Virtualization, Cloud, Infrastructure and all that stuff in-between

My ramblings on the stuff that holds it all together

DC14 – Overview of 2009 VMware Datacenter Products (VMworld Europe 2009)

4 Comments Posted by vinf.net on February 24, 2009

This session was discussing new features in vSphere, or is it VDC-OS, I’m a bit confused about that one – vSphere is the new name for “Virtual Infrastructure”? that would make sense for me.

As usual this session is prefixed with a slide that all material presented is not final, and is not a commitment – things may change etc. – at least VMware point this out for the less aware people who then come and complain when something has changed at GA 🙂 this is my take on what was said… don’t sue me either 🙂

vApp is an OVF based container format to describe a virtual machine (os+app+data = workload) and what resources it needs, what SLA needs to be met etc. I like this concept.

in later releases it will also include security requirements – they use the model that vApp is like a barcode that describes a workload, the back-end vCenter suite knows how to provision and manage services to meet the requirements expressed by the vApp (resource allocation, HA/FT usage, etc.) and does so when you import the vApp.

There was some coverage of VMware Fault Tolerance (FT) using the lockstep technology, this has been discussed at length by Scott here however if I understood correctly it was said that at launch there would be some limitations; its going to be limited to 1 vCPU until a latter update, or maybe they meant experimental support at GA, with full support at a later update (update 1 maybe?) perhaps someone else at the session can clarify, otherwise there will hopefully be more details in the day 2 keynote by Steven Herrod tomorrow.

There is likely to be c.10% performance impact for VMware FT hosts due to the lockstep overhead (this was from an answer to a delegate question, rather than in the slides).

Ability to scale-up virtual machines through hot add vRAM and vCPU as well as hot-extension of disks.

The vShphere architecture is split into several key components (named using the vPrefix that is everywhere now!:))

vCompute – scaling up the capabilities and scale of individual VMs to meet high-demand workloads.

VMDirectIO – allowing direct hardware access from within a VM; for example – a VM using a physical NIC to do TCP offload etc. – the VM has the vendor driver installed rather than VMXNET etc. to increase performance (looks to have DRS/vMotion implications)

Support for 8 way vSMP (and hot-add)

255Gb RAM for a VM

up to 40GB/s network speed within a VM.

vStorage – improved storage functionality

Thin-provisioning for pragmatic allocation of storage, can use storage vMotion to move data to larger LUNs if required without downtime – monitoring is key here – vCenter integration.

Online disk grow – increase disk size without downtime.

<2ms latency for disk I/O

API for snapshot access, enabling ISV solutions, custom bolt-ons

Storage Virtual Appliances – this is interesting to me, but no real details yet

vNetwork

Distributed Network vSwitch – some good info here – configure once, push config out to all hosts

3rd party software switches (Cisco 1000V)

vServices

vShield - which is a self-learning and configuring firewall service and firewall/trust zones to enforce security policies

vSafe – a framework for ISV’s to plug in functionality like VM deep-inspection, essentially doing brain-surgery on a running VM via an API.

Last point before I had to leave early for a vendor meeting was about Power – vSphere has support for power management technology like SpeedStep and core sleeping and DPM (Distributed Power Management) is moving from experimental to mainstream support. This is great as long as you make sure your data centre power feed can deal with surge capacity should you need to spin up extra hosts quickly; for example at a DR site when you invoke a recovery plan. This needs thought and sizing, rather than oversubscribing power because you think you can get away with it (or don’t realise DPM is sending your servers to sleep); otherwise you may be tripping some breakers and having to find the torches when you have to “burst”.

VMWare, vmworld, VMworld Europe 2009, vSphere

DC02 – Best Practices for Lab Manager (VMworld Europe 2009)

4 Comments Posted by vinf.net on February 24, 2009

This was an interesting session; I’ve played a bit with Lab Manager but definitely intend to invest more time in it this year, key things for me were;

There are approx 1000 deployments of Lab Manager at customers, a large percentage in Europe.

