Virtualization Team

If you have been following my blog for a while, you would have noticed a non normal pause in the past 2 months with no new articles on my blog. The reason behind this gap is my move from Dubai to Canada and all what that bring with it from finding a place to stay, buying a car, & starting to catch up with the new job hitting me all at once. I have spent a great year with the SE team in VMware Dubai. It is such a great team that I will definitely miss, though the great part I have managed to stay withing the VMware Family. I have joined VMware Canada PSO team earlier this month, & looking forward to meet with the rest of our Canadian team & customers.

If you have not heard of VMware APPBlaster yet, then its worth noting it is a technology that will enable users to access any application on any operating system as long they have a browser that support HTML 5. The usages of this technology will be limitless. Imagine running MS Visio 2010 on MAC or on Linux without having to install any client/agent or software. It will run directly into your web browser just as it was running directly on your machine. Check out the below Video of Scott Davis (VMware End User Computing CTO) presenting VMware APPBlaster at VMworld 2011 in Las Vegas.

I have been enjoying my weekend, when a tweet popped on my Twitter that pointed out to Paul Rubens article titled: “ Microsoft or VMware — Who’s Really Stuck in the IT Past?“ which was a respond by Paul on a video released earlier by Microsoft “Don’t get stuck in the IT Past” which can be found at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hewedqvSWaI

The Microsoft video was really disturbing, but the first thing that got on my mind after watching it was the old quote: “If your house is made of glass don’t throw stones on others”. The great part Paul Rubens article agreed exactly with that quote. I really recommend reading Paul Rubens article found at: Microsoft or VMware — Who’s Really Stuck in the IT Past which give a totally independent view of the video as he is not a VMware nor Microsoft employee unlike the video maker as well he is totally independent of both companies. I believe Paul Rubens article was a great respond to the video, but below are just few reminders for people watching the video.

Nonetheless the diversity of Solutions VMware is delivering today, many people still know VMware as a Virtualization Company. The efforts and solutions released by VMware over the past 2 years outside of the virtualization Arena has been as huge as the one to keep the lead of the Virtualization Solutions. Its no longer true that VMware is solely a Virtualization Company, but VMware is turning into a great overall IT Solutions Company.

The below video of Paul Maritz(VMware CEO) at VMworld 2011 Explain VMware Transformation from a Virtualization Company into IT Solutions Company.

For more VMworld 2011 Videos and the full Paul Maritz VMworld 2011 Keynotes, please check the below link:

http://www.vmworld.com/community/conference/us/learn/generalsessions

With all the enhancements and new features were announced with vSphere 5, many of you waiting patiently for vSphere 5 to be available for download. The good news that the long waited vSphere 5 has been announced available for download yesterday. You can download the vSphere 5 installers at: http://downloads.vmware.com/d/info/datacenter_cloud_infrastructure/vmware_vsphere/5_0

vSphere 5 has a tons of enhancements & new features, below just a summary of the major new features:

• Convergence. vSphere 5.0 is the first vSphere release built exclusively on the vSphere ESXi 5.0 hypervisor architecture as the host platform.
• VMware vSphere Auto Deploy. VMware vSphere Auto Deploy simplifies the task of managing ESXi installation and upgrade for hundreds of machines. It makes stateless ESXi possible.

In reaction to the huge demand of VMware customers after the announcement of the new vSphere 5 vRAM licensing Schema, VMware has announced the changes of its vRAM entitlements  & few other licensing items to respond to customers demands. In this article, I will be covering just that. Its important to note, I am a bit late on bringing the news here as it was announced on August 3rd. The reason on me being late to report this, I have been really busy lately covering for my two colleagues who went on vacation for the past 2 weeks. OK, so what has changed & why?

As lately I have been testing several of our Enterprise Management Solutions, & I have been sharing them more often with our customers. After the announcement of vRAM, vCenter CapacityIQ is one of the products that seems to grab attention quickly. After delivering several POCs to customers, most of them have came back to me and asked me on the procedure to Grant a User Access to vCenter CapacityIQ. Most of them want to ensure that they can create a user name & password for their monitoring team that does not have access to anything else in vCenter. As the steps are not too clear in our documentation, I have decided to share it on here with few snapshots:

Capacity Management importance has been on the rise since Virtualization started becoming a main stream. In earlier days in the physical world, Capacity Planning/Management used to end at the time the hardware was purchased. In most cases, the hardware was over-sized to ensure it can handle the workload as well future growth of the application. Though as that over-sized box is dedicated to a single application, it did not matter how you sized that application as long the server has enough resources to run it. Though when virtualizing the story is fundamentally different, as now you have multiple VMs per server. If VMs are over-sized that means your consolidation ratio & other VMs performance can be affected. If Virtual machines are under-sized, then they will not perform well. Idle & unused VMs can be of a huge waste of expensive storage and need to be avoided.

