Dugie’s Pensieve

It’s been a longer than I would have liked, but here is a rollup of links I thought interesting, but didn’t blog at the time:

• MS WINCAT-  Virtualization IT Administration Model - Allen Stewart is after your experiences; An Administration model that will win out and your thoughts on the topic because this should drive flexible administration models in virtualization products *Recommended Reading*
• Moving a virtualized data center « Documenting a virtualization project - Field notes on relocating 150 servers (30 physical servers) to a new data centre 60 km away
• VDI: Operational and stable - real life from the field notes on their production VDI implimentation
• VMRCplus on Microsoft Downloads
• Cache and memory with many-cores - Virtualization consumes more cores and more simultaneous threads — this means more contention for shared resources, specifically cache space and memory bandwidth. Good article covering this
• Tracing with VHDMount - functionality to see when something goes wrong when trying to mount a VHD file
• Upgrading Windows Server 2003 R2 to SP2 with WDS - If you upgrade Windows Server without belonging to a domain, WDS will NOT work when you try and configure it
• How do you route between Virtual Networks?  - Various ways from RRAS to Dedicate Routing VM
• Windows Server Platform Directions (Sean McGrane)  - improved hardware error handling, and server consolidation to improve server usage by using technologies like
• Windows Server Virtualization Scenarios and Features (Jeff Woolsey and Chris Corio)  - It looks in depth at the server consolidation, business continuity, development and test, and dynamic datacenter scenarios
• How to disable F12 keypress in WDS and RIS  - ’nuff said
• Blog P2V and all that - P2V alternatives to VSMT
• Backup!, Here Comes Protection - DPM and Virtual Server from the DPM blog

About bloody time:  EPG Data set free, “Massive blow to free-to-air TV - Business - Business - theage.com.au“:

THE longstanding walls protecting free-to-air TV continue to crumble, with the announcement that the commercial networks will make their jealously guarded electronic program guides available to all manufacturers.

More localised content on TechTalk Blogs with “An EPG for Australia at Last-” and “Free TV Australia announces plans for Industry Supported EPG“

As I walk 20 paces to the coffee machine, there are no less than 12 workstations, unplugged, kept aside, “just in case” — and if I look down the corridor towards finance there are at least 8 more.  So that makes a grand total of 20 tubby ended, lopsided, beat up, old workstations, just laying around, soaking up space, just so someone can power them on one day and get access to homegrown, historical apps and data!?!!

Barrrgh, It’s enough to make a virtualization guy go troppo !?!?

But I’ve had a gentle coffee with some key people, raised some compelling possibilities, and the beginnings of a change is in the air.   let’s hope there will be a Part III to follow in a few days.

What do you do when your file format (with all your critical business and historical data), outlives the application?  This is a very painful reality for the business I am working with at the moment — maybe I’ll even revisit that point with another post. 

But the BBC National Archives has 580 Terrabytes of data, in older formats, that just can’t be read (whilst ensuring the accuracy and integrity of the original formatting of the file) with Applications under Vista.  So whilst the data is being converted to open standards, the lads at the National Archives are using Virtual PC.

There is lots of resources on this at the moment, so check out any of the links below and be sure to watch the video:

• BBC NEWS Technology Warning of data ticking time bomb
• James O’Neill’s blog Imagine having 580 Terabytes of data you can’t access.
• Steve Clayton Geek In Disguise The Digital Dark Age

Visual Studio 2005 Team Suite VHD just got re-released on Microsoft Downloads.  I’m not sure what the technical difference is but I’ve noticed that v1.1 is about 1200 Mb smaller and broken into 29x manageable 100Mb chunks.  …very nice touch!

Anyway head on over to the Microsoft website and download the Visual Studio 2005 Team Suite VHD. (2.7 Gb)

….I wonder how much extra traffic the VHD testtdrive program has generated for microsoft.com/downloads; I reckon in must be getting hammered!

It’s been nearly 6 months since I’ve blogged any decent updates about my dealings with my Media Centre. 

I’m very happy to report that using my Media Centre to Host a Virtual Machine has worked really well.  I’ve nearly crunched the ~220 DVDs that I own into Divx.  I would have finished by now, except I keep buying new DVDs.  The VM has also assumed quite a few other roles since it’s inception, and I’ll probably come back and blog more about that.  But it’s working beautifully, I can run whatever I like within the VM and keep the Media Centre sterile.

I do/did have one concern though.  I’ve heard from a variety of sources that Readyboost and Media Centre make a really good combination.  I’m a little concerned though, I have this fear of breaking off a USB key (or the unpleasantness of it hanging out the front/side of my beautiful looking case).  So I did some research and found the “INNODISK 4GB USB 2.0 FLASH DRIVE” from  Aus PC-Market.  It looks perfect, just plug it into a USB header on the motherboard and no unsightly messiness.

If you are thinking of building a Media Center, Paul has a really good post on Silent PC Design Fundamentals, it pretty much ‘notes from the field’ that both of us used when building our own boxes.

Other than that, everything is sweet and I couldn’t possibly imagine life without a Media Centre — so now I need to sit back, relax and wait for the TV Internet goodness of Joost.

Jon Stokes over at Ars Techncia has a really good article on how virtualization is a prime culprit for resource contention on multi core processors.