You need to bear in mind VMFS constraints on the number of allowed hosts when using DRS with Lab Manager, LM typically provisions and de-provisions lots of VMs so size hosts and clusters accordingly. Consider the storage bandwidth/disk groups etc. The self-service element could easily let this get out of control with over-zealous users, implement storage leases to avoid this (use it or loose it!)

Real-life Lab manager implementations have typically been for the following uses;

Training – I hadn’t personally considered this use-case before but it’s popular
Demo environments – McAfee using LM to run their online product demo environments, some custom code to expose the VM console outside of VI into a browser.
Development – VMware make heavy use of Lab manager for their own dev environments, they have build end-end automation via the SOAP API to integrate with smoke test tools and commercial tools like Mercury etc. builds go through automated smoke tests with the whole environment being captured with the bug in-situ and notifications and links sent to the relevant teams for investigation – excellent stuff; would be good to see a more detailed case-study on how this has been built.

Multi-site Lab Manager implementations are tricky – and need manual template copies or localised installations of LM; may be addressed in future releases.

When backing up Lab Manager hosted VMs think about what you are backing up; guest-based backup tools (Symantec/NTBackup etc.) will expand out the data from each VM and will consume extra storage – Lab manager uses Linked-clones so the actual storage used on the VMFS is pretty efficient.

Ideally use SAN based snapshots on the whole VMFS (or disk tree), and not individual VMDK backups – no file/VM granularity but there is a good reason for this; because linked-clones are so inter-dependent you need to backup the whole chain together otherwise you risk consistency issues (maximum number of linked clones is 30)

VMware say there is no real performance penalty for using linked clones, SAN storage processors can cache the linked/differential parts of the VMDK files very efficiently (due to smaller size fitting in cache I guess?)

There is a tool called SSMove which can move virtual disk trees (linked-clone base disk + all children) between VMFS volumes – not Storage vMotion aware; needs downtime to that VM (and it’s children) to carry out.

There is a concept of organizations within Lab Manager which allows you to separate out access between multiple teams accessing the same Lab manager server and infrastructure.

Network Fencing is a useful feature in Lab Manager, it means you have multiple environments running with identical or conflicting IP address spaces; it automatically deploys a virtual appliance which functions as a NAT and router between the environments to keep traffic separate but allow end-user access by automatically NAT’ing inbound connections to the appropriate environment/container.

All in there are some good features being added into Lab Manager but it would be really good to see VMware working with PlateSpin to integrate the two products tighter, out of the box Lab Manager doesn’t have a facility to import physical machines via P2V – VMware are focused on end-end VM lifecycle solutions but PlateSpin could bring a lot to the table by keeping lab copies of physical servers refreshed; and conversely the ability to sync workload (OS/app/data) changes from development systems back out to physical machines (or other hypervisors – more on PlateSpin and it’s X2X facilities in a previous post here).

VMWare, vmworld, VMworld Europe 2009

VMworld Europe Day 1: Keynote

2 Comments Posted by vinf.net on February 24, 2009

Today is the 1st day of the full public conference, for me the keynote was a repeat of most of the partner session yesterday but with a few tweaks and customer details.

VMware always have good lead-in videos for their conferences and nice to note that Ducati are one of the many organisations that use VMware 🙂

“Virtualization is the tipping point, from the server room to the C-sute virtually anything is possible” etc. etc.

Paul says >70% of IT budget "keeping lights on" – less than 30% going into competitive advantages/new development – VMware aims to reduce this effort, enabling real IT as a service.

Paul confesses that he was blame for the proliferation of underused x86 servers at his time at Microsoft, at least he’s honest 🙂

Google does the level of cloud scale it does through set of highly specialised purpose built applications and DC systems – they could do this as they had the luxury of a green field implementation. Virtualization means encapsulation which means you can do it evolutionary way (take current apps, run them more efficiently).

