Dugie’s Pensieve

Christian Saborío has posted his experiences of comparing Virtual Server and VMWare Server.  You can read more in his post “Virtual Server and VMWare Server“, and a snippet is below:

During the last month, due to some testing we had to carry out with a software project, I needed to work with 64-bit virtual machines. Virtual Server does not support 64-bit virtual machines, so I downloaded a copy of VMWare’s free server solution and decided to give it a try. After playing around with VMWare Server, I’ve had my ups and downs which I will try to contrast with my previous experiences with Virtual Server…

…The bottom line is that both are excellent products and the fact that they are free is amazing.  I have grown so used to Virtual Server that I will continue to use it unless I have the specific need for a 64-bit VM, and when that time comes, I will hopefully be able to use Longhorn Virtualization

PS:  Fanboy’s and Propellorheads behave!  I don’t want to start yet another unholy war of Red vs Blue — I’m still recovering from last time  :)

Cool huh?  Well it all starts with a memo that was sent to all Federal government CIO’s, requiring agencies to move to a standard configuration for computers running Microsoft Windows by February 1, 2008.  without granting users admin rights

So, Microsoft has been working closely with the OMB, NIST, NSA, DISA, DHS, and the USAF — and is in the process of creating a series of Virtual PC images to help organizations to jumpstart their testing.

You can read more about this in the FDCC blog inaugural post, “Federal Desktop Core Configuration; Kicking off the FDCC blog“, and a snippet is below:

At Microsoft we’re creating and testing Virtual PC (VPC) images that we hope will help agencies and solutions providers to develop and test applications to run on FDCC compliant systems. These VPC images are not suitable for deployment, they’ll be evaluation copies of Windows that will expire after a set period of time, but since they will be preconfigured they should help organizations to jumpstart their testing…

…You still want to know more details about the settings, don’t you? The single most important requirement in the FDCC is that all normal users will have to log in without administrative privileges. Experience has shown us that taking away admin rights from users causes the most challenges: some applications stop working and some users get frustrated that they can no longer install whatever software they want and they can no longer make whatever configuration changes they want to their computers

I had one of those priceless ‘Master Card Moments’ today

• Provision a Virtual Machine from a template - 3.5 minutes
• Waiting for one of the Virtualization hosts to reboot - 5.5 minutes
• Snorting Fanta through your nose when you realise the comical irony - priceless

Via Jeffrey Snover over at the powershell blog:  Last night BenP delivered “Scripting Virtual Server with PowerShell” at the Powershell usergroup.  Here is the slide deck; is not very verbose, so might not make the most sense if you didn’t attend the session, but could still be useful.

The above snippet is heavily edited, you can read more in BenP’s post:  Scripting Virtual Server with PowerShell, or download his slide deck below.

NOTE:  If you are after some more Powershell and Virtual Server resources, try Ben Armstrong’s blog.

TechED sessions are up …and it’s kid in a candy store time.  My first initial picks would have to be:

• ARC304 - Architecting Next Generation Business Applications w/ Mike Walker
• BOF04 - Microsoft Innovation Centre - Next Generation Workplace w/ Marty Gnanananthan
• CLI304 - System Center Service Manager: Overview w/ Werner Kasselman
• CLI317 - Windows Vista: The Top 10 Reasons to deploy now (or why change what works for me now?) w/ Kyle Rosenthal,
• CON309 - Advanced Microsoft BizTalk 2006 R2 Concepts w/ Mick Badran
• DEV316 - Build Server Virtualization Presentation w/ Mitch Denny?
• SEC302 - Making the Tradeoff: Be Secure or Get Work Done w/ Steve Riley
• SVR304 - Branch Office Solutions in Microsoft Windows Server 2008 w/ David Lowe
• SVR310 - Up-close and personal with Virtual Machines and SCVMM  w/ Me!
• SVR311 - Microsoft Windows Server Network Policy Server Fundamentals: Implementing NAP w/ Michael Kleef
• SVR314 - High Availability for physical and virtual environments with Windows Server 2008 w/ Ben Armstrong
• SVR318 - Microsoft Server Virtualization Architecture and Directions w/ Ben Armstrong
• UNC305 - Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 Deployment Planning and High Availability in SP1 w/ Eileen Brown

I’ll need to think about this a little more though, but whilst I do that, I’ll let you pick your own sessions :)

I’ve just noticed that Jeff Woolsey is blogging over at http://blogs.technet.com/virtualization/.  Nice!

Jeff is a Senior Program Manager focused on Virtualization, you’ve probably listened to him in the Windows Server Virtualization video on MSN Soapbox. (..and at the WinHEC keynote before that) 

Anyway, I hear Jeff has been a great (perhaps more like awesome) job internally at Microsoft with readiness for Viridian, so I’m looking forward to seeing some great content in upcoming blogposts! You can check out his first post in the “Windows Virtualization Team Blog“, and a snippet is below:

Greetings! I’m Jeff Woolsey, a Senior Program Manager at Microsoft focused on Microsoft Virtualization. I’ve worked on virtualization technology for over ten years such as Virtual PC for Mac, Virtual PC for Windows and Virtual Server. These days I spend most of my time on Virtual Server and our new hypervisor based virtualization (codename “Viridian”) which will be a key technology of Windows Server 2008.

I have the pleasure of regularly meeting with customers and partners and one bit of feedback I receive often is that folks want to hear more about what we’re doing in terms of virtualization. With this in mind, I thought I’d take some time to start blogging about Microsoft virtualization. The focus of my blogs will be Virtual Server and our new hypervisor based virtualization in Windows Server 2008.

