First things first. Yes, now VMware is providing free licenses for Capacity Planner to qualified Partners. Virtualization.info reported this announcement back in June, and as Alessandro points out.

“Partners will not be required to buy any license anymore (even if they will still have to attend a classroom course that doesn’t come cheap). They will just have to login on the online portal, create a new profile and start monitoring the customer’s infrastructure. The data will stay online for six months and then will be archived.”

Depending on the relationship between VMware, the partner, and the customer, free licenses were not uncommon before either. Either way, I want to emphasize there is an initial investment by the Partner both financially and intellectually. To get the free licenses Partners must join the Partner program, certify VCPs, and attend the Capacity Planner classes and the Virtualization Assessment boot camp.

What does this mean to VMware’s customers new and old?

The rest of this post lists some common Capacity Planner service engagements for VMware customers to consider, and I will briefly explain the differences. VMware provides data sheets for some of these projects on their Services page, but Partners are free to either deliver the packaged offering developed by VMware or construct their own.

Special note to Sales Reps and VMware customers: When considering Capacity Planner projects, be sure to understand what level of assistance is needed. There is a difference between the deliverables of these offerings, and, yes, there is cost associated with the services of the more involved analysis. I feel the confusion about assessments stem in part from the fact that all of offerings use Capacity Planner. That is, the data collector is required to be installed and configured and the best practices and methodology for using the tool (previously covered in my FAQ post) is the same. It is the objectives of the different projects that vary considerably and thus require different levels of professional services. Complete capacity analysis tends to get lost in the licensing and hardware quote’s shadow. Unfortunately, this important function is too often viewed as either in the way of the sales process or unrealistically expected to take place as a pre sales validation. That may be a fact of business, but taking the time to complete some level of a virtual assessment will make the difference in smooth migration to VI, the performance of the VMs and the ESX hosts, and achieving and maintaining the expected capacity.

Consolidation Estimates (CE / BCE)

The pre sales CE, formerly known as the BCE, is a free offering to help determine the number of VMware licenses (VI3.5 or ESX) you will need and the server hardware to run it on . Basic consolidation scenarios are automatically calculated and are delivered to the customer in a generic presentation.

CE deliverables are usually

• A VMware software quote
• A server hardware quote
• A proposal for future VMware professional services
• A quick, high level Power Point presentation about the stats collected by
  Capacity Planner.

Customer’s who are best candidates for the CE pre sales study already have VMware ESX experience and do not need planning, design, or implementation help, or they are customers in the budgeting phase who need numbers for planning. The key aspect of this project to understand is that there is not any architectural design or planning services delivered.

Capacity Analysis (CA) and / or Virtualization Assessment (VA)

It’s debatable whether to group these together or not, but both a CA or VA project are paid professional services projects. Where the CE is just an automated monitoring and analysis, these projects get more intimate with the customer’s data center. Therefore, the results are a detailed and tailored roadmap and design for virtual infrastructure. For example the VCP delivering this project interviews the client’s IT team for current issues and future expectations. Time is taken to understand all aspects of the virtual migration such as networking, storage, and services infrastructure (Active Directory). The strategy and methodology of a physical data center move is followed in that all aspects of the implementation are considered .

CA / VA deliverables are usually

• Corporate level report containing detailed stats and analysis gathered from Capacity Planner along with multiple proposed consolidation scenarios.
• Virtual Infrastructure Design Visio
• Recommended P2V candidates and ESX host assignments.
• Recommended SAN configurations and VMFS design.
• Recommended network configurations and subnet / VLAN design
• Recommended directory services design
• TCO and ROI calculations
• all of the CE deliverables

Target customers for these projects are brand new to virtualization and want help understanding how to plan for not only virtual infrastructure, but also how VI changes their entire data center.

Plan and Design

The Plan and Design project starts with the CA or VA project as it’s initial phase, but then takes moves into a test implementation and validation phase. A full assessment as described in the previous section is conducted with Capacity Planner. After presenting the results of the collected performance data and the associated VI design and migration roadmap, the VMware Partner then begins a prototype implementation with the customer. Using either the proposed new hardware or similar existing and available hardware, implementation of the design begins for a subset of the complete VI solution. This subset can be a “dress rehearsal” or put directly into production, but the purpose is to be an exercise to validate, document, and provide knowledge transfer to the customer so that they can complete the design on their own.

