The last few months I have seen an uptick in interest in mobile device management solutions in the enterprise. It seems like every other customer I am in front of is asking about this technology and in almost every case the customer needs help identifying the criteria by which to evaluate the different solutions out there. It makes a great topic for this week, so here is the criteria I'd use:
What type of platform is it?
The objective here is to understand what type of platform the vendor being considered offers. Is the platform one that can manage the phone natively or is it one which deploys a virtual container on the phone? I have found that some enterprises like the idea of managing the phone natively, but others prefer a complete separation of personal and work. The latter is obviously a clearer, more well-defined delimiter. Meanwhile, the native phone management provides for some technical challenges in that you have to be able to clearly distinguish between personal data and enterprise data.
In both cases, however, you want to avoid managing the device itself -- in the age of BYOD and consumerization, we don't want to take a step back and go back to the complexities of managing a device. Managing a personal device is the user's responsibility; instead, we simply want to manage the enterprise resources we deliver to these devices.
What types of operating systems does the platform support?
Identify how many types of mobile phone device operating systems the vendor supports. Of course we want support for every mobile operating system out there, but sometimes not all vendors build in support for all OSes. If you find a vendor that you like and a solution which meets your needs from a feature standpoint, ask about a roadmap for supporting the other OSes. Keep in mind, however, that you are deploying this solution to manage consumer devices, so be very cautious in selecting a vendor with the widest range of support for at least Apple IOS and Android, with a roadmap for the other OSes like Microsoft Mobile.
Is the product offered as SaaS or premise-based?
Understand how the solution is deployed. Some vendors offer strictly a SaaS service, while others offer premise-based software installs. Few offer both solutions. It is important to to investigate both types of solutions, understand the differences from a feature as well as a management and training standpoint, and of course, from a cost and time-to-production standpoint.
Is it able to enforce baseline security policies?
The product should be capable of checking for required security products, prompt for acceptance of company usage policy and enforce password policies such as password length and complexity. The solution should be able to offer encrypted backups, detection of jail breaking or blacklisted applications. In addition, the solution should be capable of enforcing folder-level encryption, full disk encryption or both.
What about location awareness and remote wiping?
The ability to track the device for recovery purposes is a key factor. You should investigate the products for their GPS and location awareness capabilities which will aid administrators in possibly recovering the asset or remotely wiping it should the need arise. You should also evaluate the products' ability to wipe/destroy selective data and the ability to wipe out business data while keeping personal data intact.
Application manageability?
You should investigate the product's capability to manage installed applications on mobile devices, such as the ability to remotely update an application or even remote uninstall . If this feature is not possible on certain mobile operating systems, what alternatives does the solution offer?
Is the product capable of disabling certain features of the device?
Some enterprises find it important to be able to disable certain features of the device, such as the camera. Depending on which area of the campus or building you are in, understanding the capabilities of the solution will open the doors for you to find good uses for it.
What about monitoring and reporting capabilities?
Monitoring and reporting capabilities are important to any organization. You should investigate the different products for these capabilities. Furthermore, you should also be looking to understand how much out-of-the-box reporting capabilities the product offers as opposed to highly customizable, difficult-to-export data that may increase the operational cost of deploying the product.
Does it have out-of-the-box integration capabilities with incident management system?
I highly recommend that you understand and thoroughly evaluate the products' ability and ease of integration with the existing enterprise incident management system/process, as this will be important for you to support the solution without needing to have separate systems to track support calls.
As you can see, the list of things to look for when evaluating MDM is not terribly long but it is definitely involved. Carefully define the business objectives, don't try to enforce things that are out of your control. For example, don't try and fight consumerization by saying, "We will only support Apple devices or Android device or Windows devices." Instead, keep an open mind and accept the fact that you have to choose a solution that caters to almost everything or a solution that has a roadmap that caters, supports and most importantly keeps up with the different devices, OSes and trends in consumerization and mobility.
