andrew-virtusolve

The answer is LOTS and LITTLE depending on what you want to do with the platform. Terminal Services got a massive upgrade on R2 becoming Remote Desktop Services The kernel was unified with Windows 7 so compatibility of drivers and stuff is improved Included version of Hyper-V was new and finally got the availability features of Xen and VMware Applocker was introduced Could go on all day, but here is a good place to start... Windows Server 2008 R2: What's New Is the question you are asking 'Is it worth upgrading from 2008? to 2008R2' The answer then would be mixed based on what you want to achieve

There is a downloadable package for upgrading ESXi 4.0 to ESXi 4.1U1, the following link has everything you need, if you hit any trouble, reply to this or PM me VMware KB: Upgrading ESX 4.0 to ESX 4.1 Go has mixed success rates

Update link is useful, for general maintenance you can do most things through the UI or using local tech support mode - the 'proper' way to administer is to use the vCLI - vSphere Command-Line Interface Wouldn't spend too much time learning vi-hostops.pl though, a new unified command set is coming out for vSphere/ESXi 5 - esxcli (good article here)

As per my blog : Entitlement per processor by vSphere edition - 24GB vRAM for Essentials Kit (144GB with the kit as a whole) - 24GB vRAM for Essentials Plus Kit (144GB) - 24GB vRAM for Standard - 32GB vRAM for Enterprise - 48GB vRAM for Enterprise Plus There are certainly issues to be concerned about here, but it's unlikely to affect the majority of education consumers. We have some customers who are going to be worse off to a tune of around 50% if they choose to upgrade to vSphere 5, but they are few and far between and generally customers with very high specification kit (one for instance has 84 x Dual Hex-Core Nehalem Blades with 192GB RAM) and who's environments are very highly utilized. But, VMware's customer base has a choice to stick with the product versions they have already bought and paid for. this was inevitable really, when you have a product that is vastly superior to the competition folk will pay for it. Not that we as a company are loving the decision, there are some angry folk around here who are short about 15 Enterprise Plus licences when we upgrade :-(

Yep, by far the biggest response on the blog so far is comments on Pooled RAM Entitlements under the new licensing method, but it was inevitable really. Processors are halving in number and a licensing method centered on them will do nothing but decline - I suspect some people will miss the point on understanding this (Arthur clearly has understood it), but it basically means you are potentially restricted on the amount of allocated vRAM in your VMware environment. I wouldn't worry too much though, with EDU licensing combined with the Accelerator or Essentials Kits its still a steal!

If you have support with your licenses (on the GA date) you will be entitled to an upgrade, am just covering licensing in the latest blog post, but to steal a march on that look here: Licensing for VMware vSphere: Upgrading from VMware vSphere 4

GA (General Availability) Dates are not available yet and VMware never announces them until they are rock solid - they have learnt from other bigger companies constantly slipping. vSphere 4.0 was GA about 8 weeks after this kind of announcement last time and VMworld 2011 is August 29th-September 1st in Las Vegas, so put 2+2 together if you dare...

VMware have today announced the full details around ESXi 5.0, There are oodles of bits of information around the web, but I'll be updating the CONFIRMED major differences in vSphere 5.0 on our Blog as soon as we have the write up completed and checked against material already officially in the public domain. I expect plenty of this information will be around the web over the next few days anyway! Virtusolve Blog Quickie Headlines: No ESX, The Service Console is Dead - as expected, only ESXi - so you better start learning the vCLI commands you've been avoiding! HA has been completely re-architected, Virtual Geek's Blog Post on this has some details here VMFS v5 - again Virtual Geek has this covered

I would think it would be much easier to add the new servers into the same Active Directory and Exchange Organization to ease the migration challenges. You can move the mailboxes between the two servers then and do the whole thing without any serious downtime - although the mailbox moves can take forever to migrate unless they are tidied up first. If you are confident of the integrity and state of your existing AD implementation, this is the best way IMO. Have just done three of these in the past two months, so have a list of gotcha's and lessons learned - PM me if you want any advice. ... and just because I work for a Virtualisation specialist, I would also have to give the advice that I hope you are going virtual, then you have the added benefits of a decent backup of the original config and snapshotting if there are any major challenges along the way!