Plan and Design deliverables are usually:

• Capacity and Financial Analysis
• • Includes TCO and ROI calculations
  • Includes all the deliverables from the CE pre sales project
  • Includes all the deliverables from the CA / VA project
• Detailed documentation including
• • VI Architecture Design
  • VI Assembly and Configuration Guide
  • VI Standard Procedures
  • VI Test Plan
  • VI Roll out Plan
• Design enablement and knowledge transfer using
• • Side by side implementation following VMware best practices
  • Utilization of a prototype proof of concept infrastructure

Target customers for the Plan and Design project mirror the CA/VA project as well as include customer’s with specialized application needs in virtual environments. For example, large database or messaging applications, usage of unique hardware devices shared to VMs, or non traditional deployment scenarios are all good reasons to engage in a Plan and Design services project.

Whether you are already running virtual machines or just now ready to migrate to virtual infrastructure, a VMware Partner using Capacity Planner can help you tailor and optimize a virtual infrastructure specific to your needs. If you are interested in more details for any of the projects discussed in this post you can contact me and I’ll be glad to talk to you about our offerings at Optimus Solutions (Optimus Solutions is now a Softchoice company).

The FAQs I used to create this post seem to be only available to VAC partners who’s accredited VCPs have completed the necessary Capacity Planner services training. Upon completing the training a VCP is assigned a log in to the VMware Data Warehouse Portal where Capacity Planner data collector’s uploads are processed into consolidation scenarios. Here, from this portal, is where these FAQ documents can be downloaded. I happen to be an accredited VCP, so I have access to the FAQs. All of the FAQs clearly state they are customer documents so I am now providing this information here. I’m not sure why these documents aren’t publicly available because I am sure they would help generate more interest in Virtualization Assessment service projects.

The remainder of this post combines VMware’s information from 3 different documents – the Capacity Planner Technical, Security, and Sales FAQs. The individual documents are provided on the VM /ETC Files page and are linked at the bottom of this post. I have trimmed down or omitted most of the FAQs in this post (and it’s still a lot of info to read), but check out the full .pdfs for more details and other FAQs I left out.

I recommend you at least skim through some of these very popular Q & A’s:

• How is Capacity Planner sold?
• Why should we add Capacity Planner when we already have so many other tools installed?
• What ports need to be open?
• What operating systems does it discover?
• What impact does collection have on my network?
• What impact does collection have on my servers?
• How are the utilization figures determined?
• What are the security features within the software?

Go get a fresh cup of coffee or your favorite beverage and then enjoy!

Capacity Planner Sales, Security and Technical FAQ

Licensing

How is Capacity Planner sold?

Capacity Planner is sold as a service to customers by one of VMware’s selected partners or as a service from VMware PSO. Customers are unable to purchase licenses for their sole use; a partner always needs to be involved.

How is license usage monitored; for example, if a customer buys 500 server licenses, what prevents the customer from deploying it on, for example, 600 servers?

Capacity Planner support monitors actual versus expected server numbers analyzed and works with partner and Capacity Planner sales on discrepancies.

What if a customer discovers a need for more server licenses?

The customer should order more. In the future, customers should be aware that they have the option of using the Collector for free to discover servers. Discovery provides a server count, the operating system on each server, and typically identifies the type of server.

Competitors

What are the key competitive products?

The primary competitive products are IBM CDAT tool and PlateSpin PowerRecon.
Other enterprise capacity planning tools, usually agent based, include BMC Perform/Predict, Hyperformix, TeamQuest, and Metron Athene. There are overlaps with inventory, asset management, and performance management solutions. Therefore, some people might consider IBM Director, HP Openview, BMC Patrol, and Mercury SiteScope as competitive products.

How does Capacity Planner compete with competitor’s products?

Capacity Planner is faster because it is doesn’t use an agent and does provide automated analytics and decision support. Capacity Planner is more accurate because it can discover and enumerate the entire (heterogeneous) IT infrastructure within an enterprise through a variety of means. Capacity Planner correlates inventory and performance data to provide more accurate and meaningful analysis than most other tools on the market. It also simulates various planning scenarios, including virtualization and procurement, to help test for accuracy before implementing the best solution. Capacity Planner’s Information Warehouse is a unique differentiator that houses a growing set of industry reference data that capacity planners can leverage to drive intelligent, benchmarked IT capacity decisions for the enterprise. Furthermore, Capacity Planner can provide anomaly detection and ongoing recommendations based on these industry benchmarks to ensure capacity optimization for the enterprise.

