Under MSDN Microsoft has launched a new site called http://gps.cloudapp.net this site is awesome! The site will allow you to search for group policy settings, filter by Internet Explorer version, office version and others and browse by registry or by policy.

But this tool makes it much easier to find the right settings and apply them either with registry hacks or policy objects.

This is a quick example of a search on hide drives which is pretty commonly used but still..

There is not much more to it, but a great tool for sure, one of my new favorite online tools

The tools is naturally powered by Azure

This is GREAT news, i think it is just what we need.. a hands-on lab with guided exercises to give everyone a better understanding of VDI and especially XenDesktop and the Hyper-V platform integration.

Personally i spend a lot of time working with companies on Proof of Concepts to decide whether or not Virtual Desktops deliver the value-add their company needs. I think this is virtual lab is a great innovation in the quest to spread understanding of both the several hyper-visors available and the concepts needed to build a viable Virtual Desktop proof of Concept.

Deciding whether or not Hypervisors A or B is the best platform for your organization may not be easily decided over this virtual lab, but i think it clearly shows what Hyper-V can offer in the aspect of a virtual desktop host. And let there be no doubt, when you are talking about virtual desktops, the cost of the hypervisor is a parameter.

Citrix XenDesktop to me is the best positioned Virtual Desktop broker in the market. This is from my point of view because of the close integration with the older brother Citrix XenApp, this integration makes it possible to spread your virtual desktops over a dynamic virtual desktop platform, and the much cheaper “shared virtual desktop” platform which Citrix XenApp delivers.

What i do not understand is why VMware has not tried to incorporate terminal services(now RDS) support in a much better way to help accommodate the users which does not need to have their own OS, and by that lowering the total cost of the deployment… but that’s just me.. i do not buy the hype, i did the math.. And if you do VDI without doing the math.. “Oh boy..”

To get more information on this new lab cooperation between Citrix and Microsoft have a look here: http://community.citrix.com/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=116033898

Click here to try out the lab: https://cmg.vlabcenter.com/default.aspx?moduleid=281742e3-2613-42da-bd58-2c3578f039b4

or watch the video here:

I guess i could put in a guide to solve the challenges here but i chose not to. Citrix and MS did a good job on guiding through the challenges and delivering a good lab to work in.. good job!

I Really wish we could see this from more virtualization vendors! this is the way to show off your product!

To get started with Hyper-V 2.0 i started browsing the worldwide inter-web. And came across a great set of videos at Technet Edge. And on this site i found a series of videos by ‘Virtual Boy’ i guess also known as Matt McSpirit

Matt has published a whole bunch of videos on setting  up Hyper-V, Cluster Shared storage and all the other needed disciplines.

Some of the topics available:

Hyper-V Server 2008 R2: Bare M… Migration (In about an hour!)

Hyper-V R2: Building a Hyper-V R2 Cluster

Hyper-V R2: Making Highly Available VMs

Hyper-V R2: Introducing Cluster Shared Volumes

To see the entire list of Virtual Boy videos check here: http://edge.technet.com/Tags/Virtualboy/

This site for me was a great way to get a quick overview of changed with R2 and best practice for configuration.

Rene Vester

I spend most of yesterday working with a Hyper-V cluster and one of the things we spend the most time working on was actually storage and LUN configuration. So leveraging the Storage Link technology from Citrix might actually make this exercise a little easier to work with.

The feature included in this realease is mainly the Storage Link Technology and the product is limited in the way that it supports:

• Maximum of 2 Hyper-V hosts
• a single FC og iSCSI storage array

The product can be downloaded for free here: http://deliver.citrix.com/go/citrix/ehvexpress

I have come across a couple of oppinions on the news and i wanted to link them for you to read here:

Allessandro Perilli at Virtualization.info you can find the post here: http://www.virtualization.info/2009/07/citrix-releases-free-version-of.html

Barry Flanagan from Citrix posted a blogpost here, including links to webinars and videos on the subject here: http://www.virtualization.info/2009/07/citrix-releases-free-version-of.html

And if you are a Twitter-person you can follow Barry on twitter here: www.twitter.com/BarryFlanagan or Allessandro on twitter here: www.twitter.com/govirtual

Rene Vester

I would recommend this course to people who needs to work with Citrix Essentials but i also think it will be a great way for people considering Citrix Essentials to supplement or replace existing virtualization infrastructure.