Posted by Elias Khnaser on 02/13/2012 at 4:02 PM2 comments
Last week, I talked about what it takes to transform an enterprise datacenter to a private cloud. This time, let's focus a bit on the essential first step of preparing for a private cloud.
In order to reach a true private cloud, an organization has got to overcome the barriers of server virtualization and tackle the most challenging of physical servers yet to be virtualized. A good private cloud strategy would be to start with a cloud readiness or fit assessment. This assessment, while broad and detailed, will also include the level at which you are virtualized -- and you'll want to be at 100 percent, if possible.
To achieve 100 percent readiness, let's start with virtualizing tier-1 applications. It is important that we tackle tier-1 apps and this requires advanced understanding of how server virtualization works and the inherent best practices to squeeze every little ounce of performance out of it. There should be no reason to not be able to virtualize Exchange, SQL, SharePoint or other applications of the same caliber. Here's some guidance here as to what to look for from a technical perspective in order to boost performance of these applications:
- Make sure you are using the best combination of virtual hardware for your VMs. For instance, with vSphere, you'll always use the VMXNET3 virtual NIC, and understand the IO requirements of your application. Also, research when to use the VMware PVSCSI adapter as opposed to the default.
- If you are using Hyper-V or XenServer, understand the limitations of the parent partition or the control domain (DOM0) and when to add more resources to it, as all network and storage IO traffic in Hyper-V and XenServer pass through the parent partition or Dom0.
- You should be very familiar with the fact that adding a second virtual SCSI controller and attaching that to a dedicated virtual disk will increase performance and throughput.
- Understand when to use a Raw Device Mapping and in what format.
This is just a sample of things to look at; your service provider or system integrator performing your cloud fit assessment should be able to look at these and more and determine what is preventing you from virtualizing these servers.
Once you've virtualized tier-1 applications, you can then move on to building a meaningful service catalog for users. What I mean by meaningful is having the ability to deliver a service that meets their performance expectations and puts you in a position to charge them for it. Mastering the performance of these applications is a critical cornerstone to a service catalog, which is essential for private clouds.
Service catalogs will consist of building multiple VMs that are considered a service. For instance, if a users wants application X and we have determined that application X is made up of a Web server, a SQL server and a file server, we don't build three servers and give it to the requestor. Instead, that user can log c to our self-service portal and request "Service X," which consists of the necessary requirements. We get away from building VMs to building a collection of VMs that constitute a service and are managed as a single entity.
I want to hear from you on applications you are having a hard time virtualizing and what are the steps you have taken to overcome these issues. Let's try to share some experiences here.
In the next few weeks, I'll tackle cloud infrastructure, automation and orchestration, chargeback and showback, in addition to SLAs and SLEs.
Posted by Elias Khnaser on 02/08/2012 at 4:25 PM1 comments
I received a flood of e-mails from my last blog comparing enterprise datacenters to private clouds. I also received queries about the differences between a highly virtualized enterprise datacenter and a private cloud. So, before I continue, let me step back and explain the differences.
The traditional enterprise datacenter of today is built by adding more compute, more storage and more networking. If you take a closer look at how we acquire and build these resources, you will notice that we buy these components individually for the most part and then put them together. We also tend to scale them out separately: You need more storage, you add more disk; you need more compute, you buy more servers; etc. That process is slow and is very labor intensive, but we have done for so many years that it has become part of our DNA, and we don't notice it anymore.
In a cloud environment acquiring resources is different. We acquire them in PODs or containers of compute, network and storage that we simply add to our resource pool in order to grow it and increase its capabilities. Physical resources are added and then logically carved out using software. You can see how the approaches differ especially when you consider that these PODs are pre-built and pre-tested, you roll them in and you connect them and then use your orchestration tools to integrate the newly added resources. The cloud approach allows your private cloud to be elastic, not in the traditional public cloud model because there is no way for an internal private cloud to scale to any of the public could offerings, but instead it is elastic in that you can very easily add resources and increase capabilities.