Only one real alternative to Citrix - 2X, not quite as good, but far less cash. VMware do not provide a thinclient solution like Presentation Server (now badged XenApp), View is a VDI solution and ThinApp is application virtualisation, there is a sutble difference between the technologies and what you need is a fast thin client running a decent protocol. I don't think VDI is the answer here, you will end up quadrupling your back-end servers for not much performance pay-off, the use case just isn't quite right. Citrix XenApp 6 running the HDX protocol is, simply put, the best thing that meets the requirement to present (Non-CPU Intensive) applications. If you are using the above, configured and tuned correctly, then you need to consider another architectural solution, such as replicating the files to local servers, performing the image manipulation and then replicating back.

We have some environments running up to 40 VM's on Clariion arrays with 4 SATA disks running RAID 5 and the speed is acceptable, but it depends on how IO intensive the use of the Virtual Machines is, if you are layering SQL or Exchange on top of a Virtual Layer then its important to plan the disk config. People generally go overboard and there are a lot of other factors to consider beyond the RAID configuration settings, such as transport IO - are you Fibre Channel/10GE or simple 1GB ethernet, have you set the storage network appropriately. To summarize quickly, it's not all about the RAID settings as there are too many other factors to consider not least the array they are sat in and the stuff illustrated above, you can vastly improve performance in iSCSI environments for instance by setting jumbo frames and multipathing the load across a number of NIC's as normally the spinde isn't where the contention is sitting. Modern enterprise storage systems are doing away with RAID completely in favour of small block write technologies that create virtual LUNs across the entire array. We recently did a virtualisation project for a client who hosts 1000+ virtual machines and all the spindles in there are 7k SATA (although there was also 18TB of cache so spindle speed is not important, it queues and writes when it needs to).

Have a few trial clients for testing, but we struggle to find a specific use-case, beyond having an OS to use that is lightweight and works with all the existing system management tools - but then isn't the point of a thin platform being as small a footprint as possible, most of the time we want an OS capable of running either RDP, PCoIP or HDX protocols and little more, the problem with Thin PC is .... it's still a little thick, when compared to the likes of thinstation or a wyse OS... Hardware Requirements below for reference: • 1 GHz or faster 32-bit (x86) • 1 GB RAM, 4 GB available hard disk space • DirectX 9 graphics device with WDDM 1.0 or later version driver

Yep, it reminds me a lot of what was vRanger, later became Vizioncore vRanger and is now known as Quest vRanger, it does the basic stuff ok, but is very unreliable. As VMware endorsers we are naturally pessimistic of Hyper-V and it's 'ecosystem' of support partners and services at present, it's just not in the same league as VMware. However, stick with it if you like it or see a benefit, our predication, by Q1 2012, there will be a myriad of vendors providing a robust a decent solution around the technology - Veeam will be the first decent third party agent, followed up quickly by the usual suspects. But, if you wanted advice to stick with a vendor for the here and now, it would be VMware as the hypervisor and Veeam or vRanger as the backup technology, unless you have money to burn where it would be Symantec as the backup vendor

We are official beta testers, but are subject to NDA, so we can only re-post what other people are reporting: VMware ESXi 5.0 Rumours/Details « The VS Blog Big things coming for the enterprise (100+ servers), more cloud focus, a few cool things in the storage space, but for the average user - not much to get too excited about - our latest beta's are due next week - we will update the blog as soon as we are allowed to release info

ESXi is far more secure than ESX, people be-moan the lack of service console, but there is very little you cannot do with the vCLI - which is far easier to deploy than the VMa. Its much more lightweight than ESX, requires far less patching and maintenance and is very secure. To me, it's just good sense using a hypervisor with the smallest possible footprint.

Being honest, we have not had great feedback, we have one school that flipped from Hyper-V to VMware on the basis of compatible and reliable backup software. Rumour is that the built in Hyper-V backup console is on the way in the next release, which will annoy some backup vendors as folk expect people to go with the advance API model VMware has. This is one of the problems with Hyper-V at present, the third party support just isn't quite there yet - this will change over the next few years, but it is driving people across to the Tier 1 vendor -VMware.