Mention of Storage virtual appliances as part of vStorage that I missed yesterday, that’s interesting… hopefully something good coming from EMC on this.

vSphere/Next version of ESX will introduce no technical reason for <100% virtualization – significant performance improvements and taking advantage of VM-aware hardware, FT/HA baked-in and Open standards & Extensibility

Terramark showed a nice demo of their web UI for their vCloud platform showing oversubscription tied to billing engine to enable burst based usage

Technology makes them confident enough to implement the cloud with an official SLA with penalty clauses based on pragmatic capacity via burst/over-subscription & HA/FT.

EngineYard demo – a RoR company which supports vCloud & EC2 demo shows it controlling Terramark’s cloud via vCloud delivering “RoR as a service” and federation to multiple vCloud providers

Sungard doing DR as a service using vCloud and Logica extending LabManager and providing as a service – Lab on demand.

Announcements were made around the Client hypervisor and formal announcement of vmware partnering with Intel on client hypervisor

Management vPro

CVP – client virtualization platform

More technical details coming in Steve Herrod session tomorrow.

SAP Managed Services detailing how they are using VMware

SAP Managed Services 28k servers 8k VMs (internal services)

Data backup 340TB/day

Training & demo, QA/support biggest consumers

Moved ops to low-cost countries

Lifecycle Manager for end-end management of services.

Made some interesting comparisons for how the airline industry manages oversubscription and the IT/cloud industry.

A bit disappointed that there weren’t any big announcements or dates for vSphere (other than the public unveiling of the already leaked name) – but it can’t be far off now – will look forward to Steve Herod’s session tomorrow for the details.

New open ask the Exec team session tomorrow at 2pm – ask Paul your questions, etc.

Uncategorized

VMworld Partner Day wrap-up

Leave a comment Posted by vinf.net on February 24, 2009

I take back what I said earlier about lack of technical track & content – whilst it wasn’t quite up to the list of previously announced sessions there was enough good stuff with information that is relevant to VMware partners with both a technical & competitive slant.

I still have my concerns that tomorrow is going to be rammed with the number of people expected, best get in early if you want a seat.

There was a fair bit of mud-slinging at Microsoft & Citrix from the ThinApp and View camp but I’ve seen similar from the other side so I think that’s just business as usual, whilst a nice thought – it would be better to have more of an independent view on the matter and I note Brian Madden has a session about VDI vs.TS and he’s always been pretty objective about that sort of thing – I’ve seen him at BriForum in the past.

Afternoon sessions were interesting, covering the upcoming AppSpeed product (‘#include <subject to change, your mileage may vary type disclaimers.h>), which is borne from the B-Hive acquisition last year – I’ve been looking forward to this as a result of early demo work I did on the B-Hive product, the upcoming vCenter integrated product is likley to support a good set of DB & Web applications as well as Exchange – I for one would like to add my vote for RDP/ICA coverage in future releases, VMware have noted this is in the pipeline for future releases, there will be a further beta programme later in the year and it looks very promising – almost a killer app for virtualization projects as far as I can tell (more information later in the week from the public sessions).

Microsoft were hosting some drinks this evening and had some interesting discussions with the AppV/HyperV guys, they have a stand in the solutions exchange and are worth checking out, IMHO if only for the AppV stuff, it’s an excellent product and IMHO better positioned for the enterprise environment and can service offline scenarios much better than VMware ThinApp (despite the mud-slinging that went on today)

I spent a bit of time preparing the ioko stand in the vCloud pavilion, I’ll be on the stand tomorrow during the lunch break and the evening session with TechHead. Confusingly, and some would say tactically we are both called Simon in real life but if it helps, I look like this. Don’t let that put you off – or the fact that there seems to be some concrete attached to my head in the photo ! :)).

We’ll be there with some other ioko colleagues for the welcome drinks, please feel free to come over and say hi, we have a presentation on the stand around our cloud reference architecture and customers. I would be happy to talk anyone through it and our practical experiences implementing this cloud thing (we were doing it long before it was called “cloud”).

The solutions exchange is huge.. far bigger than I had expected, drop by the Dell stand for the biggest flat-screen TV you have ever seen!

Hands-on labs are looking good – dual screen setups and thin-client devices.