It is also important to note that the traditional datacenter is made up of primarily client-server type applications. These applications have a dependency on a single operating system, and this is opposite to how cloud applications are built around service-oriented architectures. In order for us to have a true cloud platform, we would have to rewrite these applications based on SOA standards, which is not going to happen for the majority of our enterprise applications. As a result, the closest we can get to a cloud platform is to automate and orchestrate our environment, develop a set of standards and processes which would allow us to scale faster.
Today, we still manually provision VMs. The problem is, organizations are having to deal with increasing number of virtual machines. The fix is to hire more admins and while that is great for the economy, that just does not scale, so we have to learn to build standards and automate and orchestrate in order to get away from manual, repeated tasks.
Another significant difference between an enterprise datacenter and an internal private cloud is that with a traditional datacenter the business has complete reliance on IT for acquiring resources -- there is no self-service approach, no chargeback or showback model, no services approach. Basically, there is an IT “waiter” that takes down the requirements, manually builds a VM to meet these requirements and hands it over to the application owners.
In an internal private cloud model, we have a self-service portal with predefined virtual machine offerings that application owners can consume and will have to make their applications work within a predefined framework.
We can also take it one step further by creating the services concept. A service is a collection of VMs that are managed as a single entity; VMware vSphere and Citrix XnServer call this concept vApps. In retrospect, when you apply this to your cloud design, you end up offering a service that your users can consume or provision.
Finally, when you build an internal private cloud your infrastructure is also very highly automated and orchestrated. As a result, your traditional rack-stack-install-and-configure approach changes in exchange for stateless servers that PXE boot and deploy the correct image depending on the IP address range they are connecting from.
Please keep the e-mails coming. Better yet, leave a comment so that we can engage the rest of the readers.
Posted by Elias Khnaser on 02/06/2012 at 5:09 PM3 comments
One of the most frequently-asked questions I get when from CXOs is: How do I turn my datacenter into a private cloud? In the next couple of blogs, I'll outline how we can take a current traditional datacenter and transform it into an on-premise internal, or private, cloud. Many people make the mistake of claiming that they have an internal cloud already just because they have gone through server virtualization, and while server virtualization is the essential, inevitable first step to building an internal cloud, it is merely the beginning.
There are many benefits to transforming a datacenter into a private cloud has many benefits. But, it's not an easy task and this is not a project that IT can undertake on its own, as doing so will will affect the business as a whole -- the way we procure software will have to change, the way we provision VMs will change, building and enforcing VM standards, etc.
If I had to use one word to summarize the benefits, it would be "discipline." Of course, we are all seeking to reduce cost and maximize efficiency. While I am a strong believer that eventually our datacenter will end up in a public cloud, I think for a period of time we will have a hybrid model and we will slowly transition into placing our most valued resources in the internal private cloud while everything else sits in a privately hosted cloud in the public cloud somewhere. I think today we say "justify a physical server," and tomorrow we will say, "justify putting the resource in the internal private cloud."
Let's start with the basics. To lay a good foundation for an internal cloud, we need to start at the procurement level. Wwe need to establish and be willing to enforce specific procurement requirements. For example, it is no longer acceptable to choose a software vendor whose products you'll be using to not support virtualization. So, one of the very first requirements for software procurement should be:
- Do you support virtualization?
- What is your roadmap for expanded virtualization support and product enhancements?
- Enforce the first and second requirements in any RFP process.
The first two basic requirements can go a long way, but in order to enforce these requirements, you must have business buy-in to the internal private cloud projects and spell out its benefits to the business. Typically these apps are dictated by the different business departments and if you have a business sponsor, you can enforce these requirements. When talking to software vendors, you have the power to dictate, you are paying money and running your business. Vendors have to be willing to support you as well in order to facilitate your other initiatives -- they can no longer just say no.
Once we can get past procurement and we have a clear understanding of how we are going to address that issue, we need to then develop a virtual machine standard. To start, we have to evaluate the different operating systems that we intend on supporting and tie them into the procurement process. Here's another task that's not an easy one to do, so approach this with caution. A set of standards is needed if we are going to build a robust internal private cloud.