PS:  Jeff if you’re reading this, I love your blog user “WSV_GUY“

After my benchmarking coffee post, a few people sent me quizzical emails asking about the project I’m on.  So I thought I’d blog it.  The project in a nutshell is to help the team here (at a dev shop) migrate from Lotus Notes to a Sharepoint/Exchange, and collapse the domain model in the process.

My role in all of this is making sure the business requirements are met [and not overlooked] by the technical implementation.  So virtualization is [still] huge part of my work, it’s just not my work if that makes sense?  I’m finding most of my time is looking at little things like:

• How long roles are to be virtualized - all new servers/roles are starting as Virtual Machines, each role is classified as a ‘workload type’ and projected growth.  Roles that could potentially outgrow a VM and require physical hardware (that’s either politically or technically) are flagged.   
• Workload lifecycle - this is mostly how long do we intend to keep the role.  So far 5 to 8 years appears to be the norm.  We are preferring the “Build new and migrate data” as apposed to in place upgrade  (but this could change).   At the moment we’re just gathering support articles and doco.  We won’t have hard candidates for another 7-8 months, so we’ll revaluate these on an on-going basis.      
• Archival and replay of legacy systems - mostly identifying systems for P2V and methods for storage.  Storage at the moment will most likely be 80Gb USB drives.  Only a couple of systems need to be kept on-line
• Service Availability - Focusing on “service windows” rather than “raw thumping uptime”.  Most services only have key times they need to be available, and an outage of 30 minutes is mostly acceptable.  Backup and restore requirements seem to consume most of my time in this area. 
• Assorted Application stuff - most of this is just ’sanity check’.  If we place role ‘X’ at site ‘Y’ it will impact the delivery of service ‘Z’ by ‘ABC’; So what are the different ways we can mitigate the pain of ‘ABC’.
• …lots of other miscellaneous duties and drinking coffee every chance I get of course.

It’s a little frustrating at times, but different and interesting from what I’m used to.

So what virtualization am I using?  Well, at the moment I have 5 Virtual Machines locally that I use everyday for ‘validating’ (it’s not really testing).  I’m using Virtual PC for this because it’s sinfully easy to drag and drop files between each VMs.  Vista Readyboost and Virtual PC is certainly a winning combination, and has mode a noticeable improvement.  Overall, everything just works nicely.

The servers however are all hosted housed on a combination of 3x virtualization platforms:  VMware VI3, VMware Server and Virtual Server R2 SP1.  There are no plans to standardise on any one platform just yet — and there is a need to maintain all three, because each of the project groups and development teams have justified to keep their current investment.  Hey, that’s fine by me.  It’s better than the alternative of a hundred whiteboxes scattered around!  (hence my outburst last Thursday)

So I think that’s the all the important stuff for now?  There is heaps of other cool stuff being identified along the way, but all this will be keeping me busy for the moment :)

What more can be said:  Frank Arrigo is off to Redmond!  – Frank spills the beans in G’Day World #262. 

If you’re an Aussie Frank is more than just the guy who “does not satisfy Wikipedia’s Notability Requirements” he’s also the guy who who leads the Microsoft’s Developer Platform Evangelism team in Oz.    …and super blogger:  http://blogs.msdn.com/frankarr

Congratulations Frank baby!!!    I’m gonna miss you Dude.

The lads over at the blog “Documenting a virtualization project” have finished.  In under 12 months they’ve consolidated 120 Virtual Machine on to 6 Hosts using VMWare ESX Server 3 and VirtualCenter 2.  — this is a consolidation ratio of about 20:1

I know this is a bit off topic for my blog, but I personally find it still very relevant and interesting.

The guys are saving about $9,500 AUD per month in real estate cost/rental, (that’s $6000 EUD or $8,000 USD) — and roughly 30%  of that again per month in Power ($3000 AUD).

A huge thankyou Martijnl for his time and efforts, for publishing his “notes from the field” for such a brilliant resource.

You can read more about his project wrapup in his post “End score (consolidation, power etc.) « Documenting a virtualization project“, and a snippet is below:

Our current VI consists of:

• Six cluster hosts (DL585 G2, 48GB memory per host) :: 120 Virtual Servers (consolidation 20:1)
• 1 Virtual Center Management Server

Real estate saved:

• Total rack units used for VI: 30
• Total racks used for VI: 2
• Total rack units saved: 240
• Total racks saved: 8
• Total sq. meters saved: 50 (we would have had to move into a datacenter suite twice as large to accomodate for growth)
• Total real estate cost One Time Charge saved: € 30.000 (approx.) – 
• Total real estate cost Monthly Recurring Charges saved:  € 6.000 (approx.)

There are also additional benefits like the massive increase in continuity, the time saved on provisioning new servers and the transparency in costs.

On a side note, Martijnl has rolled out VDI for 50 Desktops.  Rather than listen to all all the other site bagging/hyping up VDI, you read more about his experiences in his VDI posts:  Mumbai is connected, First connection and Operational and stable

It’s a beautiful day here in Brisbane, and I should be on the Bike enjoying some twisty road near a mountain somewhere.   Instead I’m here are home rationalizing my TechED session.

Hows that for some messed up priorities :)

Hmmm, now if only my TechED session was  GPS-enabled-smartphones-taking-photos-of-twisty-corners-from-the-motorbike-and-mashing-up-the-trip-on-the-fly-to-live-maps. 

I need to talk to fellow super villain Dave Lemphers about his Online Map Services and uber cool location sharing!

Ok, enough day dreaming — back to my preso; I’ll treat myself to an afternoon iced coffee on MT Cootha when I finish my next few slides.  Hey it’s not much, but it’s a workable compromise.