Here are some pictures from the Solutions Exchange as it’s being setup

Right, early start tomorrow (or later today, it’s 1am local time)… more live posts from the keynote – here’s hoping for some major product announcements from VMware to counter the recent MS/Citrix ones.

VMWare, vmworld, VMworld Europe 2009

VMworld Partner Day – Keynote

1 Comment Posted by vinf.net on February 23, 2009

So things have kicked off here in Cannes for VMware partners of which my employer is one, the first session is the keynote/general session – covering general product announcements, some sales woop-de-woop and details of upcoming partner programmes.

Despite the “current economic climate” (a phrase which has been used at least 100 times already today, and it’s only 11am) there VMware are still seeing a strong demand for product and services and the VMworld event itself, this isn’t surprising (to me anyway) as I’ve long seen VMware’s key message as “do more, with less” which is what you need if you are tightening the corporate belt.

There are 1500 partners here today for partner day and they are expecting 4,600 delegates for the full conference which starts tomorrow; it’s already pretty heaving on the 1st floor balcony and I think tomorrow might be pretty crammed – best try to get to sessions early.

I’m not sure what happened but when I signed up for partner day originally there was a full-on technical track for today, which was my main reason for attending – this seems to have vanished without a trace and the remaining sessions are a mix of sales/business/competitive and partner sessions with what look to be some high-level tech session later today – this is a bit disappointing and I’ve not seen anything in the run up to say this was going to be the case, ah well I’m sure there will be some useful information anyway.

There was some interesting positioning of virtualization which I’ve not seen spelled out before – positioning it as enabling the “software mainframe”, building a large, reliable compute resource but using industry standard building blocks, reducing proprietaryness (new word I have invented) like you have with traditional mainframes (ICL, IBM, etc.) through standardisation of constituent parts (no single vendor tie-in).

in the keynote Paul outlined VMware’s key initiatives going forward;

VDC-OS – foundation for the cloud; internal now, enabling…
vCloud –
- Service Provider targeted,
- build clouds using VDC-OS tech
- allows eventual federation
- reduce proprietaryness (choice)
- VMware Working with standards bodies
Desktop as a service (DaaS) – programme started with VMware View and ThinApp products, 2009 full rollout of full suite

People stay, devices come and go
Current model is device centric, move to user-centric (provision users not PCs.
Abstract the underlying plumbing through virtualization
Currently centralised / server hosted only Thin-Client/VDI

Mobile
Client hypervisor – make seamless replication of environment delivery and data between server based and local and sync data back
VMware view – DaaS thin & thick clients with central mgmt.
take advantage of de-duplication
currently PCoIP (PC over IP – remote desktop) – blade PCs etc
Trickle data changes back to cloud (less device dependency)
possibly enable BYOPC (buy your own PC from say PC world, you get the choice, IT provide a sandboxed environment for you to work in

Isolation through virtualization from local OS
VMware would like you to install Win7 to the cloud (easy upgrades, less hardware dependencies, upgrade of lot of distributed PC hardware = resource intensive
users & IT are Slaves to pieces of hardware.

Interesting item – Terraditchi (spelling?) is a hardware device that does WAN acceleration for remote desktop sessions they are a VMware partner and are collaborating to move the implementation entirely into software –less proprietary/dedicated hardware.

Cloud is great but as I’ve talked about before its going to take time (or will never happen) for everyone moves everything to the cloud, there will always be a hybrid internal/external cloud VMware are floating the term "virtual private cloud" through vCloud to describe a federation & choice between internal & various service providers.

this allows this sort of move to be done in an evolutionary way, rather than revolutionary (i.e throw it what you have and rebuild) – virtualization can deliver benefit now (cost saving/consolidation/DR) and position you for a strategic move to the cloud in future through the federation/standardisation from vCloud/VDC-OS.

VMware also officially using/announcing the vSphere; light on details – hope there will be a big announcement tomorrow – but he did say shipping this year.