Is Capacity Planner a performance management tool?

Although Capacity Planner collects performance statistics and makes them available for review, the tool is not a typical event management or real-time performance management tool. The main purpose of the product and service is to identify candidates for consolidation using virtualization. The tool can also be used to provide advice around tuning servers and applications prior to consolidation or virtualization.

Potential Difficulties

Why should we add Capacity Planner when we already have so many other tools installed?

Many organizations collect similar data using various different tools (event management, asset management, patch management, and so on); however, the data from all these tools usually resides in different databases or datastores. With Capacity Planner, all the relevant data can be collected quickly with little overhead on the collected systems. In addition, many applications sit on the shelf because of the amount of time and expertise required to deploy them. Our agent-less technology alleviates this issue. Most clients install our software within minutes and are reviewing inventory and performance data within a couple of hours. In most environments, our solution is fully deployed within a couple of days.

Security Methods

How do we know our data is safe?

Our client base, which includes Global 2000 banks, insurance companies, and retailers, researched this issue and concluded that the risk of transferring data that is not sensitive through Secure Socket Layer (SSL) encryption over HTTP was low to nonexistent. Sensitive information like IP addresses reside only at the customer site. Customers access their information through a secure, Web-based dashboard and manage user IDs and passwords so that they can implement the same password restrictions as required by their internal security policy. An example of transferred data is available.

What are the security features within the software?

To keep sensitive data secure, Capacity Planner collects the data securely and stores it using highly secure methods. Our collection methods use standard OS APIs. These APIs are the same APIs that you use to copy files from one system to the next and to logon securely. These APIs have been accepted as C-2 level secure and are updated with hot-fixes every time a problem is found. The data is stored in a local database that is protected by file system security. Passwords are encrypted before being stored. Our products have the ability to send information through the Internet to our Web site for analysis and comparison. All data sent and received from our Web site uses HTTPS. This is a secure transmission protocol that is used by all institutions.

The basic security methods are the following:

· Local administrator accounts are required on all target servers.

· Accounts are stored and encrypted on the Collector server in an Access database.

· Capacity Planner uses a RC4 password encryption with a private key.

· Passwords are not shown in clear text on the Manager.

· CSV files sent from Collector to Capacity Planner data center do not contain usernames, passwords, IP addresses, or share information. CSV files do contain domain names and server names.

Requirements

What is the necessary inventory information that you need to conduct an assessment?

For server consolidation and other capacity planning activities, project teams need to know detailed hardware information around four core hardware components: processors, memory, disk, and network interface cards. Detailed intelligence for applications, services, and shares is equally valuable.

What administrative rights are needed to access servers?

On a Windows environment, users enter either global, domain, or individual administrative rights to access remote servers into the Manager. UNIX and Linux systems require root access to access the appropriate data from the software.

What ports need to be open?

We need the following ports open: 135, 137 through 139, and 445. If there are servers behind firewalls that can’t be opened or will be challenging to open, it is often easier to install a Collector inside the firewall.

Installation

Do I need to install agents?

With Capacity Planner, you do not need to install any agents on the target servers. Capacity Planner is agent-less software that collects across server infrastructure, leveraging existing data sources already on the systems. As a result, Data Collectors only need to be installed to pull the data from the target systems.

Do I need to purchase other software or hardware to run this tool?

Unlike other competing products, Capacity Planner was designed to leverage basic hardware and software requirements. Capacity Planner requires a Windows 2000 or newer operating system on a laptop, desktop, or server with at least 1GHz CPU, 512 MB of RAM, and 250 MB of free disk space.

What is the appropriate operating system for the Collector and Manager?

Capacity Planner requires Windows 2000 or 2003 with an ASCII language operating system. VMware mandates US English Windows 200x operating system as best practice.

Discovery and Collection

What does a discovery collect?

Discovery using Capacity Planner is simply a system count of the environment. There is relatively little information beyond a physical count that is provided. The discovery enumerates the list using the Active Directory, IP Scanning, DNS queries, and NETBIOS options. It does not verify that the machine is online or accessible.

