Demitasse

I’ve been playing with View 4 and a Windows 7 non-persistent desktop pool for the last month (between a lot of other things).  Combined with roaming profiles and user folder redirection it seems to be a good solution for users with a well defined set of applications.  The issue always comes with the applications outside the base build that are used by a small subset of the user population.  Being able to provide non”standard build” applications to specific users and still have them use the non-persistent desktop simplified image management.

On the APAC Virtualisation podcast this week Appsense were almost talking about an upcoming product that will address user installable applications.  But for now the best solution seems to be to use application virtualisation or streaming for less widely used applications. 

Being a VMware kind of guy I have also been playing with ThinApp, which works well for applications on Windows XP, but doesn’t yet fully support Windows 7.  I already have a packaged version of Office 2007 which I use to deliver courses, it’s inside a TrueCrypt container on a USB key that I take to the classroom with me.

This post on the VMware View-Point blog (linked from the ThinApp blog) makes interesting reading about why agentless application virtualisation is great and says that they are close to releasing ThinApp 4.5 which will support Windows 7 as well as being faster than ThinApp 4.o.

I have a list of applications to virtualise with ThinApp once Windows 7 support arrives, to make available in the non-persistent desktop. If it works well for me it could have the side benefit of making laptop rebuilds so much simpler, particularly if my main applications live inside that TrueCrypt container on my laptop.

On a side note we’re waiting for ThinApp 4.5, View 4.x and vSphere 4.x.  Is it just me or does it sound like there might be some important releases before VMWorld 2010?

I have just had the pleasure of attending the third live session of the APAC Virtualization Roundtable Podcast, hosted by Andre Leibovici.  This is modelled after the VMware Communities Roundtable Podcast hosted by John Troyer, it is run on Wednesday evenings Sydney time.  It is run live with dial in voice and online streaming audio as well as online chat as well as being available as a recorded MP3.

Today’s topic was VMware View VDI with Jeff O’Connor a senior consultant from VMware and APAC Desktop Practise Lead as guest presenter.  The discussion was technical and driven by questions from the chat, answers were from Jeff’s experience with a number of large View implementations.

Last Week’s topic was mostly Xen and building cloud hosting on the open source Xen hypervisor, so Andre is making sure virtualisation isn’t just VMware.  The discussion has given me a new perspective on VMware’s products.

I highly recommend both the podcasts above, although I expect to be listening to recordings rather than dialling in.  The APAC one is at 11pm on Wednesday’s NZ time and the VMware Communities one is at 9am Thursday NZ time.

For all the students to whom I have taught vSphere courses and who haven’t yet taken the VCP 4 exam.

If you enter the voucher code VMTQ270A0468 when you register for the VCP410 exam you will receive a 10% discount.  This voucher code is valid for exams booked and taken before 30th June 2010.

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I’ve been playing with running ESXi as a guest on ESXi, mostly so I could test SRM v4.0 before teaching the 1.0 course.

As you may know ESX 4.0 can run another ESX 4.0 host as a VM.   The physical host uses hardware assisted virtualisation to run the 64bit virtual ESX server.  The virtual ESX server can only run 32bit VMs.  ESX on ESX is a great way to build a test lab, a single powerful host can run multiple test ESX servers. 

I took a look at Eric Gray’s VCritical post on the right VM setup to be the ESX virtual host, and ran each site of my SRM environment on one of the two HP Blades, I could have run them both on one blade if I’d had more storage in the blades. 

I would highly recommend ESX on ESX as a test lab, provided you can get a quad core machine with a heap of memory. 

I’m now looking for an inexpensive motherboard that can take 12GB (or more) of RAM, the I won’t need the blades to run my VDI and Windows 2008 domain, they can just run the testing environment.

I finally sat the VCP410 exam this week, it took all day as I had to drive 200km each way to a testing centre.  The local one where I did the VCP2 & VCP3 exams doesn’t do Pearson VUE exams any more.

Overall the exam was quite tough, lots of detail oriented questions where you need to know supported versions and amounts. 

As preparation I’d suggest you start with either Scott Vessey’s blog post  or Simon Long’s which Scott links.  There is a lot of documentation to study and try to remember.

I didn’t do a lot of preparation  specifically for the exam, but was happy with a score just under 400, I needed 350 to retain VCI instructor status.

Now that Windows 7 has been released to MSDN and TechNet subscribers we’d better be able to use the vSphere client on Windows 7.

With a default install the vSphere client complains about a config.xml file issue. As usual the resolution is available on the VMware communities site (and through Google)

As I’m teaching I haven’t tested this. but two different students have.

I had an excellent course in Melbourne last week, not many students but all good people.

One student was a VMware staff member in the consulting team here in Australia, despite being in more of a management role there was some very good material from his experiences. 

1. Six core Dunnington

One was this note about a configuration change to make if you have Intel’s new “Dunnington” 6 core CPUs  in your new ESX servers.  Shouldn’t they be called hex-core? maybe a hex is not something you want on your server.

2. VCB silly defaults

When VCB 1.1 was released one of the nice new features announced was that a VCB backup would delete any leftover VCB snapshots it finds when it starts a backup, rather than failing the new backup as previous versions did.  Unfortunately the setting that controls this is disabled by default. 

look in C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware Consolidated Backup Framework\config\config.js on your VCB proxy server and if they aren’t set to sensible values reconfigure the settings for PREEXISTING_MOUNTPOINT, PREEXISTING_VCB_SNAPSHOT, MAX_RETRIES and BACKOFF_TIME.   The defaults are fail, fail, 0 and 10 which means that existing VCB snapshots or mounts on a VM will cause new VCB backups of the VM to fail.  Changing to delete, delete, 3 and 60 will cause the existing mount points and snapshots to be deleted (changes written into parent disk) and will allow up to 4 minutes for these to complete.

There were also lots of obscure issues with Converter and old NT 4.0 machines, which can be summarised as you’ll have “fun”.