2 (high-level) product announcements today

vCenter server heartbeat SLA monitoring and HA combined (app awareness and response time and DRS/HA)

vShield zones (leveraging vSafe API to delivery security & compliance products).

VMware are making big moves into the desktop space with the View suite and there could be a good green story here, VMware’s statistics show 684M desktop PCs in the world now

By my very quick workings are @85w each = 58 billion watts )58Million KW of energy) if a thin client + share of a central VDI datacentre is 20w that’s a huge energy saving

With the introduction of the client-side hypervisor they mention they have the possibility to solve the problems of this scenario for offline/mobile use.

Lastly, VMware Partner University is announced, accessible via Partner central All VMware technical and sales training materials online. It has been Localised to several language and is Role based (sales/pre/post) and solution specific (VI/VDI/BC)

VMWare, vmworld, VMworld Europe 2009

VMworld minus 1 Day

Leave a comment Posted by vinf.net on February 22, 2009

I’m here at VMworld Europe in Cannes after a good flight with BA from LHR Terminal 1, very efficient bus transfer from the airport to the conference centre, turn left at the arrivals hall – or follow the people with VMworld signs – Microsoft take note; there was no shuttle bus the day before TechEd Europe last year when a lot of the people were arriving.

I’ve registered at the conference centre (opened at 4pm local time if you are en-route) and the following is a picture of the goods…

The bag is pretty decent – and has a metal strap clip, not the useless squeaky snappy plastic ones that you normally get at these types of event.

I have 2 passes, one for partner day (Monday) and one for the normal conference – there isn’t anything in particular to denote that I’m an “official blogger” so hopefully that won’t give me any issues getting into a lounge.

There is a shuttle bus service from the conference centre to the various official hotels, one hint though – when they ask what hotel you are staying at shout – the driver on route 3 seems hard of hearing as I had to tell him 3 times and still ended up being the last on the bus when my hotel was the closest 🙂

Hopefully able to go to the official Veeam party this evening to meet up with the twitter brigade and fellow bloggers.

Also need to go for a run and work off that sizeable lunch!

Addendum – I see from Eric’s video that I checked in at the wrong desk; might explain the pass thing 🙂

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Using VMware vCenter Converter 4 to create a Virtual Center Template

1 Comment Posted by vinf.net on February 20, 2009

I have a set of standard template Virtual Machines under VMware Workstation 6.5 that I use to spin up VMs, Workstation doesn’t have a native template feature but I get a VM to a point where I’m happy with the build, VM tools installed, Windows updates done etc. and then I sysprep it and shut it down.

At this point I mark it read-only and when I want to create a new Windows virtual machine I just right-click it and create a linked-clone.

This is handy for me as each VM only consumes small amounts of space as they are all just differential snapshots.

however, if I want to change the base template (for example to update from SP1 to SP2) this does present an issue as it has lots of children which depend on it so I can’t change the parent VM, in this instance I create a full clone of the base VM and update it and create further linked clones from it (essentially creating a “fork”).

I also have an ESX server farm in my lab and I like to keep my standard images consistent between workstation and ESX/VC to to save me creating and patching multiple templates.

I recently created the following templates and wanted to get a consistent copy on both my lab ESX system and my laptop VM Workstation system, I noted VMware Convertor 4.0 had been released so thought it would be an ideal time to use it to get a fresh set of images with all the current Windows updates applied.

Windows Server 2008 x64 as a virtual centre template on my ESX farm
Windows Server 2003 Ent, x86, SP2 as a read-only VM on VMware Workstation 6.5.

1st task is to import the Windows Server 2003 image from Workstation to ESX/VC using VM Converter 4.0;

Note the source machine options.

VM Workstation VM Information

Select appropriate target – in this instance it was an ESX farm, controlled by Virtual Center so I chose VMware Infrastructure Virtual Machine and put the hostname and credentials for my Virtual Center host, you can of course go direct to each ESX host if you don’t have VC.

