Hello all Wikipedia readers

I just noticed links coming in from the Wikipedia article on x86 virtualization. Needless to say that put a great big smile on my face

Updating again

Hello to all the readers,

Things have been quiet the past month because we needed to finish another project (implementation of the EMC DiskXtender archiving solution). And as we are doing this project ourselves (meaning us guys running the day-to-day server and network operations as well) progress has been slow.

The project status is currently:

• 75 servers virtualized at an approximate 20:1 consolidation ratio.
• next two cluster servers (HP DL585 G2) ordered, delivery in two weeks
• 25 servers to go

We also have the VDI project well and truly going. The update of which you can read below.

VDI project is on the move

Since the last update on February 8th a lot of progress has been made and we now have an almost functional VDI environment for our offshore development work in Mumbai, India and we already have interest from different other parts of the organization to implement this for their outsourced or offshore/nearshore projects (Spain and two major Dutch clients).

The VDI cluster of two HP DL585’s is up & running with ESX3 and 125 VDI seats. The VM’s themselves are running on a 2TB dedicated allocation in the EMC Clariion SAN. After assigning key users both in Holland and in India the templates for the various expertises (Java, Microsoft, Oracle, Software Testing) have been made and approved by the process managers in Holland and India.

The modelling for the templates varies, some expertise areas like Software Testing have created one template for all users, some expertises have created templates on a per project base (MS, Java). For this last group a process was created for template lifecycle management. Basically, we deploy a standard expertise template in a “staging” area, the projectleader takes care of bringing the template up to project standard, the template is stored in the library and the projectmembers are tagged to this template. At the end of the project the template is “degraded” to the template archive.

On the Leostream side all went well, 75 seats of the Connection Broker were ordered directly via the Leostream site, and the correct license key was mailed the next working day. Configuration was pretty straightforward with only one issue. This related to putting the virtual desktop to suspend state after a users logs off. This was solved in an update of the software, a proces which is easy to do, backing up the configuration in one file is also a nice feature.

In Leostream Active Directory group membership (one group in AD for each expertise) is matched againt a Leostream policy, only one match possible. Within Leostream groups of VD’s receive a “tag” which can be linked to the policy and a policy can hold multiple tags. With this we can assign users to multiple types of VD’s (for instance if someone is working on multiple projects or cross-competence) by simply adding the tag to the policy and without extra fiddling in the Active Directory. After the users

logs in at the VDI site, they can choose a VD from a list which is controlled by their policy/tag settings and after that they receive a .rdp file which they can open with Remote Desktop from their own desktop. We however decided to use the Leostream Connect Tool which has to be installed at the physical desktop of the user. With this the user simply starts the tool, fills in his credentials and Leostream automatically picks a VD from the user’s available group of VD’s, creates the correct .rdp file, starts the VD and performs the user logon via Remote Desktop and suspends the VD after user logoff.

So basically all configuration on the cluster, Leostream and the templates is finished, we are now focussing on completing documentation, test plan and most of all, waiting on the 20Mb NL-Mumbai connection to be delivered. We had some unexpected delays due to a relocation of the development center to a different building on the same compound without our knowledge. As this specific building is off-net (no fiber coming into the building), so an extra fibre extension was required.

So, we still love VMware and VDI

Follow up: Oracle troubles

I will be writing a “lessons learned” post about our project in the near future but for now I will follow up on the Oracle problems we had last month.

What we learned from using Oracle in a VI environment is that memory settings turned out to be highly critical in relation to the performance of the VM. We didn’t have this problem on a physical machine, at least not as intrusive as this, but when Oracle doesn’t have enough memory available it starts very heavy swapping to the virtual disk. This results in a 100% CPU load and processes start to hang with an unresponsive application as the result for the users.

Adding memory to the amount the server needs (indicated by checking the swapsize in the VM) has fixed these problems.