What operating systems does it discover?

Capacity Planner collects from Windows NT 3.51, NT 4.0, 2000, and 2003; Red Hat Linux 8 and 9 and Enterprise Linux (ES/AS/WS) 3 and 4; SUSE Linux 8, 9, 10, and Enterprise Server 9; HP-UX 10.x, 11.0, 11.11, 11.22 (PA-RISC) and 11.23 (Itanium); and Solaris 7, 8, 9, and 10 (Sparc) and 9 and 10 (x86) Operating Environments.

How are discovery and inventory different?

Discovery is a free count of the number of systems in the customer’s environment. Inventory is a paid service that collects all the hardware, software, and services inventory data.

What inventory data is collected?

Capacity Planner collects hardware, software, and services inventory data.

What performance metrics are collected by Capacity Planner?

Capacity Planner collects from targeted servers 300+ core performance statistics and additional relevant statistics for specific applications. This low-overhead query collects performance metrics from the four main data groups of processor, memory, disk drive, and network utilization. For memory, for example, Capacity Planner collects not only paging data or what is available in bytes but also specific cache information that affects the overall project decision strategy. This data is then correlated with the previously collected inventory data.

What impact does collection have on my network?

Capacity Planner typically only uses 20,000 bytes during data collection across a network.

What impact does collection have on my servers?

The impact on the target server varies, depending on what is collected. Windows systems traditionally are affected less than 1% utilization. UNIX systems might peak at 5 to 10% utilization during inventory collection cycles.

How long does Capacity Planner take to collect inventory?

This varies depending on a number of factors, such as the Collector system, location of target systems, and network speed. Traditionally, Capacity Planner collects inventory on one system every 20 seconds. Multiple systems can be collected at the same time as a configurable parameter.

How long do we need to collect performance data?

VMware recommends a minimum of three weeks of data collection to start to compile a server profile with at least 1,000 performance samples. In addition, performance collection over three to four weeks provides server trending on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis that could be critical to understanding when servers are peaking. In addition, the longer you collect data, the more valuable it is.

Does Capacity Planner collect application statistics?

Yes, it collects limited application statistics that are written to Microsoft Performance Monitor (PerfMon).

Utilization and Performance Counters

How are the utilization figures determined?

Utilization and performance counters are determined by collecting multiple samples each hour of each day for each week. The statistics for each hour over a week are correlated together to determine the average, hourly, prime time, and non-prime time utilization for each hour. Average utilization is typically the average utilization during the prime time hours of 7 AM to 6 PM, for example, or for the entire 24-hour period. Capacity Planner also maintains weekly summary statistics that track maximum observed, minimum observed, average, hourly, prime time, non-prime time, and weekend loads. Capacity Planner also maintains a summary for the most recent four weeks of performance statistics on these same criteria. The summary is used to determine peak load for consolidation recommendations. The peak load is determined by evaluating each metric over the most recent four weeks of collection and locating the hour of the day that has the highest average value. It is not the maximum observed value as any statistical analysis eliminates the high and low values from consideration.

What is the difference between peak hour performances versus average utilization?

Peak hour is the one hour in the twenty-four hour period that has the highest average utilization. Average utilization is typically the average utilization during the prime time hours of 7 AM to 7 PM, for example, or for the entire twenty-four hour period. The difference between these two metrics is significant.

Figure: Peak vs. Average Utilization

Assume that servers A, B, C, and D in Figure 1 were Microsoft Exchange servers that were to be consolidated based on average utilization. If this were the case and all peaked to 40 percent utilization in the morning and at the lunch hour, the server would run out of capacity at those critical times.

As another example, assume that the servers in Figure 1 were Citrix servers. On average, most Citrix machines that Capacity Planner has monitored run low CPU utilization, low memory utilization, and extremely low disk utilization. However, the largest variable is network utilization. During peak loads, usually in the morning during sign-on, the network traffic may go from an average of 100,000 bytes per second to millions of bytes per second. If one used average utilization or even prime-time utilization metrics for consolidating a Citrix server, problems would likely arise.

Identifying the peak-hour average provides capacity planners with an upper threshold for consolidating servers. How important is the difference between prime time averages and the peak hour average? Analysis of data in the information warehouse reveals that the peak-hour average is two times higher than the prime-time average for 68 percent of all servers. For 32 percent of all servers, the peak-hour average is five times higher than the prime-time average.