From the description of the course:

This course introduces learners to Citrix XenServer 5.5 and Citrix Essentials for XenServer 5.5 and provides the knowledge needed to perform basic configuration and management tasks. Through online simulations, learners will view, install and configure key product features, as well as explore capabilities such as StorageLink, Workload Balancing and Lab Manager.

On a side note, if you are looking to try out or buy Citrix Essentials for Hyper-V this seminar might also provide a better understanding of the components of Citrix Essentials which are available for both the Hyper-V and XenServer editions.

You can sign up here: http://www.citrixtraining.com/courses/course_view.cfm/course_id:274/cgroup_id:30

Rene Vester

For a while i have been looking into the offerings of the three major vendors Microsoft, VMware and Citrix and i have been trying to decide for myself what would i want and need for my own business.. if i had one.. And the debates on the subject with colleagues and friends have been quite interesting. To me it is a matter of delivering what a business needs to leverage virtualization thereby gaining the lower cost of operations, higher flexibility and of course  an easier infrastructure to manage.

I would like to start this series of posts with a run through of the vendors i am most focused on.

VMware ESX

VMware to me is an awesome innovator in the virtualization space. They have done extraordinary things in the field pushing the adoption of virtualization to a degree where it is not a question of if we should virtualize but more a question of how much we can virtualize, of course keeping in mind how much we can afford to virtualize. One of the things i fear in the aspect of VMware is the fact that they might not be able to keep up as the new platforms catch up on features while keeping the cost of the product down. VMware is by far the most extensive virtualization platform available today. The most proven and the most feature-rich platform if you need to drive a large and complex it infrastructure. The question in regards to VMware is really whether the large part of the customers out there actually need all the features they are getting or have to pay for.

Microsoft Hyper-V

Microsoft has done great things with their own hypervisor the Hyper-V platform, and my most recent experiences tell me that the product is definitely ready to be implemented in production environments. The product is not as enterprise-aware.. or should we say “cloud-aware”.. as VMware but for smaller, simpler installations Hyper-V could be an option for many too look at. Hyper-V is very limited in the variety of platforms supported, but for many of the customers i have spoken to, they agree that it is well worth it to have confidence that if you platform performs poorly you contact one vendor. With the upcoming release of Windows Server 2008 R2 Microsoft Hyper-V also have the long awaited live migration feature and from my tests on the Betas the feature works quite well.

Citrix XenServer

Citrix with their acquisition of XenSource put themselves on the Virtualization world map. Citrix XenServer as the product is called now is a strong Linux/Xen based hypervisor platform with a low performance overhead between hypervisor and virtual guests. The architecture of XenServer and VMware ESX are very similar in the way that they both run on a well-trimmed linux kernel, however they differ a lot in the way they connect virtual machines to the physical hardware(i will elaborate on that in a later part of this series.). Citrix XenServer put themselves on the map even more clearly with their announcement of a free hypervisor with central management, live migration and other features. VMware also has a free edition of their product but Citrix sent a strong message as they delivered close to all the features a mid-complexity customer needs to run an efficient virtual infrastructure especially central management and live migration. Citrix also delivers additional administrative features through their Essentials for Virtualization product and through this bind all their products even more strongly together.

The next post in this series will focus on the differences in architecture of the platforms and the benefits/challenges with these differences.

Rene Vester

I have been spending quite a lot of time this week presenting news from the Synergy to customers around Denmark. And when it came to talks about the virtualization of XenApp and terminal services workloads i think we could all agree that there is a great need for objective performance tests to help guide us to choose the solutions best suited for the environment we are working with at the moment.

At Citrix Synergy in a Virtualization Congress session i had the pleasure of watching a presentation by Jerome and Ruben, two dutch CTP’s they presented the joint-venture between their two companies PQR and Login Consultants a project named Virtual Reality Check. The Project is awesome in two ways i think, first it provides a great view into their results from the tests they have done so far. Secondly the tool they have used to automate the workloads for the tests have been made available to the community.

