Brian Madden: Terminal Services versus VDI

These are my notes summarizing Brian Madden’s one hour long Terminal Services versus VDI presentation at VMWorld Europe 2009. I will highly recommend that you should watch Brian’s video, he is insightful, lively and articulate, you’ll enjoy him while learning from it as I did.

Background

Both Terminal Services (TS) and Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) employ server-based computing (SBC) and offer the benefits that are inherent to SBC, namely

• Central management
• Central access control
• High performance
• Security

Historically, several applications have been found not to work with SBC due to limitations of remote display protocols, although the end-user often views it as an application compatibility issue. Typically applications that are multimedia, graphic-intensive, or write their state to proprietary folders on a local disk drive, or require multiple monitors, or a hardware security dongle,  are known to break.

Should I use TS and VDI?

If you have to answer this question, you should first identify which applications are SBC compatible. Once you have identified them, then you should decide between TS and VDI.

TS advantages:

1. Very high user density (By contrast, VMWare VDI supports only 6 to 8 users per core today)
2. Proven solution/Mature technology (80 Million users/lot of user experiences on wiki’s  and training material on the Web. By contrast, VDI is cutting edge, there is a learning curve coupled with a dearth of usage-based content)
3. Automatic “thin” provisioning: All users share a common copy of OS/app code

VDI advantages:

1. Live migration for load balancing, supporting mobile users
2. VM’s can be rebooted without rebooting the host
3. Suspend/resume of VM’s possible (TS disconnect continues to consume resources)
4. Fault tolerance per user (since each user has their own VM)
5. Competition amongst vendors (Citrix was a monopoly for TS, now VMWare, Microsoft, Citrix and several other vendors are investing in the future of VDI)

   Brian showcased Atlantis Computing as an innovator that dynamically composes a bootable virtual disk (vhd or vmdk) for booting a VM.

VDI disadvantages:

1. Disk space: 10GB per user in the data center (cost per GB in data center is 5X to 10X its cost on the desktop)
2. Routine Op’s: How to run AV, backup, patch one master image

Brian’s predictions for 2010:

• Improving user density
• Remote Display Protocol improvements
• Thin provisioning/ Windows layering
• Offline VDI/Local hypervisors
• Local personality/Application management

Brian possesses journalistic flair; his posts are always insightful and thought-provoking. I have become a great fan of his blog.

Windows 7 migration a driver for seeding VDI adoption

Migration to Windows 7 is an impending event and it will happen, since Windows XP was released in 2001 and is already over 7 years old, while new generations of processors (multi-core, 64-bit, Intel VT), chip sets, graphics cards, audio cards, and disk interfaces (e.g., SATA), which were developed after XP gained mainstream adoption, are already shiiping in commodity computer hardware today.

63% of all desktops/laptops/workstations worldwide use XP, 23% use Vista; the remaining market share is fragmented across other Windows, Mac, Linux and OS’s mobile devices. [Net Applications Operating Systems Market Share report.]

XP has lost 10% market share between May 2008 and March 2009, while Vista gained just over 8% [Net Applications Top Operating Systems Share Trend report.] I am presuming that 8% of the XP users migrated to Vista and the remaining 2% siezed this opportunity to migrate to a Mac instead

The migration from Vista to Windows 7 should be smooth since the latter is an incremental release of the former.  However, the migration from XP to Windows 7 poses some of the same structural challenges outlined in my earlier post.

At the end of the day, end users care about running their applications and expect to continue to do so over the course of routine hardware and OS refresh cycles – the hardware and OS have become a commodity. The challenge for Microsoft, and the enormous market opportunity, is to provide solutions that can permit a seamless migration from XP to Windows 7 such that end users can continue to use all of their existing applications from the same desktop cost-effectively.

While the Windows 7 migration is not a dislocating event by itself, its timing coincides with the business need to move to a modern hardware and desktop OS, which encourages corporate customers to look at alternate ways of managing the desktop. The Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) vendors are viewing it as an opportunity to gain adoption for their VDI offerings – Citrix XenDesktop, Microsoft MED-V, VMWare View.

In upcoming posts, I will outline the alternative that Microsoft is offering to smoothen the upgrade path from XP to Windows 7.

DropBox: "Cloud" service for storing, syncing, sharing files

I found Dropbox, a nifty service for storing files online, keeping their copies on several of your own computers in sync, or sharing some of them with your friends.

