Demitasse

I’ve been taking a look at Pocket Ace as a way of taking an operational computing environment with me on a USB key.

Pocket Ace allows the creation of a VM that can be run from a USB key without prior installation of VMware products.  The key contains an installer for VMware Player & uses that to run a VM.  Naturally since it’s part of ACE there are use and maintenance policies around the VM.

Of course the first question is how much USB key do you need to run a usable VM?    Since I use Windows XP as my desktop environment that’s what I want to run, I also need an office package and Microsoft Outlook 2003 to talk to my Exchange server using RPC over HTTPS.

To shrink the XP install I have used NLite to remove as much as possible, allowing the install to get down to under 1GB after the install and with Outlook 2003 and some office viewers installed and updated.  I allow 1.8 GB of disk for the VM so the basic system will fit on a 2GB key.  I use a 4GB key so I can put more on the key and have more versatility.

Since I’m planning to use the ACE package from a USB key I then allow access to drive letters using folder redirection & put a startup script into the VM that connects drive letters. 

I use a Portable Apps install in the VM, this in turn contains Open Office to allow the viewing & updating of documents.  I tried to use the redirected folders with the USB key’s copy of Portable Apps, but the launcher wouldn’t work from the redirected folder so I put it inside the VM.

So what’s it like?

The main drawback so far is that the install of VMware Player isn’t seamless or silent.  On a kiosk PC I was unable to install since the kiosk user isn’t an administrator.  On a standard PC the Player install ran OK but had all of the usual dialogues for the player install, a non-IT user wouldn’t be comfortable with that. 

Once Player installed the VM started.  When the VM was up it was quite good to use, but the effort of getting the player installed made the whole process less useful.

I’ll have to look at other ways to get my portable computing environment in my pocket.

One of the blogs I’ve been following lately is Eric Sloof’s.  Eric is a fellow VCI who must have been having some time off between courses in the last few months.  His Blog has covered a number of tools that assist access to VMFS datastores and the VMDK files within.

More recently Eric has caught the coding bug and written  some useful tools, tonight I’ve been taking a quick at Eric’s alternative to using the Web Interface to manage VMs.  He has coded a Mouse Keyboard Screen Client and is actively adding features.  It’s a cool little tool that currently does MKS, full screen console and power control.  When it does CDROM and Floppy redirection and (optional) integrated authentication then it’ll be a real killer for giving VM owners control.

By the way I am now in my new office with desk and chair, just waiting for the sparky to come and finish the permanent wiring.

Maybe I’m getting older, but I no longer find using my laptop on my lap very productive.

For the last eight weeks I haven’t had a desk to call my own while my office was being built.

This week the paint goes on and the following week the floor should go in. After that I’ll be able to move in and get back to full speed.

Every class I teach something interesting comes from the students in the class, so I thought I’d start to share these.

Last week I taught in Auckland and early on in the course we discussed VMware converter and the HAL that ends up in the converted VM.  Two students used converter to do online conversions in order to minimise downtime, as you may know I don’t like online conversion & always use the boot CD.

One student had converted some terminal servers and the resulting VMs would redline the CPU all day.  The original physical servers had dual PIII CPU’s so the single 2.6 GHz vCPU should have outperformed the old system.  It turned out that converter hadn’t replaced the ACPI Multiprocessor HAL with the ACPI UniProc HAL.  When the HAL was changed the CPU utilisation on the VMs dropped back to a sensible 20% rather than the stupid 100% that occurred with the wrong HAL.

Be warned that the converter does not change HAL, even if using offline conversion, if you are converting from SMP to non-SMP you will need to change the HAL.  For more information take a look at the Microsoft support site

I’m having a couple of weeks off teaching, more notes from class should come through in June.