The standards conversation will then expand to developing a VM standard, so not only are you limiting the number of operating systems, but now you need to limit the number of VM profiles you support (for instance, Windows 2008 R2 with 2 vCPUs and 8 GB of memory, etc.) There is nothing wrong with having different tiers, as long as you keep the number of VM profiles in check. Don't create 10 profiles for Windows Server 2008 R2.
You see where I am going with this, right? So far we have limited the number of OSes that we support, we established standards for our VMs from a hardware profile perspective and we have developed a procurement policy to support virtualization. Now what? As we start to acquire these software packages with different virtual hardware requirements, we need to fit them in our standards without deviating. In some cases we will use a VM profile that has more resources than the requirements, or we may choose to fit in a profile with fewer resources and change the tier later. Whatever we do, we have to work within the framework we have established.
These strict requirements will benefit us significantly later as we start to discuss chargebacks and showbacks, as we start to discuss automation and orchestration. As you can see so far, building an internal private cloud is not a simple "click next" project and will require true business and IT alignment.
In upcoming blogs, I will go deeper into what the next steps are, what tools to use, what infrastructure to use, etc. Meanwhile, I would love your feedback on this discussion.
Posted by Elias Khnaser on 02/01/2012 at 4:01 PM1 comments
I have recently been working with a customer that was having an issue with ESXi 5, the problem was that the client unpresented a physical LUN to ESXi 5 by simply deleting the datastore and physically removing the LUN from the storage array software. That led to the condition knows as APD (All paths Down).
What happened is while the datastore was deleted, ESXi continued to try and access that device and since ESXi uses hostd to access devices and also uses hostd for ESXi to vCenter communications, that led to a slew of issues. In this blog, I want to focus on the correct way to delete and unpresent a LUN in ESXi 5. Here are the steps:
- Unregister all objects from the datastore including VMs and templates.
- Ensure that Storage DRS and Storage I/O are not configured to use this device.
- Detach the device from ESXi host, which will also initiate an automatic unmount. To do this click on Configuration, and then Storage, find the datastore you wish to unmounts, right-click it and select unmount.
- To avoid doing this to every ESXi host, from vCenter do a Ctrl+Shift+D to switch your view to Datastore clusters view. Execute unmounts and choose which hosts you want to unmount this from.
- Now, while still under the Storage node, switch your view to Devices, right-click the NAA ID of the device and click on Detach. For more info on finding the NAA ID look up VMware KB2004605.
- Now double check that the LUN has been properly unmounted by checking the operational status of the device which should read unmounted.
- Physically unpresent the LUN from the storage array controller software.
- Perform a rescan of the ESXi host.
Now if you are trying to unmount an RDM, first delete the RDM from the virtual machine and delete from disk, then follow steps 5 to 8.
Posted by Elias Khnaser on 01/25/2012 at 4:19 PM1 comments
It's interesting to discuss mobility with the different departments in an organization. They each define mobility differently and want to address it separately.
Talk to the networking team and all they want to talk about is wireless and how to enhance their wireless infrastructure and what features they can offer for a better user experience. For them, BYOD is a matter of enabling their users to use these devices on wi-fi securely and effectively.
The systems group will talk to you about mobile device management and their wanting to control these devices and secure them, push content to them and remotely wipe them, etc.
When you talk to the virtualization group they want to do a mixture of both. They start off with talking about desktop virtualization and to them BYOD is about enabling users to access apps and desktops on any device. Some of the more savvy virtualization technologists will bring up VMware Horizon Mobile and Citrix CloudGateway and some will ask about Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager 2012 capabilities.
The truth, folks, is that mobility is about all the above. In a nutshell, it is about:
User Experience -- This enables BYOD, desktop virtualization, mobile applications, SaaS applications, etc. It is important to note here that when developing a BYOD strategy we can enable applications that were meant to run on mobile devices, I call these Post-PC era applications, but it is equally important to enable Windows based resources (apps and desktops) on these devices as well. We can stretch this further and talk about enabling Dropbox-like technologies for data, but I think you get the idea.
