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 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

However it hit me, i am going to spend the rest of my life keeping the static pages up to date, so i have been trying to build these pages in a more dynamic way.

It is still a work in progress but have a look in the top menu under technotes or have a click here: http://www.renevester.com/technotes/

Please.. feel free to give input or share your ideas as to what information would help save you time

Rene Vester

Virtualization is perhaps not ready to become the new platform for your entire SBC infrastructure but i preparation for disaster recovery getting the best performance from the needed virtualized

infrastructure is important.

You can view the article here: http://www.brianmadden.com/content/article/A-short-guide-to-virtualizing-Presentation-and-Terminal-servers-on-VMware-ESX-3

/LamerSmurf