The standard installation samples each server once an hour. Are all servers sampled simultaneously or divided across the time period? Can this be configured?

Servers are sampled in groups of ten servers. They are not all done simultaneously; instead, they are sampled in order until all are sampled. Performance collection is a configurable option within the Manager.

How does Capacity Planner calculate peak hour and other calculations?

Capacity Planner collects data every hour and calculates peak-hour utilization for each one-hour increment in the 24 hour day. After several weeks, it identifies utilization for the busiest hour in the week. Capacity Planner also maintains weekly summary statistics that track maximum observed, minimum observed, average, hourly, prime time, non prime time, and weekend loads. Capacity Planner also maintains a summary for the most recent four weeks of performance statistics on these same criteria. The summary is what is used to determine peak load for consolidation recommendations. Peak load is determined by finding the hour of the day with the highest sustained load. It is not a measure of maximum observed values.

Hyperthreading

How does Capacity Planner handle x86 processors that have the hyperthreading feature enabled?

Capacity Planner detects hyperthreading based on the model for the server sent to Capacity Planner. If the chassis model is sent, Capacity Planner checks to see if the hyperthread flag has been turned on for that model in the information warehouse. If the hyperthread flag is on, Capacity Planner ignores half of their CPUs. If they send four, Capacity Planner only enters two into the system, assuming that they did not go through the process to turn hyperthreading off.

Capacity Planner flags a chassis as being hyperthreaded when it is either manually entered or detected by comparing the maximum number of CPUs allowed in the chassis to the number of CPUs being reported. If a chassis can only have four processors, but inventory is sent showing eight processors for that model, Capacity Planner turns on the hyperthread flag for that model.

Proposed New Hardware

Does proposed new hardware have VMware automatically included on it?

Proposed new hardware does not automatically have VMware included on it.

How can I help make VMware recommendations?

When leveraging Capacity Planner to run consolidation or virtualization scenarios, users can create a new server with specific hardware specifications and either VMware ESX Server, VMware Server, or standard Microsoft, Linux, or UNIX operating systems. These systems comprise a group of servers to run consolidation scenarios against. The scenarios will allow users to pick their various future platforms and operating system combinations, and then run scenarios to determine how many proposed systems are needed.

How does Capacity Planner determine the native MHz for proposed new hardware?

Capacity Planner reduces the amount of native capacity when multi-processors are involved. The rule of thumb in the industry is to reduce the amount of native capacity available to 80% of the original rating for the second processor. Subsequent processors are multiplied by .8 raised to the power of the slot number of the CPU. So the third CPU contributes .8 raised to the second power multiplied times the rated speed (the third CPU is in slot 2 because slot numbers begin with 0). If this is a 64-bit processor, the percentage is raised to 90% due to improvements in the technology. Therefore, the variables are the number of processors, the rated speed, and the slot number.

Platforms

Is VMware comparing like with like when comparing Intel and AMD based platforms? If people believe the AMD CPU is more powerful, is their a way to apply a correction factor for AMD platforms?

AMD Opteron is not more powerful. It is a different technology that provides better throughput under certain circumstances. In an Intel platform, all the processors make memory requests through a common physical interface. AMD Opteron has a separate physical interface for each processor. The bottleneck to memory has been removed, and the speed to the memory is faster as well. This is the big difference. It is also a 64-bit platform, but that alone does not offer an advantage over an Intel 64-bit platform. There are two things to consider. First, are you comparing a 32-bit to a 64-bit platform? Second, are you comparing Intel to AMD Opteron?

The only way you see significant improvements in throughput is in a memory intensive application. Most applications are not total random memory access intensive, only about 2%. If a system is paging due to limitations on the file system cache, 64 bit may solve the problem by allowing a much larger file system cache. If a system is paging because every reference to memory is for new data that has not been read into memory before, this is a disk access and memory speed issue, primarily disk access. If you have a system that is constantly pulling data from memory but not requiring disk access, this favors the AMD Opteron. This typically means large database servers. When we combine a number of systems in a virtualized environment, this creates a memory intensive situation on the ESX Server overall and favors AMD Opteron. There is no way to apply an algorithm to the statistics that would show lower processor utilization. The processor will not run at a lower utilization, but the throughput and response times will be better. Because it cannot be represented statistically, the technology and the ramifications are explained to clients. Essentially, the statistics point out that running an AMD Opteron at 65% utilization and Intel at 50% utilization provides greater throughput with AMD Opteron.