Mobile Device Management -- The influx of mobile devices has created a nightmare for IT. Using MDM is absolutely imperative, but make no mistake: You don't want to manage the device here, folks. This creates a support nightmare, but also opens your organization to legal issues. When adopting BYOD, manage the enterprise resources, not the devices. Don't worry about upgrading IOS; that is not your concern anymore. Do not approach BYOD as if it were a desktop from 10 years ago. Manage the enterprise resources and respect the user privacy, data and applications.
Wireless -- No mobility project will ever be successful without a solid wireless infrastructure, so always remember when deploying any of the latter technologies that wireless is a critical component and make sure your infrastructure is capable of delivering these services.
Now you can approach these pillars independently if you have a specific project, but my advice is before you take on any aspect of mobility, make sure you have communicated and collaborated with the other departments within your enterprise. These pillars are interdependent and collaboration is needed to make certain projects work properly. For example, if you are revamping or enhancing your wireless network and there is a desktop virtualization project going on, it is imperative that your wireless team is included in design and planning meetings. That way, they can adequately prepare for the different remote protocols that will be used, so they can address session drops when changing wireless access points, etc.
Communication goes a long way. It is high time we broke these silos that we have built in enterprise IT if we plan on delivering a proper service to the enterprise.
I welcome your thoughts!
Posted by Elias Khnaser on 01/23/2012 at 10:27 AM0 comments
In previous blog posts, I covered some new features of XenDesktop 5.5 and XenApp 6.5. I want to continue with that, and this time, let's look at the new QoS support via Mutli-stream ICA/HDX.
First, some background: The ICA packet today is comprised of multiple virtual channels that carry different types of data within them. For instance, each ICA packet could be carrying virtual channels of the following types: graphics, keyboard, mouse, audio, printing, clipboard, drive mappings etc. The challenge for QoS today is, if I want to classify ICA/HDX traffic from a network perspective, I would have to do the same for all the virtual channels inside of that ICA packet.
Keep in mind that QoS has been available for optimizing the traffic within a single ICA packet for a while now, so you can prioritize virtual channels within the same ICA packet if you want to, but you are still carrying all the virtual channels, and network administrators cannot QoS inside the ICA protocol, they can only apply a class of service against the entire protocol.
Let's take an example, where a remote office using a VoIP application is complaining of poor audio quality. Let's also assume that there is non-ICA traffic on the WAN as well and you have determined that the WAN link is significantly congested. Our options here are limited. We can certainly play around and optimize the virtual channel responsible for audio or we can engage the network administrator to raise the class of service of the entire ICA/HDX protocol running on port 1494 or 2598. By doing that, however, you are now prioritizing all the additional virtual channels inside the protocol, even though users were not suffering from any performance issues from those other channels. While you may have fixed the VoIP issue, you more than likely caused another issue because the ICA protocol is transporting so much more than just VoIP, and raising the class of service might affect other non-ICA traffic.
You can see how this is very limiting, and this is where multi-stream ICA comes into play: It allows you to establish multiple TCP connections (ICA runs on TCP) between the client and the server, carrying different types of data. As a result, you can now associate different ICA virtual channels with different ICA streams and, conversely, with different classes of service so that you can easily prioritize them on the network. Furthermore, with XenDesktop 5.5, you can even enable an optional UDP stream if an application can take advantage of it.
Of course, using multiple TCP connections between the client and the server requires an architectural change in the way you design and deploy your Citrix technologies. Additional ports will need to be opened and configured on both the network and the server side, but multi-stream ICA gives you the granularity that you need to better control and classify the traffic on your network to give your users the best possible user experience.
If anyone is using this technology, I would love to hear how that is working out for you.
