menu options that are available to you when managing a virtual machine. You have the normal power options. Under configuration you can edit settings and upgrade Tools and virtual hardware. The Inventory menu allows you to Migrate or Clone. And the Snapshot menu give you the normal options you would expect.

Migrate a Virtual Machine with Web Client

This is a really nice feature to have available in the web client. This is something that in the past you would have had to fire up the full vSphere client to do. All the normal options seem to be available for this process.

 Edit VM properties in Web Client

This section is pretty straight forward and you can see form the two images below that all of the normal options are available to you in the Web Client. You can edit and add virtual hardware to you VMs.

This second image shows the normal VM Options that you can edit also.

Creating a Virtual Machine with Web Client

I’m not sure how much I will use this to start, but its pretty awesome that this feature is there at the beginning. You can create a VM from the Web Client, using all the same choices that you would normally.

Simple screen that allows you to name your virtual machine and select the folder location in the datacenter.

The next image shows you the ability to select the resources that it will run on. For example you can choose a host or cluster to place the VM on to start.

The next screen shows you available storage options. The Web Client provides you with plenty of detail to make educated decisions.

This section allows you to choose from available Virtual Machine hardware versions. It also explains the options for both so people can make educated decisions.

Next up in the process is to choose the guest operating system.

The last screen before the review allows you to adjust any of the virtual hardware that you want in your VM. There are plenty of options here and at first look I don’t see anything missing from the regular client.

ESXi 5 Host management from Web Client

From the image below you can see the summary screen that shows information about a ESXi host. All the normal details appear to be here and are presented in a easy to consume manor. From the right side of the screen you can see recent tasks and running tasks to keep an eye on what is happening in your environment.

The image below shows the monitoring screen so that you can view Tasks, Events, Alarms and Performance data on the vSphere host. This is also really nice to have in the Web Client so that you can see what is going on.

Cluster views form vSphere Web Client

The next image is the Cluster Summary view from the Web Client. These are not much different form the host views, they just present you with higher level details.

This image shows you cluster services to be able to view DRS information within the cluster. You can see History, Faults and Recommendations form this area.

 The last screen that I have shown here gives you Resource management details for the cluster. You can view whats happening cluster wide on CPU, Memory, Storage and utilization details.

I thought that I would not dwell on all of the licensing craziness and wanted to start writing about some of the cool new stuff that VMware announced. In this post I will cover the install and setup of the new vCenter 5 server appliance from VMware.

The vCenter appliance is exactly that a Virtual Appliance built and maintained by VMware. It is based on SLES 11 linux and now offers an option to IT shops that are not bound to Windows. From my point it looks like VMware is continuing to build it’s management tools with no need for Windows or at least the option of choosing your OS that the tool will run on. This is something that I’ve heard complaints about for years and will certainly make some people very happy.

The install of the appliance is very straight forward just like most virtual appliances are. You must first download the package from VMware which is just shy of 4GB in size. The package is a OVF so the next step was to deploy the OVF and power it on afterward.

Once the appliance boots if you open up a console to the VM you will see a screen like the one below. The device will grab an IP from DHCP if its available. Once you have an IP you can open up a browser and point it to https://appliance_IP_address:5480.

Once you browser connects to the appliance you will be presented with the screen below. This screen is the management console for the appliance. This is where you can enter in settings that control the appliance its self and not virtual machines. I will cover the web console in a separate post. The default login for the appliance is listed below.

User – root

Password – vmware

Once you log in to the appliance you will be presented with a screen shown below. This gives you some basic information about the appliance. You can see from the screen shot that this appliance has already been connected to an Oracle DB hosted on a separate server. The appliance supports Oracle and DB2 databases currently, which allows you to be totally Microsoft free. You can also stop/start the vCenter from this screen.

 The next step in setting up the appliance would be to point it to the database. In this step you can see the details of the Oracle DB that we are using in the lab.

 The next screen shown below is the Settings section that shows you the default Ports that the appliance uses and allows you to make changes. You can also select the inventory size for the vCenter Appliance, this is based on how many virtual machines it will manage. There are RAM recommendations listed based upon the inventory size that you select. The appliance comes built with 8GB RAM and 2 vCPUs.

The Administration section is pretty straight forward. You can change the admin password and Enable or Disable SSH access to the appliance.

The last section under the vCenter Server area is the storage section. This allows you to store log files off on a NFS share rather than withing the appliance.

 In the image below you are now looking at the Services menu which allows you to control services like Syslog, NetDump and Autodeploy that run on the appliance. I did not take screen shots of each sub menu to keep this from getting too long. This screen allows you to start and stop the services and the individual sub menus allow you to change the IP ports that they function on.

Next up is the Authentication section. This allows you to setup NIS or Active Director based logins. From the image below you can see we have already setup the appliance for AD logins.

