Tag Archives: VMware
Creating a Highly Available VEUC Storage Design
One of my clients is in the peak phase of deploying about 1200 virtual desktops across the organization, and they have placed a premium on desktop uptime. There are always tradeoffs when we do VEUC strategy and design. What can you afford vs. what performance/availability metrics would you like to achieve?
Luckily, we were able to design a solution that met their needs, at a pretty reasonable cost. They already had a VNX array dedicated to the VDI workload, so rather than do something like double the spindle count and switch to RAID6, we decided to look at EMC VPLEX. The added benefits were just too good to pass up. They could achieve their uptime requirements, and gain independence from underlying disk subsystems, while also avoiding ...
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The Increasing Importance of VMware vCenter
It seems that with each generation of VMware products, the importance of vCenter (formerly Virtual Center) elevates from a central administration point to a keystone for full functionality. While a number of features in the vSphere suite are able to survive without vCenter, such as High Availability (HA) and virtual networking, many other pieces of the stack rely on vCenter for some or all of their ability to carry out tasks.
One example that emphasizes this is the VMware View product for virtual end user computing (VEUC) to host desktops. During a vCenter outage, you can still connect to any fully available desktop. However, both types of desktops, Full Clones (sometimes referred to as Thick Clones) and Linked Clones, are affected by ...
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VMware updates Horizon and ThinApp to allow for self-service Windows app delivery
This morning VMware announced updates to ThinApp and VMware Horizon to allow for Windows application delivery via the Horizon portal. In case you are wondering what Horizon is, it's a web based portal for application delivery. Before today it was only able to delivery access to SaaS based or Web applications. With the latest updates you can now deliver ThinApp packages to users with the Horizon agent on their PC. This provides a self-service option for application delivery.
So some of you may be asking how is this different than assigning ThinApp packages within VMware View? Below is a quote from VMware on the two processes.
Entitlement to Horizon-enabled ThinApp packages can be based on Active Directory groups or on groups that you create within Horizon. With ...
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My brush with the brightest minds of VMware at a private CTO event
I was one of a lucky group of 100 people that received a private invite to attend a reception with VMware CTO and many other great and high ranking VMware executives. You probably are asking how did I get such an exclusive invite. Well as a recipient of the VMware vExpert award for 2011 my name was placed in a random drawing of the 332 vExperts and I was one of the lucky one hundred people.
So the event was held at the Wynn hotel next door to the VMworld conference. There was a huge list of people that are well known in the VMware and Virtualization industry. This was all made possible by Stephen Herrod the CTO of VMware. He put on the event and ...
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VMworld 2011
On July 19th – VMware unleashed vSphere 5 on the world. What was intended to be a triumphal announcement of next generation virtualization and cloud enhancing technologies quickly devolved into a public relations nightmare with angry customers all over the world. At the same time that VMware announced an entire suite of updates across their product line, they also changed the licensing model for the flagship vSphere ESX software. During the ensuing weeks, every VMware sales representative ended up spending almost all of their time talking to customers trying to explain the logic behind, and to minimize the impact of the introduction of vRam licensing.
Social media and the blog-o-sphere at the time reacted angrily, as did many customers. This has been re-hashed many times over, ...
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VMware Datastore Clusters and SDRS
New to VMware vSphere 5 is a feature called “Datastore Clusters”. Datastore clusters allow you to aggreagate storage resources, which enables you to set different resource policies on the Datastore Cluster. Datastores within a Datastore Cluster can be thought of as a hosts in a vSphere cluster.
Whenever you add datastore to a Datastore Cluster that datastore’s resources become shared resources within the Datastore cluster. Once your Datastore Cluster is setup you can then enable a new feature called Storage DRS.
Storage DRS
Storage DRS has extended the Distributed Resource Scheduler to the storage resources. SDRS enables VMDK to be placed on the optimal datastores within a Datastore Cluster based on set policies. SDRS can be set to manual or to automatic. Manual mode SDRS will make recommendations ...
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Virtual End-User Computing: It’s all in the Design
If I had a dollar for every time I heard "This is the year of desktop virtualization" I could probably buy that new set of Callaway golf clubs I've been eyeing. As we've seen in the industry, there really hasn't been a year of the virtual desktop. So the question is "Why?" I mean, it provides many benefits—security, flexibility, manageability, and so on. However, many companies are falling into the typical VEUC pitfalls such as never ending POC phases, ROI justifications, capital cost, and not truly understanding the use cases for their environment.
Here are some tips for designing a VEUC environment that will help you bypass the pitfalls of deploying a VEUC environment.
1. Include the End-Users
The number-one goal when deploying a virtual desktop environment is ...
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Vblock or Flexpod (Part IV)
This is Part IV in Four Part Series discussing VCE Vblock and NetApp FlexPod technology and marketing approach. Links to the other articles can be found at the bottom of this document.
The goal of this series was to really foster a discussion around whether or not a “stack” makes sense moving forward as a design tenet for your datacenter. If the answer is yes, and you are comparing VCE Vblock to the NetApp FlexPod as potential solutions for your environment, what are the deciding factors that should help you make a decision choosing one over the other.
In the original post, I listed a number of questions or initial consideration points around use case, existing infrastructure, speed to market, vendor support, technology attributes, flexibility, scalability etc. ...
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Let’s Build a House (prelude to FlexPod or Vblock)
This is a prelude to a Four Part Series discussing VCE Vblock and NetApp FlexPod technology and marketing approach. Links to the other articles can be found at the bottom of this document.
Let’s Build a House
Let’s step back from technology for a couple of minutes and take a look at a different topic. Let’s talk about home-building. There are lots of ways to build a house. For the sake of this analogy, let’s assume that you as the reader have three options when it comes to building a home:
Do it Yourself
That’s right – you are pretty knowledgeable when it comes to building design and architecture, you like to roll up your sleeves and do a lot of work, you have money to
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Vblock or FlexPod? (Part III)
This is Part III in a Four Part Series discussing VCE Vblock and NetApp FlexPod technology and marketing approach. Links to the other articles can be found at the bottom of this document.
Most customers that I meet with (technologists or executives) are pretty tired of hearing about the “cloud.” Likely the most ever over-used buzz-word in IT, cloud means so many things to so many people (or doesn’t) that a better definition is required to help drive datacenter virtualization conversations.
EMC started their push for “Private Cloud” in 2009 in order to drive the concept that it is possible to get the positive attributes of “public cloud” without taking on the risks or downside that are typically ...
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