Posted by Elias Khnaser on 01/18/2012 at 2:41 PM1 comments
I was meeting with a new customer right before the holidays and part of the conversation was that they were very unhappy with the performance of their blade system in a virtualized environment. They told me that they benchmarked the same workload on rack-mount servers versus blades and they saw the CPU Ready Time drop significantly using the rack-mounted servers. They asked if I I had seen that with other customers because, they were considering moving away from blades. This was a large customer with over 2,000 VMs in production.
A week later, in an amazing coincidence, I had another customer call and complain about the exact same thing, except this time the customer said that the workload would vary depending on the blade the VM was on. They were seeing this performance degradation on their VMware View environment running Windows XP with a single vCPU.
I recalled reading something of the sort on the VMware communities' forum about processor power management causing VMs to run sluggish, so naturally we checked that first. In both cases the processor ower management was set to Dynamic at the blade BIOS level. Keep in mind that processor power management can be managed in two location: in ESX or in the hardware. It's also worth mentioning that the only time ESX can actually manipulate the processor power management settings is if the hardware configuration is set to "allow OS-controlled power management." During our inspection we found that it was not the case, so we started looking at the hardware. There, we found that it was set to Dynamic. As soon as we disabled that setting, the environment started to function perfectly again.
The processor power management setting affected mostly workloads that were CPU latency sensitive such as a VDI or XenApp/Terminal Server environment. However, I truly recommend that you disable this feature unless there is a compelling reason to use it. VMware also published a knowledge base article on this issue found here.
If you have experienced this, drop a note in the comments section so that we can help others.
Posted by Elias Khnaser on 01/09/2012 at 2:25 PM1 comments
As we bid farewell to 2011 and welcome 2012, I figured we would end this blogging year with a reading of the crystal ball "Eli style." It has been a great year and I have enjoyed all the comments and the responses that I have received from all of you on all the social media channels I am connected on. That being said, let's see if we can end this year with a bang of predictions:
Desktop Virtualization
I am sure you were expecting this one from me so I will keep it brief. In 2012, the adoption of desktop virtualization will continue to grow and enterprises will recognize that the effects of consumerization will force them at some point to start rolling out Windows 8 even as they've yet to complete or even start their migrations to Windows 7. Couple that with the expiration of Windows XP in 2014 and I think 2012 will be the year of the desktop.
Most of my clients tell me that they won't to Windows 8, but my take on this is that it is really not their choice to dictate that anymore , Windows 8 will make a splash in the tablet arena, the Metro-style OS will take off and consumers that are buying these new devices and getting used to Metro and not wanting to go back to Windows 7-style computing will force IT to make the move. Desktop virtualization will be used to deliver a choice of Windows 7 or Windows 8 and a slew of virtualized applications.
Mobile Device Management
MDM in 2012 will most certainly take off. I am predicting that cloud-based MDM solutions will dominate, but as the number of mobile devices increases and their uses for accessing enterprise resources solidifies, most enterprises will be seriously looking at an MDM solution not necessarily to manage the end point, but rather to manage the enterprise resources on that device.
My favorite companies to watch in the MDM space are OpenPeak, MobileIron, Citrix CloudGateway and VMware's Horizon Mobile. Keep in mind these solutions do a lot more than just MDM, but since the term MDM summarizes a lot of other things like mobile application management and security, I figured I would just use that term.
Big Data
The increased number of mobile devices automatically translates into an increased volume of user-generated data and automated application-generated data. Couple that with the amount of data generated out of social media -- especially as that data makes its way into the enterprise -- and you end up with an enormous amount of data that will overwhelm the current enterprise infrastructure from a hardware perspective as well as from an information management perspective.
The increasing volume of unstructured data will inevitably lead companies to start investigating options not only around how to contain and manage this volume of structured and unstructured data, but also how to mine it and leverage it for competitive advantage. We will see this accelerate in the enterprise as Microsoft and Oracle adopt Hadoop behind their databases. Currently, IBM offers Big Data through InfoSphere.