From the Active Directory sub menu you can point the appliance to the AD domain that you wish to use for authentication. All you need is the Domain name and an Admin user and password. The setup was very easy the only thing is that you must restart the appliance before you will be able to login with AD credentials. As a note once setup I was able to log into this console without a reboot, but connecting to manage VMs required the reboot before it would work.

The Network section is up next which is also very simple. You can manually provide all network related configuration settings from this section.

The System menu does not have many options that you can see from the image below. It shows you some appliance version information and host name. There is a sub menu to set the Time Zone. The main function here is the ability to Reboot or Shutdown the appliance with the buttons on the right.

The image below shows the update section that appears to allow you to setup automatic updates of the appliance. There is not a lot of details around this area yet so I will continue to watch.

The last menu section of the appliance is the upgrade area. Now from first look I figured this would be a way to apply a version upgrade to the appliance. But from further looking it appears to be a way to link a source and destination vCenter appliance. And then import the configuration in the destination one. I’m guessing that you could download the latest version of the appliance and then import your configuration over. If someone has more details around this drop me a comment below.

In case you were sleeping today VMware announced vSphere 5 and all of its 150 plus glorious new features. I’ve been lucky enough to be using it for sometime in the Beta program and its really a big step forward. There are tons of new features that people have been waiting for.

But with all of the new stuff it seams a licensing change has kind of put a cloud over the shinny new features. Along with the new version VMware has change the licensing model that vSphere 5 will use, moving towards a vRAM pooled model that I will attempt to explain further. Now for some organizations this will be great and for others it will add additional cost.

There has been a lot of banter on twitter today about the licenses changes and in the VMware forums. I am holding back making a decision until I can digest this further. But from what it looks like is building a scaled up design model would be more expensive with the new licensing model.

Here is some highlights from the vSphere 5 license white paper that VMware release. You can download the full paper here.

 vSphere 5.0 will be licensed on a per-processor basis with a vRAM entitlement. Each vSphere 5.0 CPU license will entitle the
purchaser to a specific amount of vRAM, or memory configured to virtual machines. The vRAM entitlement can be pooled across
a vSphere environment to enable a true cloud or utility based IT consumption model. Just like VMware technology offers
customers an evolutionary path from the traditional datacenter to cloud infrastructure, the vSphere 5.0 licensing model allows
customers to evolve to a cloud-like “pay for consumption” model without disrupting established purchasing, deployment and license management practices and processes.

You will still be buying your licenses based on sockets but there is now the vRAM amount to factor in.

Licensing Unit: Per Processor (CPU)
vSphere 5.0 is still licensed on a per-processor basis, allowing customers to continue leveraging established purchasing,
deployment and license-management processes.

So what is a vRAM Entitlement
We have introduced vRAM, a transferable, virtualization-based entitlement to offer customers the greatest flexibility for vSphere configuration and usage. vRAM is defined as the virtual memory configured to virtual machines. When a virtual machine is created, it is configured with a certain amount of virtual memory (vRAM) available to the virtual machine. Depending on the edition, each vSphere 5.0-CPU license provides a certain vRAM capacity entitlement. When the virtual machine is powered on, the vRAM configured for that virtual machine counts against the total vRAM
entitled to the user. There are no restrictions on how vRAM capacity can be distributed among virtual machines: a customer can configure many small virtual machines or one large virtual machine. The entitled vRAM is a fungible resource configured to meet customer workload requirements.

What is Pooled vRAM Capacity in vSphere 5?
An important feature of the new licensing model is the concept of pooling the vRAM capacity entitlements for all processor licenses (see Figure 1). The vRAM entitlements of vSphere CPU licenses are pooled—that is, aggregated—across all CPU licenses managed by a VMware vCenter instance (or multiple linked VMware vCenter instances) to form a total available vRAM capacity (pooled vRAM capacity). If workloads on one server are not using their full vRAM entitlement, the excess capacity can be used by other virtual machines within the VMware vCenter instance. At any given point in time, the vRAM capacity consumed by all powered-on virtual machines within a pool must be equal or lower than the pooled vRAM capacity.

How would I monitor the Pooled vRAM Capacity
Available and consumed vRAM capacity can be monitored and managed using the licensing-management module of VMware vCenter Server. Customers can create reports and set up alerts to obtain automated notification of when the level of vRAM consumption surpasses a specified level of the available pooled capacity.

So if I run out of Pool vRAM how would I increase the Pooled vRAM Capacity
If necessary, the easiest way to expand pooled vRAM capacity is to add more vSphere CPU licenses of the same edition to the vRAM pool. Alternatively, customers can upgrade all CPU licenses in the vRAM pool to a vSphere edition with a higher base vRAM entitlement.

Some Licensing Examples

 vSphere 5 License pricing