The world is just now starting to get a glimpse of what vCenter Operations for View could be like. I really hope that this product comes out of the gate with a strong feature set and delivers a big win for VMware. This would really strengthen their VDI offering.

The ability to monitor performance of the connections between the endpoints and the VMs running in the data center is a vital metric that needs to be tackled by VMware. This is something that Citrix is already delivering with XenDesktop and I like what they are doing so far. You can see the latency measurement between the connection and also information like client version, IP addresses and broker that it connected through. All very helpful information for troubleshooting performance and connection issues.

I like the fact that VMware has added counters for Windows that can be monitored using Perfmon inside the OS, and you can always fire this up to look at something. But I think this needs to continue to develop further to make these connection and performance issues easy to continually monitor and troubleshoot. In the preview videos that VMware posted on this blog post are mostly centered around monitoring the infrastructure, this is what vCOPs already does. The last video did show some tasty nugguets about PCoIP monitoring which looks promising. But some type of a client summary page would be very helpful so Admins do not have to drill down into 10 screens to get the picture unless they want that level of detail. It also needs to provide performance monitoring for client connections and end user experience. Below is a list of things that I think would be very helpful in a VMware View deployment to monitor.

• PCoIP connection latency
• VM login times
• Client version
• Connection server client is connected through
• Connection type (PCoIP vs. RDP)

 

Below is a sample of what Citrix is offering today with their XenDesktop product. From this session screen you can shadow session which I wish VMware would add into View Manager. Then there are details about latency, connection type, endpoint details, which items are enabled within the HDX/ICA protocol. Overall a pretty good looking and helpful console from Citrix.

The lower part of the same screen shows you some hypervisor and broker health status. There is a simple graph that shows you CPU, Memory and Network usage for the VM that you are looking at.

 

 

 

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If you are thinking about starting or are currently working on a VDI project, you need to do some type of assessment on your current desktops. Without collecting performance and usage data from your current PCs you will only be guessing what on how to design your infrastructure for VDI.

If you are guessing or making too many assumptions about your users, the design is going to either be extremely over solution-ed or will perform badly. By doing your homework you are collecting the data that will allow you to make intelligent decisions on CPU, disk and network performance that will be required.

There are a few applications on the market that do this type of desktop assessment, Liquidware Labs and Lakeside Software are the leaders in this space. In this post I am showing the more valuable slides from the presentation that is created by the Stratusphere Fit tool after collecting data from your PCs.

To deploy the tool you only need to import a Virtual Appliance and assign it an IP address and DNS name. You then export a collection install file that needs to be pushed out or installed on any computer that you wish to collect data from. You can create user and machine groups for different use cases or any logical grouping that might tie in with your design or business case.

I have pasted slides from the presentation below and have made some notes around a few of the slides. This is a sample report that I created using a test environment. There was no grouping setup so a few slides were removed that would present data based on groups. This is just to provide an idea of what type of data you can get by doing an assessment and what Liquidware Labs can help you with.

Besides the presentation below there are a number of built in reports that you can pull or schedule to run on a reoccurring basis. There are several output formats that you can export reports in such as PDF, Excel and Word, among others. There is a good report that will give you summaries of user data and types of files being stored. This is very helpful when planning for profile storage.

The slide below is the opening image that you can customize with Vendor and Customer information.

This slide shows details about the scope of the assessment, such as date range, number of desktops, users and groups.

The slide below shows some of the ranges of how decisions for the Fit ratings will be calculated.

The slide below is showing the number of computers and which group they were placed in.

The slide below is showing peak and averages for all desktops and the different metrics that are measured.

The slide below is probably my favorite one. It shows the averages for all desktops hourly for a week day. So you can see the IOPs are high first thing in the morning when users are logging in and then look for other details that will aid in your design.

The next slide is showing details about the physical desktops, such as age, CPU and Memory usage.

The next slide gives details about the different CPUs that are in your desktops and their utilization.

The next slide covers the physical memory configuration in the desktops.

 

The next slide gives a breakdown of what Operating System is installed on the desktops being monitored.

 

The next slide covers local storage on the desktops. You will get a rough idea of sizes and how much data is being used. Note: there are much more detailed reports that can be run to find out more about user data.

 

The following slide covers devices connected to PCs, you can see that a lot of local or built in devices show up on this report also.

 

The following slide covers monitors and printers.

The next slide shows a summary of the most used applications.

The next slide shows applications that are used most based on time.

The next slide is application related and covers CPU utilization.

 

Now an application view related to memory consumed.

 

And finally an application view that relates to IO consumed.

 

The next slide is showing applications and a graphics intensity rating.

The next slide shows a view on how your desktops are for VDI candidates.

The next slide is showing how your users will fit as VDI candidates.

The next slide is covering how different applications qualify as Virtualization candidates.

 

 

 

 

The next slide is showing a list of machines and highlighting PCs that are on the bubbles or are not good candidates for VDI.

The next slide is showing a list of Users and highlighting user accounts that are on the bubbles or are not good candidates for VDI.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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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.

 

 

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Well we have another successful Chicago VMUG meeting under our belts. With each meeting we have it really feels like were building a strong community in Chicago. The reason that I got involved with the VMUG community was to network with my fellow VMware people and to share our experiences. I think building a strong community benefits everyone that attends the VMUG meetings. Sure you get to listen to briefings from VMware and other virtualization related companies but being able to talk openly with others that are fighting the same battles as you everyday is priceless. You get to ask questions of people who have done what you are seeking to do or are also planning the same projects. These are opportunities that would not come around often if it were not for the VMUG meetings. You can see the slide decks from most of the presentations on the Chicago VMUG blog.