Hybrid Clouds
While I think that cloud computing in general will accelerate significantly in 2012 with IT organizations offloading more IT tasks like collaboration, mail and others to the public cloud, I see 2012 as being the year of the hybrid cloud. I think IT will finally come to terms with the fact that expanding the enterprise infrastructure does not make much sense moving forward.
Challenges like Big Data and other technologies will make it very expensive for companies to continue to invest in an enterprise infrastructure when the alternative is available and cheaper. Take something like VDI for instance, which at some point will end up in the cloud, probably not in 2012 but it sure makes financial sense to have it there, especially if your current colocation datacenter provider offers cloud solutions. It's a matter of deploying to the public cloud compute resources. This and many other reasons lead me to believe that hybrid clouds will be the talk of the town in 2012 with products from Citrix, F5, and Cisco leading the charge. VMware will be there, of course, but in VMware's case I think you can only extend to a vCloud and not any cloud.
Social Enterprise
The Facebook generation is starting to make its way into higher positions in the enterprise and as that trend accelerates so will the adoption of new collaboration methods. I personally think that email's usefulness will be lessened in the enterprise, with Facebook-type solutions taking over. I think that coupled with Dropbox-like solutions for the enterprise will almost wipe out enterprise intranets. Microsoft will significantly enhance Sharepoint or face stiff challengers in the enterprise space. In this space, I really like VMware Socialcast, Citrix GoTo portfolio and collaboration in addition to the work that Cisco is doing in this space and, to some extent, what Microsoft is doing with Lync.
Automation & Orchestration
Key enablers of private clouds, automation and orchestration tools will be another highlight of 2012. We will see significant consolidation in this space with potential acquisitions of companies like Cloupia and Gale Technologies. Citrix's message with its acquisition of Cloud.com and CloudStack is spot on and I like what VMware is doing with vCloud Director. I think Microsoft has a strong solution in SCCM but I do believe that at some point that has to be broken into a separate product as the SCCM suite has grown significantly large and complex.
Storage
Finally, the biggest innovation for coming years will happen around storage. In 2012 we will see a larger adoption of Flash in the enterprise as the cost becomes reasonable and the technical barriers are abolished. I also believe that the ever-increasing drive capacities and the volume of current and expected data growth will force enterprises to demand either a replacement technology for RAID or an evolution of RAID. I believe that trends in both directions will rise. However, I'll make a more accurate prediction here in that RAID will probably evolve in some form that resembles IBM's RAID-X implementation -- some iteration of this type of RAID can accommodate larger drive capacities, significantly lower rebuild times. I would keep an eye on EMC, HDS and IBM in this space. I also think that technologies like Erasure Codes will be given a serious consideration.
As always I would love to hear your comments and perspectives on these predictions, where you think I'm spot on and where you disagree with me. I also want to take this opportunity to thank you for reading the blog this past year; I hope I was able to positively contribute to your knowledge, give you insight and a different perspective on things. If you have suggestions for topics you want to hear more about in 2012, send me e-mail or tweet or Facebook me -- the social revolution is at your disposal and I am available and always online.
Posted by Elias Khnaser on 12/29/2011 at 5:36 PM7 comments
With the release of VMware vSphere 5, VMware added GUI capabilities which allows you to tweak how many virtual CPUs and how many cores per virtual CPU each VM was configured with. This is a very useful tool because many times you come across operating systems and even applications that are limited in terms of the number of CPU sockets that they support, conversely, having the ability to add cores per virtual CPU socket increase performance quite a bit. This is a cool new GUI addition, but the technology exists in vSphere 4.1 as well, albeit not very apparent and requires manual configuration.
Now before I go any further and delve into how to configure this in vSphere 4.1, it is worth noting that this technology was ported from VMware Workstation, it existed in VMware Workstation for many versions now, VMware tends to release features and functionality into the Type-2 hypervisors first as a way of vetting its stability and functionality before it is released in the enterprise products, not a bad approach at all.