Jon sheds light on just a few of the challenges vendors like Intel have to address to make heavy duty Virtualization/Consolidation ’sustainable’:  Intel’s vision of the future of the “processor” is a heterogeneous network on a chip (NoC). This NoC may contain cores of different types, some of which are highly application-specific. These cores will run threads that have very different resource needs and usage patterns than the more general-purpose x86 cores

Another snippet from his article ‘Cache and memory in the many-core era‘ is below:

Virtualization has the potential to exacerbate the resource contention problem tremendously, since different workloads running in different virtual machines—workloads managed by OS instances that are mutually unaware of one another—can create a kind of “perfect storm” and pull overall system performance down through the floor.

Or, to put this in plainer English by using an analogy, the VM contention problem is kind of like a two-family condo where both floors are on the same (aging) breaker box. On a Friday night in the dead of summer, if the undergrad girls in the top unit are running eight lights, two air conditioners, four curling irons, and an entertainment system, and the couple down below is running an air conditioner, a washer and dryer, and a dishwasher, then something’s bound to blow. Within each unit, the inhabitants may be carefully monitoring their electricity usage so as not to overtax the aging circuits, but the lack of cross-unit coordination is a recipe for periodic blackouts.

(To unpack the analogy briefly, the two condo units would be two virtual machines, and the person keeping track of electricity usage in each unit would be the OS.)

Virtualization-related resource contention is already a real problem, and there have been a number of attempts by Intel and others in the academic community to profile how different types of workloads interact (c.f. “Virtualization in the Enterprise,” Intel Technology Journal, v10, issue 3). What these studies have found is that degenerate cases, where resource contention causes performance degradation across all the VMs in a system, are not uncommon on enterprise workloads.

I hate to trivialise the article, but it’s interesting and recommended reading. 

Short Review:

This book rocked my world. I mean really rocked my world. I found Ben’s style easy to read without being verbose or wordy — great use of bullets and numbered lists (I’m a big fan of numbered lists).  The book is free from any “Marketing or Microsoft” hype, and Ben tells it like is is. 

If Virtual Server is your thing (or about to become your thing), this book will be the reference you will refer to time and time again.  It covers the whole spectrum of Virtual Server nicely.  Everything from the install and getting it running, through optimization and advanced infrastructure,  right up to extending functionality with scripting via VBscript or powershell.  If you are a Developer or ISV the later chapters are very focused on extensibility of Virtual Server.

Recommended with 8.5 / 9 stars

Long review

The book rocked.  I would have to say it is the best Virtual Server book out there.  I don’t say that because I know Ben and he’s a great guy; I say that truthfully because out of all the Virtual Server books I’ve read so far, this is definitely the best I’ve read by a long way. 

I have to confess though, I’m not the regular audience who will read this book.  I’m the type of guy that spends my time bending Virtual Server to perform all sorts of unnatural acts. This means lots of workarounds, lots of third party tools and lots of scripting.  I learnt a lot from this book.

This book covered all the aspects, and covered all the angles.  I knew there was stuff about the COM API that I didn’t know - and I was too lazy to go read MSDN.  Ben’s book had it, and put everything in context of where it should be.  It has all the basics such as patch management (which isn’t so basic), tricky routes, backup strategies, P2V and so on.  The scripting was good, you can either use it for some basic automation — or once you get to the development chapters use it for some heavy duty provisioning and power on processes.   …and there is a Sysprep section!  I mean really, Sysprep is more than just essential, it’s the law.  It’s amazing how many people exclude this very important resource.

There a smattering of Linux virtual machine references throughout the book (including YUM for patching), along with all the tips and traps for new players.  There is also some hard stats on sequential and random disk performance with IDE and SATA and how this translates to performance inside the VM.  Actually the book touches (and explains) on everything that has popped up at some stage with my dealings with the product.

So the long review in short, Ben’s book is pretty much the definitive guide out there.  Ben is honest and writes the product for what it is, and what it can do — once you rip off the cover and get down to the nuts and bolts, Virtual Server can do a lot more than you give it credit for.  …but you have to expect that from a product that has a web interface as it’s primary admin tool   :b

I think that’s it?   

The book took me about 4 days to read cover to cover; on and off over Friday to Monday.  As a book it got dog ears very quickly.  Colour pages would have made the book almost perfect (I need code to be in colour), but granted the book would be more expensive.  There is just enough screen shots, tables and diagrams to balance the book nicely.

Yup, straight to the pool room — recommended with 8.5 / 9 stars.

It’s no secret I have a weakness for coffee, in fact I love my coffee — and will probably treat myself some Kopi Luwak Coffee for my Birthday. 

I’m also on a Lotus Notes to Sharepoint project at the moment.  Actually it’s more of an uber virtualized migration and consolidation. 

Anyway, normally I would have gone running and screaming from such a project, because I abhor domino and notes!  …but the guys have a fully optioned up Franke Flair coffee machine in the kitchen.  We’re talking $10K of ‘pimped my ride’ coffee machine here, all smooth, golden coffee goodness, mmmmmm!

But what me chuckle today, was an informal coffee review I was having with a mate of mine.  Rob drinks more coffee than I do, and triple espressos for him are the norm.  Anyway we got talking about  blends of coffee, and although Rob is a reasonable well articulated guy, his official word on Goroka Espresso is:

> thats Goroka Espresso, i can’t drink that [censored].  It’s like drinking speed mixed with road base

I guess you had to be there.  But several hours later I’m still smiling - and off for a coffee.

I was re awarded the MVP for Windows Virtual Machine over the weekend.  It’s an honour to be part of the Microsoft MVP Program again.

Thankyou to all the MVPs, Community members and Friends who’ve been there at events, usergroups, cups of coffees or just emailed through.  It’s great to see so many people who are interested in virtualization.  I’m really looking forward to spreading a little more of the ‘virtual machine lovin’ with everyone :)

Many thanks again.

Dugie.