Face it most of us have our internal teams and maybe a few friends in the industry. But do you really get the opportunity to speak openly about these technologies with industry experts and 100 other community members very often. Well if you attend the VMUG meetings then you can answer yes. Today I met several new people and I can say that at each meeting I’m sure to meet other interesting members.

In the first session of the day we had Chris Fox in from VMware. Chris gave us a briefing of new products and announcements that have taken place since our last meeting which included both VMware San Francisco and VMworld Copenhagen. In this session Chris laid out what VMware’s current Cloud and VDI offerings are. Chris also was nice enough to hang around and participate on our VDI panel in the last session that I describe below.

The second session of the day was a general VDI related presentation from Elias Khnaser from Artemis Technologies. In this talk Elias covered the business and technology reasons that are causing most companies to consider Virtual Desktops. He also provided some sample numbers on sizing and costs related to VDI deployments. Elias also spoke about the many options available within the VDI space.

Next up was Wyse technology. During this session we got a recap of the thin client offerings that Wyse has today. I was really surprised to see the Wyse mobile thin clients, these are kind of a Netbook style thin client. They also covered software clients that Wyse offers for PC’s and the popular Pocket Cloud app for iPad and iPhone.

After the 2nd session we took a short lunch break and enjoyed some delicious Fajitas that the staff at Dave & Busters in Addison cooked up for us. The food was fresh and ready right when we needed it to be. I was pleased with the meeting room and the service we got from the staff.

The next session was from RES Software and Brian talked about how RES can help with your VDI planning and deployments. It was good to hear from RES as I was already familiar with some competing products in this space. We got to hear about their profile management and workspace extender products. Brian from RES Software was also kind enough to sit on your discussion panel later in the day also.

Before I wrap up the last portion of the VMUG meeting I’ll cover what is likely a favorite of many. The prizes that we gave out today to many that attended the VMUG meeting. During the experts discussion panel we handed out vNerd shirts from TrainSignal and vArmy T-shirts to people that asked questions to the panel. Then we drew names for several people that won VMware related training videos from TrainSignal and Elias Khanser. Also the great folks at Wyse gave away an Apple iPad and the team at RES Software gave away a Flip video camera and several Starbucks gift cards. I would like to talk our sponsors and other companies that supplied these great gifts that we were able to provide to our lucky winners. Oh I almost forgot that one of our great members donated 4 tickets to an upcoming Chicago Bulls game that were given away to a lucky member at the meeting.

We finished off the meeting today with a panel of VMware heavy hitters that bravely took all questions from the audience related to VDI. I was really impressed by this session it was our first real panel type discussion and picking Virtual Desktops as the topic seemed to be a great choice. The questions came fast and there was a bunch of them. The conversation was honest and open. We had questions that ranged from security, SAN storage planning to building a small VDI of 50 clients. Each question was great because they came from a community member with a real issue or someone just seeking some insight to help with their planning. I posted a couple of pictures of the panel below taken with different cell phone cameras so excuse the poor quality. The panel consisted of the following people, I will fill in the names that are missing once I go over my notes.

Matt Lieb a vSpecialist from EMC   ( @MBLeib )
Chris Fox from VMware
Elias Khnaser from Artemis Technologies   ( @ekhnaser )
SE from Wyse
Brian from RES Software   ( @ressoftware )

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Just a few minutes ago word hit Twitter that VMware View 4.5 is now GA and is available for download. This is great news because View 4.5 offers another big leap in functionality to the VDI product from VMware. The Burton Group has already deemed View 4.5 as being an enterprise ready platform meeting 100% of the criteria for Server-Hosted Virtual Desktop requirements.

Here are the new features in View 4.5 per the VMware release notes.

• View Client with Local Mode – Provides the industry’s first integrated offline and server-hosted solution for desktop virtualization, addressing BYOPC use cases.
• Full Windows 7 support – Provides full support for Windows 7. With View 4.5 and ThinApp 4.6, organizations can migrate to Windows 7 at half the cost and time.
• View Client for Mac OS X – Enables Mac users to access hosted Windows virtual desktops, extending the BYOPC use cases to Mac users.
• Integrated Application Assignment – Simplifies the delivery of ThinApp applications to end-users using the View Administrator console.
• Rich Graphical Dashboards – Simplifies management and monitoring through improved reporting and diagnostics.
• Role Based Administration – Distributes IT tasks to the right administrator.
• Integration with Microsoft SCOM and PowerShell – Enables integration into existing management infrastructure to further simplify the management of View virtual desktops.
• Support for vSphere 4.1 and vCenter 4.1 – Delivers integration with the most widely-deployed desktop virtualization platform in the industry. Takes advantage of optimizations for View virtual desktops.
• Increased scalability – Allows you to deploy 10,000 virtual desktops per pod and use this modular architecture to scale out across your organization.
• Tiered storage support – Reduces the cost and increases the performance of storage by enabling you to take advantage of multiple storage tiers, including high performance and locally attached storage.
• Lowest Cost Reference Architectures – VMware has worked with partners such as Dell, HP, Cisco, NetApp, and EMC to provide prescriptive reference architectures to enable you to deploy a scalable and cost-effective desktop virtualization solution.

VMware View 4.5 Documentation

VMware View 4.5 download link

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