This is a new feature, you get shown all the VM’s and can choose the appropriate storage group to on each host because it queries VC

It checks it out against the host and VC

Some better laid out options for the conversion (reminds me of the PlateSpin UI)

Options to change CPU count and SCSI controller

Options to customize service start-up options post-conversion, for example if you have an application that you don’t want to start-up until you’ve checked the target VM is ok (not applicable in this case as it’s a vanilla template, but handy to know).

These are the new sync options – and a warning that I don’t have sysprep pre-loaded in this VM – not required at this stage as the VM already has sysprep applied within (will change this once its on the target as i can apply a customization template)

Note – I chose to install VM tools, as the ESX version is likely to be different from my Workstation version that is included in the image.

Usual summary screen… much nicer UI than previous versions

Running the conversion process, this is over a GbE network connection.

Note new job copy option.. very handy in previous versions you had to do it from scratch each time.

All done in about 20mins, although it did sit at 95% 1 minute remaining for about 10mins 🙂

And it shows up in Virtual Center as a normal VM

Worth remembering to use the ‘notes’ field in both workstation and ESX, Converter brings them across so you’ll always know this VM’s history

Now, running under ESX

at 1st logon its detecting newly installed hardware drivers and running deploypkg.exe, which I assume converter injected to do post-conversion tasks

The auto-install of VMtools threw up some errors over unsigned drivers, so had to manually ok the dialog boxes and then it rebooted itself, wonder if I hadn’t logged on manually it may have done all this in the background automatically.

Once the VM was across I got a service failure on boot up, after I did some digging, it turns out it is something related to VMware tools the vmhgfs service failed to start due to the following error: Cannot create a file when that file already exists – I guess this is a left over from the Workstation version of VM Tools as a bit of digging revealed that this driver is related to host/guest shared networking which isn’t in ESX. – in this instance I removed the registry key relating to the driver and all was good (do this at your own risk!)

I also had a failed device in device manager, I right clicked on the VMware Replay Debugging Helper and chose uninstall and all was well, maybe I could have uninstalled/reinstalled VM Tools instead.

A reboot and all was running ok, I then shutdown the newly cleaned up VM and converted it to a Virtual Center template and was able to apply my normal customization templates (see this post for more info on that).

Next part of this article will be to convert the Windows 2008 x64 template I have in ESX into a VMware Workstation image and all my templates will be consistent.

VMWare

VMworld Session Builder/Auto-Generator

Leave a comment Posted by vinf.net on February 17, 2009

There is an automated session builder for VMworld, which lets you build up your sessions and export them into various calendar formats (Outlook, iCal etc.) I couldn’t find any navigation to this from the VMware homepage or vmworld.com site – but thanks to Virtual Aleph I managed to find a link, strange.

The link you are looking for is here, it does all seem a bit disjointed from the vmworld.com site, maybe its not meant to be released yet as Manlio says he was notified by email – but it worked for me and I have some sessions scheduled now, lots to choose from, so little time 🙂 maybe VMware will consider a 4 1/2 day format like Microsoft use for TechEd in future.

If you can’t do the auto-schedule, you may have too many sessions in your interests section, by my reckoning there are about 16 session slots; the schedule for Thursday PM hasn’t been announced as they will be re-running the most popular sessions – would expect an announcement late Weds/early Thurs on this.

Export options..

vmworld, VMworld Europe 2009

vinf.net at VMWorld Europe 2009

2 Comments Posted by vinf.net on February 17, 2009

Less than 1 week to go now until VMworld Europe 2009 kicks off in Cannes, I will be there blogging about the content and this is a quick post to let you know what I will be doing during this time.

“the tools”

I’ve been using twitter for a while but not extensively; I’ve found it useful during sessions to share information that later makes it into proper full-blown blog posts; IMHO twitter definitely isn’t the end of the blog but it’s useful for this sort of real-time event.

I have my Blackberry 8120 with TwitterBerry as my tweet posting client, Google maps to find my way around and it’s built-in camera/video recorder via Qik. plus the usual email etc.