For those of you that want to configure virtual machines with multiple vCPUs and multiple cores per vCPU on vSphere 4.1, follow these steps:
- Right-click a VM and click on Edit Settings
- Click on the Options tab
- Choose General in the Advanced Options list
- Click Configuration Parameters
- Click Add Row
- Add cpiid.coresPerSocket in the name column
- Enter the number of cores you want in the value column, a value of 2, 4 or 8 is valid, of course the 8 cores, Enterprise Plus licensing required for the latter.
- Click OK and Power On your VM
It is worth noting here that when using this feature, the CPU Hot Add / Remove is disabled. This is a really cool feature and ofr those that are not ready to go to vSphere 5 just yet, I wanted to make sure that you were aware of it.
Posted by Elias Khnaser on 12/20/2011 at 8:31 PM2 comments
Virtualization has changed the game as far as how we troubleshoot issues in our environment. It is no longer as simple to determine as it was before. Now that resources are shared, it is sometimes tricky -- is it a VM problem? Or is it the network? Or compute? Or all of the above?
That being said, at the heart of every virtualization infrastructure today is storage. Some have large, enterprise-shared storage of different sorts, while others have smaller ones, but we all have shared storage one way or another. Monitoring the latency between VMs and the storage that they're running on is crucial. SolarWinds for its part has released a really cool and free storage response time monitoring tool that plugs directly into your VMware infrastructure and reports back on virtual machines' IO.
The cool thing about this tool is that it will also break down the latency metrics, separating the time spent in the host (kernel) versus the time spent on the device (SAN). This information can prove very valuable to any virtualization administrator when dissecting a technical issue.
Here are some of the things you can monitor and measure:
- Host to datastore enumerated by the worst response times
- The busiest VMs from an IO perspective
- Kernel versus device latency metrics
This is just a subset of what you can do with this free tool, which I have already added to my toolbox.
SolarWinds has a broader portfolio of products and its acquisition of Hyper9 not too long ago gave it a significant foothold in the virtualization market. I will cover the other SolarWinds products in a later blog but I wanted to share this tool with you. You can download it and a slew of other SolarWinds free tools here.
Posted by Elias Khnaser on 12/15/2011 at 3:27 PM0 comments
One of the coolest features of Citrix XenApp 6.5 has got to be the new Instant App Access feature, what this does is dramatically reduce the amount of time it takes to launch published applications. So instead of the traditional login and wait for your profile to be created locally, settings to be applied, policies and so on, Instant App Access gives instant access to your applications -- as soon as you click on an application you are ready to use it.
The magic behind this functionality is quite simple. As soon as you login to Citrix Receiver and your applications are enumerated, an empty session is opened in the background for you on the XenApp server. This is an empty session, but it manages the entire pre-launching functionality so that when you are ready to click on a published resource, you get that resource instantly without waiting. It is a very smart and intuitive way of masking the process and significantly enhancing the user experience.
I'm sure you have a ton of questions. Here's one you might be wondering about: What happens if I silo my applications on servers? Because each application gets its own set of servers and I have 10 silos, does that mean that the user will have an empty session on each silo of servers? The answer is simply, yes. If you are in a silo that is exactly what happens, and there is really no way around this.
Now, of course if the application silo contains 10 servers, it will open up one session on the least busy one, not a session on every server. That being said, your second question might be: Will that not consume resources on my XenApp servers? Again, the answer is yes it will. But in this case, the resources are minimal and considering XenApp 6.5 is a 64-bit only application, I don't see the resource issue being as big a deal as it is in the 32-bit versions. And if you are worried that this might consume a license, you are correct -- it does! However, keep in mind that the user logged in to launch applications. The good thing is if the user does not launch an application within a given time, it puts that empty session in disconnect mode, which then releases the Citrix license.
This is just one of the features of the new XenApp 6.5. In the future, I'll cover some other new features such as the multi-stream ICA protocol. Stay tuned!
Posted by Elias Khnaser on 12/12/2011 at 5:17 PM1 comments