Transferring Data

Are there other ways to transfer data besides HTTPS?

HTTPS is the default transfer mechanism, but you have the ability to transfer data through FTP, email, or burning the data to a CD.

Can the data be exported?

Users can export data from either the Manager or Dashboard to a CSV file.

Reports

Can you create custom reports?

Dashboard includes Dynamic Reports that permits users to create customizable reports and export them to CSV files for further analysis.

Downloads

1. Capacity Planner Sales FAQ (1635)
2. Capacity Planner Security FAQ (2194)
3. Capacity Planner Technical FAQ (4331)

]]> http://vmetc.com/2008/07/11/everything-you-ever-wanted-to-know-about-vmware-capacity-planner/feed/ 10 http://vmetc.com/2008/05/04/san-diego-here-i-come/ http://vmetc.com/2008/05/04/san-diego-here-i-come/#comments Sun, 04 May 2008 14:56:08 +0000 Rich Brambley http://vmetc.com/2008/05/04/san-diego-here-i-come/ I am headed to San Diego today for VMware Partner Exchange 2008. It should be another great week of learning and networking. I am looking forward most to the hands on labs for Site Recovery Manager, ESXi, Virtual Desktop Infrastructure, and Lab Manager. There is also separate technical solution tracks for beginner, intermediate, and advanced breakout sessions. The exhibit pavillion, called the VMware Experience, sounds interesting too. Quoting the event website:

“Experience a whole new type of exhibit pavilion!
Modeled after VMware’s campus headquarters which allows for “casual collisions,” VMware Experience is an open environment that fosters collaboration among the attendees. With 2 large lounges with hotspots, easy access to our OEM and Alliance Partners, several coffee and beverage stations, this “town-square” type set-up allows you to enhance your experience and the connections you make!“

I’ve never been to San Diego, but I hear it is one the most scenic cities to visit. I am taking my camera, and will hopefully have some time to do a few things. I was told by a friend that Driving the Pacific Coast Highway north from San Diego sounds like a can’t miss opportunity. Unfortunately, the Padres are on the road (a three game series in Atlanta!). Whale watching season ended in March, but daily 1 hour harbor cruises sound like a great way to see and learn a lot about San Diego.

As Usual, VMware has planned a Partner Appreciation Party that looks like a lot of fun for Weds night.

I’m sure I will create a several posts from this event, but I can’t promise they will appear this week. I am starting a series to link all realted event posts together, so look for more over the next week or so.

VDI & VDM Architecture

With VDM 2 the VDI architecture is scalable and flexible. Multiple installations of VDM allow for larger numbers of users and desktops. Securing virtual desktop access from the Internet is also possible.

When you install VDM 2 you have three choices for the Desktop Manager installation type:

• Standard (first Connecton Server),
• Replica (copies of first server) servers
• Security Server – ssl tunneling, 2 factor authentication – can be installed in DMZ

VDM installs

windows services on 2003 SP2 or Server 2003 R2

VDM can only be installed on 32 bit OS

VDM installs Microsoft ADAM in order to provide non intrusive AD modifications locally. ADAM only reads the existing AD schema for users and groups and does not modify.

Currently there is no built in load balancing to provide a single broker address for users. Different VDM server addresses can be used for different users, or a third party load balancer like F5 can be used to provide a virtual ip address.

When using multiple VDM servers, configurations replicate between servers

Features

USB Redirection

• allows access to local usb ports on the client hardware (thin-clients, desktops).
• Active Sync with local ports.
• Globally enabled only, can not turn on/off usb redirection for individual users
• requires installation of VDM Agent and client
• for Windows VMs only

Tunneling - SSL through the communication path all the way back to the ESX server

You can provision individual desktops or desktop pools,

• Pools can consist of either persistent, or non-persistent desktops.
  • persistent – files saved to VM and changes made are kept. Once a user is assigned to a virtual desktop the user is always connected to same VM
  • non-persistent – files and changes are not kept. VDM can restart the VM after user logs out to reset the VM for the ext user
• The Pools can be based on desktop needs – accounting, order entry, support – all cloned from the same template