My laptop; Dell Latitude D620, Windows Vista and Microsoft Live Writer (and tweetdeck) 3G and WLAN access (hoping WLAN will be good!) and the usual corporate application stack

I have remote access back to my home lab via an SSL VPN (I’ve got a big post on my refreshed lab in the pipeline) should I come across anything cool I want to try out.

I have a Mimo Flip camera as kindly provided by VMware, I’m no video wizard but I’ll try and post up anything interesting that I come across – and hopefully try not to be on camera myself 🙂

“the schedule”

I’m at Partner day on Monday – so will be posting anything of interest (subject to any NDA material)

I’ve not fleshed out my conference schedule yet; but will do so later and post it up; I note there is no pre-registration for sessions this year and they have the whole PM on Thursday reserved for re-runs of popular/oversubscribed sessions so hopefully that will work out.

There is also an interesting ancillary meeting with Microsoft around their virtualization strategy which I will be attending and will post what I can, if you have anything specific to ask the top virtualization people @MS, comment away and I’ll ask what I can.

Once I finalise my intended sessions I’ll post them up.

“the official capacity”

My rather excellent employer, ioko have a stand in the vCloud zone and I’ll be manning the stand occasionally with my colleague TechHead. Typically lunchtime and the end of the day – if you have something specific you want to talk to me about drop me a line at simon dot gallagher at ioko.com or DM me on Twitter – I’d be happy to talk you through our managed services, my professional services team and the cloud reference architecture I’ve been developing for internal and customer use.

Zeus will also be at the event and are definitely worth checking out – indeed you might want to check out this joint case study on a project we completed to provide online video for Forumula One in record time. </plug>

“the ones to watch”

My twitter account is here, if you want to get in touch, or maybe meet-up DM me and I’ll see what we can arrange.

My Blog is obviously here and I’ve added the twitter feed to the homepage and the blog RSS feed here should you wish to subscribe

My Qik account is here, I’ll cross-post Qik links to twitter

VMWare have the virtual vmworld event here – free registration

The unofficial vmworld underworld site is here

“My hopes”

I hope for the following at VMworld…

No crazy queues, and large session halls (SF 2007 still haunts me!)
Good, stable Wireless
ESX4 release or public beta dates
More tangible vCloud technical information and roadmap
Some interesting discussions with the community
some good free stuff 🙂

Enjoy!

vmworld, VMworld Europe 2009

How to Administer a Windows 2008 Server from a Vista Client

1 Comment Posted by vinf.net on February 11, 2009

This confused me for a while, up until now I’ve been using Windows 2008 inside a VM, so have had little need to remotely administer it other than via the console.

As you all know it’s better practice to use the MMC tools to admin remote servers rather than use terminal services to the actual server (uses less resources, no chance you can hit shutdown rather than logoff etc!).

In the old days you installed adminpak.msi on your XP machine and off you went, this has now been renamed to RSAT (Remote Server Administration Toolkit) – you need Vista SP1, download the appropriate update package from here.

Install the appropriate version of the update (x64 or x86) but don’t worry – you can still admin both x64 and x86 servers from an x86 client using the same tools.

Now at this point I was a bit confused (and I hadn’t read the KB article in full…tsk) but there were no handy admin tools in my start menu anywhere.

To get them installed you actually need to add a Windows “feature” via the “Programs and Features” control panel applet (I assume the update adds them there, I didn’t look beforehand).

Then scroll down and choose the appropriate tools that you need, I’ve expanded out the relevant sections and I’ve chosen to install them all.

Waiting…(no need to provide any CD’s or anything as Windows Vista has the whole OS image on-disk in a .WIM file by default, which is handy.

it did take several minutes 🙂

All done, and my workstation now has a full compliment of Windows 2008 admin tools

Note if you want to administer a Hyper-V server, then you need to download and enable these tools separately – details here, the link in the article is broken but you can download the appropriate update from Microsoft here.

If you run a corporate domain environment, its probably worth bundling these into a GPO or SMS installed package for your administrative machines, as it takes a little while to do by hand (as I did) and you have to jump through the WGA hoops to get the downloads from Microsoft.

Hyper-V Management Tools install (Vista x86 SP1)