Most organization today has different complains about their current performance monitoring tools. These problems are put under the magnifier when Virtualization or Private Cloud is implemented. Below are few of the main complains getting heard & VMware is trying to respond to by vCenter Operations Manager:

• Our Performance Management/Monitoring tools report too many metrics that is hard to make sense of & track.
• Our Performance Management/Monitoring tools report too many false positive events, which getting to be a nightmare for our admins.
• Our users are the first to notice performance problem before our admins can use our current Performance Management/Monitoring tools trying to find out the problem source.

One of the most asked questions lately by partners and customers when it come to VMware View 4.6 Implementation (I believe its applicable for older versions of View as well) is that when creating a Windows 7 Desktop Pools that utilize Linked Clones & try to utilize Quick Prep the deployment of desktop fails at the customizing stage. In the other hand, if they use SysPrep instead of Quick Prep the Desktop Deployment succeed & Desktops work normally though its much slower than Quick Prep can customize a Desktop VM. Further, Windows XP Pools work just fine with Quick Prep at the same setup. To be honest this has hit me before and that how I found out the solution.

Note: VMware vSphere 5 vRAM has dramatically been amended since the original announcement. For more info about what was amended then please check my following article: vSphere 5 vRam Licensing Amendment. Further, this article has been updated accordingly.

While others have decided to cover up all the nice features that is coming up with vSphere 5 & vCloud Director 1.5, I was quite busy explaining to customers that most of them are not affected by the new vSphere 5 vRAM Licensing Schema. Actually none of the existing customers who called me asking about the licensing change was near being affected by the new licensing schema. Let’s be honest when I first heard about the new licensing schema I had panicked too, but only few hours laters of research I have discovered it actually make sense and not as bad as it look at first glance.

For all of those Android Tablets fans who had a VMware View environment and wanted to connect to, but had no official VMware View Client that support Android this post is carrying out the good news to you. Now VMware has officially released a VMware View Client for Android Tablets, which finally will give us the same functionality iPAD users has enjoyed for a while. I believe now I can move on and buy an Android Tablets my self and be sure it will work with VMware View with the full functionality without any problem. Getting the VMware View Client up and running on your Android tablet is nothing more than a quick visit to your Android Market and download the client from there. You hear it correctly, VMware has just pushed the VMware View Client into the Android Market for ease of availability.

In the past two years, every vendor has packaged its offering with the word Cloud or Cloud Computing in it. I don’t blame them being the buzzword of this decade, though that create a hell of confusion to customers. In many cases that confusion was even against the vendor it self. I mean if you want just to sell a simple hardware box and you put the word Cloud Computing, you might end up confusing the user of what he is buying and leave it all for not understanding what he is exactly getting. Further, It has definitively hurt the real Cloud Computing Vendors.

If you are an Ubuntu user like I am, a VMware View PCoIP Client for Ubuntu has been long waited for. Unfortunately, officially it still not released by VMware so if you want the official release then you just have to wait. Though if you are looking for a work around then its here, and you don’t need to get stuck with the disastrous RDP protocol. Before I mention anything further, how about watching the below video as a teaser. A real teaser!



I have noticed many partners lately complaining about their Capacity Planning report having below expected VM per server Density, & has normally been granted access to their Capacity Planning Project to optimize the report. I have decided I will share the info on here on which parameters to change in order to  get a decent VM per Server Density in your CP report. Although I have been using these numbers successfully During my job for a while, and I know that many of my colleagues are following the same I provide no explicit/implicit guarantee of the results nor my employer. If you think your capacity planner report got out of hand on results (Ex 1000 vm per host), then please check what you have done wrong or contact your local VMware SE, or feel free to leave me a comment below. I will repeat use at your own risk, & ensure to use your judgement before submitting the report to customers.