Web Management interface for VDM servers

• enable/disble VDM servers
• manage inventory of desktops
• policies
• event viewer
• provsioning thresholds
• session timeouts
• enable/disable tunneling
• enable/disable usb redirection

VDM Agent

• installed on XP Pro 32 bit, Vista Ultimate virtual desktops,

• must be installed for USB redirection driver

VDM client

• required on local PC or thin-client for remote access to virtual desktop
• You need a local installation of RDP
• windows OS supported only.
• Must have to use USB redirection

VDM Web Client

• Provides access to virtual desktop via a web browser
• Method of access to virtual desktop from Linux PC
  • SUSE, Redhat, Ubuntu (requires RDP, Java, Firefox)
• USB redirection not available via web client

Thin-client support – supports Xpe and Linux based thin-clients

Future feature- use a template and linked clones to reduce disk space consumed (like in Lab Manager)

I entered 200 servers in the calculator and received the following results (click on the screen shot to see a larger image):

Saving the World with VMware by

• saving 2,250 tons of CO2
• planting 9,900 trees
• offsetting the effects of 974 cow emissions
• offsetting the effects of 500 car emissions

Saving your business with VMware by

• reducing server hardware from 200 to 20 saving $900,000
• saving $307,476 in server related power costs
• saving on labor costs
• saving on rack space and data center real estate

Check out Oriel’s virtualization calculator here.

This post uses content from documents found in the VI Plan and Design Toolkit available to VMware partners. Logging on to Partner Central and accessing > Info Center > VAC > Services is how you find the various toolkits. It also should be pointed out that the partitioning information in this post is for ESX 3.x only, and is not applicable to ESX 3i, 2.x or previous versions.

When installing ESX you quickly reach the Partitioning Options screen. Select the “Recommended” radio button initially. You can then make changes from the Partitioning Disks screen which follows.

Primary Partition Changes

Best practices state that the following partitions should be made “Primary” partitions:

/boot

/

Swap

This can be accomplished by selecting each of the aforementioned partitions (one at a time) and clicking the “Edit” button. The configuration options for that partition/file system will be brought up. Select (turn on) the checkbox option near the bottom of the box labeled “Force to be a primary partition”. Do this for each of 3 file systems listed above, clicking “OK” after fixing each file system.

Create New Partitions

Following VMware best practices, it is best to dedicate entire partitions for the following directories:

/var

/tmp

/home

This can be accomplished by clicking New.

Follow the configurations from the following table, as the file system should reflect these sizes. Click Next when finished.

Local Storage Partitions

This table shows the service console partitions and sizes for each ESX Server host. Some of these recommended partition sizes are larger than the default values. The additional partitions and increased sizes will protect against the critical root partition getting filled up which can lead to issues. Note that this section does not apply for ESX Server 3i. Also, the following partition table uses less than 16 GB of space.

Service Console Partitions and Sizes for Each ESX Server Host

To understand the Capacity Planner tool let’s first back up and understand the Capacity Analysis services project. When you start to consider how to migrate your data center to VI:

• You need to size server hardware which will become ESX hosts, and you need to know how many ESX hosts you’ll deploy.
• You’d like to explore different vendor hardware platform scenarios for your ESX hosts.
• You need to understand which of your physical servers will consolidate well and which ones are not good virtualization canidates.
• You’d like to figure out a good VM to Host consolidation ratio.
• You need to estimate your total disk storage for the VI solution.

Capacity Planner helps you

A typical Capacity Analysis project is 4 weeks. It’s 4 weeks because you want to understand when your servers are the busiest, like at the end of the month when all reports are run, and when your servers are idle. During the project the performance data is uploaded to VMware’s database where your data is analysed and then presented to the VMware partner for use in generating consolidation scenarios. The consolidation scenarios are finally delivered to the customer in a report. The most common format of the delivered report these days is the Basic Consolidation Estimate .ppt, or BCE.

VMware’s Capacity Planner Overview web page describes it best:

Gain insight into IT resource utilization and develop a virtualization roadmap for server containment and consolidation with VMware Capacity Planner. Professional services based on VMware Capacity Planner can help you:

• Assess the current state of your IT infrastructure with comprehensive performance metrics
• Plan for capacity optimization through detailed utilization analysis and benchmarks
• Design an optimal solution with scenario modeling

VMware Capacity Planner – VMware

What Was Announced?