Agree, but this is where the hybrid model suits most schools, for the average user RDS using RDP is very usable, especially under 2008. Then have a smaller footprint of XenDesktop or View for your heavyweight multimedia, HDX as a protocol for media performance is epic, we have one company that uses VDI using it for AutoCAD - am not joking!

Ensure anything you chose is on the Hardware Compatibility List, for iSCSI you are hard pressed to find a better value proposition than the Iomega IX12-300r (yes we balked at the Iomega as a brand for this, but when you lift the hood you realise it's EMC behind the front end and configured correctly the performance is great). For SAS there are a number of ways to go, we only supply Tier 1 brands, so the likes of NexSan fall by the wayside, but the HP X1600 and X1800 are quality bits of kit, easily configurable and don't need to cost the earth. Most people think storage needs to be expensive to be good, in the past few years, as iSCSI has grown in use and application there are a LOT of devices now available that provide suprising performance, the baby brother of the IX12 for instance will run 4-5 Windows 2008R2 machines using iSCSI without too much drama - amazing really as it costs around £200! Don't get me wrong, it's not right for production use, but amazing considering what you can do with it if you understand how to tune it for performance.

We aren't affiliated with Axel and can give you an honest review - and honestly, they are great, better price point than the HP and Wyse equivalents and we get nothing but praise back from their users.

Our preference is Xen, using VMware ESXi as the hypervisor broker. Mostly on the basis that the HDX protocol rocks, is massively quick and Citrix really know this market. View is a good and very viable alternative, but is edged out performance wise. There are some educational discounts with both if you go through the right channels and it depends on the size of rollout and what clients you are going to be using. Most of the time, 90%, when we do an engagement looking at Virtual Desktops, we end up recommending a hybrid model between VDI and Terminal Services on 2008R2 as most schools don't need the overhead of virtual desktops which tend to consume vastly more resources - so advice would be to consider hybrid as apposed to pure VDI solution, but you will probably know what's right for you - if its virtual all the way then Xen on VMware is a very good shout.

Butuz, You can run multiple vSphere Essentials in parrallel, so you can buy another 3 servers worth by buying two lots of licensing but they will run as effectively two separate installations. The vStorage API does allow this, but you still need a third party application to interface into it such as vRanger or Veeam.

Express version is Free, Citrix at the moment give it away and will charge for the synchroniser, there are three main components to the overall solution; 1. XenClient - Endpoint that is stand alone installed on laptop (desktop coming). 2. Synchronizer - XenServer VM that provisions, backs up, manages virtual machines. 3. Citrix Dazzle - Self Service application store. This old but good blog post explains it

XenClient Express - depending on the hardware. Version 2 has just become available on public preview, ticks all your boxes I think, link here

How many hosts do you have? If its three or less with no more than 2 processors in each, you could go the VMware Essentials Route, less than £500 for the licensing and you get vCenter Management of the hosts which includes the vStorage API for backup. PM me if you want more details, its pretty much all we sell to most schools on the basis that normally 6 processors over three hosts will host more than the average school will ever need if config'd right

Assuming the two sites are in separate physical locations, you will not get reliable HA across the link, you would need to utilize Site Recovery Manager and the appropriate storage plugins. You certainly won't be able to geo-cluster SQL in this way using CAB (Cluster Across Boxes) as this requires Raw Device Mapped LUNs on shared storage between the two nodes. Within the same site, with a number of tweaks you could get something similar working, but its a fair bit more complex than as described above as if your VM's are sat on a HA enabled cluster there is extra bits of configuration required (such as setting anti-affinity rules on the VMware cluster) Alternatively you could look at replicating just the virtual machine files without the SQL cluster to the second location using some EMC plugins that quiesce the database and synchronise the block level changes, but with a highly transactional SQL DB this would be difficult to ensure its working. Your best bet would be to backup to the remote location using a vStorage API compatible backup solution and then bring the backup up if Site A ever fails. To summarise, what you are trying to achieve is very difficult and comes with lots of gotchas, if you want availability across two physical locations VMware Site Recovery Manager is the way to go.