Jeff Jennings delivered a keynote about operational readiness, this is the conversion of virtualisation from a project oriented implementation to a core technology within the organisation.
Jeff handed over to Thomas Walker for a quick demo of Pocket ACE (keep watching for my experience) and VDI. The demo was pretty quick as there were sessions to follow on each technology.
I missed Thomas’s session on ACE as I went to Andy Meakin’s storage optimisation session. My main takeaway from Andy’s session is that the BuslogicSCSI driver isn’t always slower than the LSIlogic. Also that the default queue length for the Windows 2000/2003 Buslogic driver is 1, so tuning that would help.
The other takeaway was a reminder that copying files onto a VMFS cases a lot of disk locking. This applies to using SCP to copy files into a VMFS, as the file size grows through the copy the whole VMFS is locked each time a block is allocated. This is a good reason not to keep those ISO files on the same VMFS as VMDK files. Using converter to import a machine as the VMDK file is created full size & then filled with data.
Simon Cruso discussed VDI, delivering his presentation using a Wyse thin client to deliver the presentation. I’m looking forward to the release of the VMware Desktop Manager V2.0 (not mentioned at TSX) which should include the fruit from the Propero acquisition in the form of a good desktop broker.
The final breakout session was with Andre Kemp where he outlined some of the top troubleshooting issues he sees. The session brought home to me the value of the Install & Config course, at least half the issues he mentioned are covered in the course. I look forward to the download of his presentation so I have reference information to resolve the other half.
TSX wrapped up with a panel discussion where the standard answer was “We can neither confirm nor deny the presence of that feature in a future product nor a date for that product”
As delegates left we were given a messenger type bag.

Overall a good conference. It’s difficult to balance the needs of the end user customers with the needs of the VMware partners. It’s also hard to add as much value as possible to a free event.
Next TSX Sydney I’d like to see an NDA partner only day in addition to the two or more customer days. This would follow the format at VMWorld. I’d also like to see some repeats of sessions to prevent conflicts.

I talked to Callum Russell, Senior Marketing Manager AP for VMware, yesterday about the low number of people sitting the VCP exam and the low pass rate.
Worldwide about a third of the people who attend the VI3 Install and Configure course sit the exam, of those only half pass the exam. These statistics worry me (and VMware).
I know I’ve taught around a hundred people the course and so far I’ve only heard from about six that have passed the exam, all of them passed it well. But what about the other ninety plus students?
I’d love to hear from any students (not just from my course) who have sat the exam and not passed, is there anything more we need to cover in the course?

Also to repeat what I say in the class, the class is not complete preparation for the exam, you also need to read and understand the Install & upgrade guide, the Basic admin guide and the Server Config guide. These are long guides but they don’t have as much material as appears at first glance.

My highlight session of the day was Jacob Jensen talking about high performance networking. Particularly talking about making the fact that there is a virtual switch in place as invisible as possible and the importance of VLANs in NIC count constrained ESX servers.
A close second was Nathan Wheat talking about security. As you’d expect the focus was on policy and procedures rather than technology. The technology is very secure if used correctly, as always the security falls down if the people using it don’t use it well.
The other sessions were good, unfortunately I missed Andre Kemp’s performance tuning session, which was very well attended and reportedly as entertaining as ever (also good material).

I’m here and the crowd is starting to build. It’s the usual BD coffee and pastries for breakfast, accompanied by people catching up with each other.
I was pleased to see that there appear to be nearly as many VCP’s on ther attendee list as there are other partners.
As always there are session conflicts stopping me hearing all I want to hear, on the plus side there’s something I want to hear in every slot.
There are also some labs running that weren’t on the published agenda, they are Lab Manager and the API SDK. I’m not sure I want to miss any sessions to attend either lab.

Tickets and hotel are booked, a couple of meetings booked too, catching up with other local VCIs.

I wanted to get mobile with blogging, mixing my other favourite tech, mobility, with VMware is always fun.  Looking around using the great revealer I came across Diarist and Matt helped me set it up to work with WordPress, now I’m set for mobile blogging.

As we all know Virtual Centre needs a database server and if you don’t have a database server when you build your VC then you can have the VC installer install MSDE.  Those of you who were listening in class will recall that MSDE is not recommended for production use, only test and demonstration.  So how do we move from an MSDE based VC to a SQL server based VC?

1. Make sure you have a SQL server to move to, at least SQL2000 SP4 or SQL2005 SP1.
2. Create a domain account to use as the service account for Virtual Centre
3. Stop the Virtual Centre & MSDE services on the VC server
4. Copy the database files (.mdf & .ldf files) to the data folder on the new SQL server
5. Attach the database to the SQL server
6. Assign the domain service account database Owner access to the database, make the VC database the default database for the user
7. Make the domain service account an administrator of the VC server
8. Logon to the VC server as the domain service account
9. Change the Virtual Centre ODBC system DSN to use the new server name
10. Change the Virtual Centre servie to use the domain service account & start the service

For me the logon to the VC server with the service account was important, possibly because I hadn’t made the account a local administrator before trying to run the service under the account.  You may not need this step.

If your database server is SQL 2005 then make sure SP1 is installed & follow VMware KB article about Requirements for running Virtual Centre with MS SQL 2005