Oracle announced Oracle VM at their Oracle OpenWorld user conference. Oracle VM is a Xen hypervisor based on Oracle Enterprise Linux. Oracle also announced that the Oracle Database, Oracle Application Server middleware and selected applications would be certified when run in Oracle Enterprise Linux virtual machines on Oracle VM. Oracle claimed that Oracle VM is more efficient than other virtualization products. Oracle VM is free, but annual support costs are $499 for two-socket systems and $999 for unlimited sockets.

Oracle Press Release:

• “Oracle Unveils Oracle VM”

Press/Blog Coverage:

• “ Oracle Introduces Oracle VM As It Leaps Into Virtualization” – Information Week
• “Analysts call Oracle’s virtualization bluff” – ZDnet

VMware Summary Response:

• Oracle VM is yet another Xen variant offering far less than VMware Infrastructure. Once customers investigate the Oracle offering, they will conclude that VI3 is the overwhelming choice for their virtualization strategy. VI3 provides the full complement of availability, resource management functionality and the maturity of a production proven platform with extensive certifications and support (2,000 hardware models certified, 30+ guest operating systems). Tens of thousands of customers have standardized on a “VMware first” policy. Informed customers will no more choose a Xen product over VI3 than they would choose MySQL over Oracle.
• Oracle’s open source offerings have very limited adoption.
  • Ask your customers: How much of the market has adopted Oracle Enterprise Linux (OEL) one year after its launch against the leading Red Hat Linux distribution? Answer: An insignificant minority.
  • We believe Oracle VM faces a similar hurdle, as the overwhelming majority of customers want uniform and powerful functionality for automation and management across all of their applications, not fragmented application- or vendor-specific virtualization silos. Oracle VM will now be the 5th or 6th Xen variant to be introduced (Citrix, Virtual Iron, Red Hat, Sun, Novell/SUSE, etc.) with each limited by incompatible virtual machines, differing functionality and divergent levels of certification and support.
• All the disadvantages of Xen. Oracle VM suffers from all the disadvantages of the Xen hypervisor’s OS-centric architecture, such as vulnerabilities from using a general-purpose management operating system, poor scalability and incomplete/missing enterprise functionality.
• Oracle continues to support customers using VMware; “certification” of Oracle VM is of limited practical value.
  • Per Oracle MetaLink Note 249212.1, Oracle supports most of its products in a VMware environment by referring non-Oracle specific issues to VMware on an as needed basis. In addition, most enterprises have been able to negotiate unlimited full support with their Oracle representatives.
  • Hundreds of customers run Oracle products (applications, databases and middleware) on VMware Infrastructure in dev/test and production – more than any other virtualization platform. Over 40 referenceable customers are running Oracle products on VMware Infrastructure today.
  • Please contact VMware if your customers run into Oracle support issues, as we have been able to unblock most enterprise customers who encounter difficulties.
  • Oracle’s “certification” of Oracle VM covers a minority of customer environments. Certification applies only to Oracle Enterprise Linux, which currently accounts for less than 5% of Oracle’s Linux user base. Oracle explicitly acknowledges very poor performance of Oracle VM with Windows environments, which represent a large majority of customer’s Oracle platforms.
• Set the facts straight around VMware and Oracle performance. Oracle claims around, “Three times greater efficiency,” are misleading marketing stunts. VMware extensively tuned ESX Server to run both databases and other mission critical applications well. Real-world Oracle database performance can run near-native on paravirtualized Linux guests with VMware Infrastructure 3.5, and runs very favorably without relying on non-standard guest patches. Please refer to “Ten Reasons Why Oracle Databases Run Best on VMware”and “Virtualize Your Oracle Landscape” for updated benchmarks that demonstrates the practical, real-world benefits of running Oracle on VI3.
• VMware will continue to work with Oracle because the majority of customers want the flexibility and choice offered by Oracle products on VMware Infrastructure.
  • Given Oracle’s acknowledgement of x86 virtualization as a fact of life, we believe increasing and consistent customer demand will lead to fully unfettered support and virtualization-aware licensing policies. Please let the your VMware team know about customers who are interested in advocating Oracle to fully support VMware Infrastructure as an “equal” platform to Oracle VM.