The tool they are using to perform their tests is called VSI, Virtual Session Indexer.
The VSI tool is basically an automation of workloads and collection of the results to give a view into differences. The platform can both be used for performance tests, scalability test, but also as they clearly showed in their session, it can be used to spot challenges with new applications, updates or other changes to the platform. And by preparing it can be possible to avoid deploying a new update which will decrease performance of the infrastructure without having to effect the ‘physical’ users.

You can read more about VSI here: http://www.loginconsultants.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=210&Itemid=128

The tool can be downloaded from the Login Consultants download section.

Check out www.virtualrealitycheck.net to see the results of their tests so far.

/Rene Vester

Citrix Essentials which is the name for the “XenApp of the Server Virtualization world” has been announced and the major news for me is the strong integration with Microsoft Hyper-V. To me Microsoft Hyper-V has always been a player in the market which i had high expectations of, i think Microsoft has succeeded well in building a very customer base often with a dedicated “microsoft strategy”.. Loving Microsoft or not, i think that is an impressive achievement.

Citrix Essentials include a lot of cool features which will be the same value-add for both Citrix XenServer and Microsoft Hyper-V, i will try to show explanations, demos and reviews of the components as i think it is way more important than the cool names someone in Marketing came up with

For this post i came across this video-demo of the Advanced StorageLink technology and i would like to share it with you guys. The demo is shown on a Hyper-V environment.

I think the fact of having a product like this, which can easily be updated with new features, greater support in storage vendors and whatever comes next puts Citrix in a unique position to offer value-add like they have done for so many years with Metaframe, Presentation Server, XenApp(wonder whats next). Who knows.. maybe Citrix Essentials will be available in a VMware edition at some point?

As i was looking around for more references and buzz on the Citrix Essentials stuff i came across Alexander Ervik Johnsen homepage. He also mentions the Citrix Essentials features and i added his site to my list of blogs i read. Good to find another scandinavian on the big bad internet. Ervik is also recognized as a CTP by Citrix for his contributions.

Rene Vester

Citrix Hosted an unfiltered discussion with two renowned CTPs, Jeroen van de Kamp and Ruben Spruijt. They are the two people behind the Virtual Reality Check where they have had support from both their organisations Log-in Consultants and PQR in this joint venture.

The Virtual Reality Check material has been made public at: www.virtualrealitycheck.net

The recorded webcast can be seen at: https://event.on24.com/eventRegistration/EventLobbyServlet?target=registration.jsp&eventid=136904&sessionid=1&key=3CD0F47C5FAAC232A296EA11E6B953C1&sourcepage=register

Happy viewing, and for those coming to Citrix Summit/Synergy/VC there will be an opportunity as well to listen to and talk to Ruben and Jerome on the matter of Virtual reality check

Rene Vester

The Virtual Reality Check is a great performance baseline giving the community the option to compare Citrix XenServer, VMware ESX 3.5 and Microsoft Hyper-V.

The objectives for the VRC has been:

• How does various Microsoft Windows Client OS’s  scale as a virtual desktop?
• How does a VDI infrastructure scale in comparison (virtualized) Terminal Server?
• Which performance optimization on the host and guest virtualization level can be configured, and what is the impact of these settings on user density?
• With the introduction of the latest hypervisor technologies, can we now recommend running large scale TS/CTX workloads on a virtualization platform?
• How do the two usage scenarios compare, that is Microsoft Terminal Server [TS] only, versus TS plus XenApp?
• How do x86 and x64 TS platforms compare in scalability on bare metal and virtualized environments?
• What is the best way to partition (memory and vCPU) the Virtual Machines the hypervisor host, to achieve the highest possible user density?

I think the PQR and Log-in team has done an excellent job that we all can benefit from. The materials and results can be reviewed at www.virtualrealitycheck.net i would encourage anyone working with any of these technologies to have a look at the findings.

However i still think that any experience and performance measurement which is done should be announced, the VRC is a comprehensive test and my guess is there will not be many of those, but i am sure Ruben, Jerome and the team would also love to hear from others who have experiences in these areas.

Rene Vester