• You download the Dropbox client (supported on Windows XP and Vista (32 and 64-bit), Mac OS X Tiger and Leopard, as well as Ubuntu 7.10+ and Fedora Core 9+)
• 2GB of free storage provided with it
• You can then drag and drop files that you want to store online or share into the Dropbox.
• Dropbox maintains a snapshot of files
• If any of the files get updated, it sends only blocks that have changed
• It also offers the ability to undelete and restore files from the copies that are stored online.
• You can create Public folders for sharing, files in Public folders have URL’s that you can share with your friends.

While the company seems to be consumer-focused, the service is usable for dull and boring corporate stuff, like instantaneous automatic backups of files that change and also enables disaster recovery.

Someone has used Dropbox for syncing and sharing VM’s. This is an interesting use case, however, readers should pay heed to the transfer times as image sizes grow

Windows 7: Why did customers not migrate to Vista?

I have been reading  Brian Madden’s perspectives regarding Windows 7, the Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) and the uplift in adoption that VDI and desktop hypervisors will experience due to the draft created by Windows 7 migration. 

I was asking myself, “Why is the Windows 7 migration such a big deal?” Windows 7 is after all an incremental release of Windows Vista. The fact of the matter is that customers did not migrate to Vista over the past two years and continue to run on XP even today. A significant majority of customers have shied away from migrating from XP to Vista on their existing computer hardware because of driver compatibility between XP and Vista – drivers written for XP may not work with Vista, they may have to be rewritten. 

SeattlePI.com has posted Microsoft internal email unsealed by a federal judge that provides a historical insight into Windows Vista’s hardware and software compatibility problems. It reports that compatibility problems turned Mike Nash’s (Corporate VP, Windows Product Management)  $2,100 PC into nothing more than an “email machine”. Steve Sinofsky, (Senior VP for Windows) admits to Microsoft’s lack of clarity and focus around setting and managing the expectations of hardware device vendors

We need to be clearer with industry and we need to decide what we will do and do that well and 100% and not just do a little of everything which leaves the IHV [Independent Hardware Vendors] in a confused state.

The primary causes for the incompatibilities are

1. Vista supports a new audio/video driver model due to a massive change in the underpinnings for audio/video between XP and Vista.
2. Vista enforces a new security model for device drivers

As a result, many XP drivers, across the board for printers, scanners, wan, accessories (fingerprint readers, smart cards, tv tuners), and so on, don’t run under Vista and their devices  become unusable. There seems to be little incentive for  device manufacturers to design, develop, test and support brand new drivers for “legacy” XP devices on Vista. Here are the 10 most common hardware problems that may be encountered by a Vista user.

The migration experience with Vista was so poor that Microsoft took the unprecedented step of providing a downgrade path to Windows XP.

Top 10 Posts for Q1 2009

Here are the Top 10 posts for Q1 2009, the numbers of views are in parentheses.

1. Defragment Ubuntu, Fedora, ext3, ext4 (2247)
2. Most popular VMWare Virtual Appliances for IT Administrators (2186)
3. VirtualBox – setup, share, shrink, convert (842)
4. How to convert a VMWare VMDK to a Microsoft, Xen VHD? (810)
5. How does shrink with vmware disk manager work? (614)
6. Most popular VMWare Virtual Appliances for Security (607)
7. Pre-configured VHD (Virtual Appliance) available from Microsoft (593)
8. Most popular VMWare Virtual Appliances for Web Apps (558)
9. Virtual Machine Disk Image Compression (320)
10. rsync vm, vhd for backup, disaster recovery, ec2 (317)

Defragmentation of virtual disk files remains the dominant theme. There is an equal amount of interest in virtual appliances, particularly those for system administrators.

Search terms:

• ext4 defrag ubuntu
• ext4 defrag
• convert vdi to vhd
• e4defrag ubuntu
• virtualbox shrink
• rsync vmdk
• wubi
• defrag ubuntu
• defrag ext3
• windows 7 virtual appliance
• defragment ext3
• vmware appliances
• defrag ext4
• xen vhd
• ubuntu ext4 defrag
• defrag ext4 ubuntu
• vmware firewall appliance
• vmware appliance
• “vdi to vhd”
• convert vhd to xen
• ext3 defrag
• windows 7 beta vmware virtual appliances
• defrag fedora
• ext3 defragmentation
• virtual appliance windows 7
• ubuntu defrag
• hercules load balancer virtual appliance
• fedora defrag
• convert vmdk to xen
• shrink vmware disk

Top 10 referrers for Q1 2009

Here are the Top 12 referrers to our blog over the past 3 months, the numbers of referrals are in parentheses.

1. http://pro-linux.de/berichte/ext4/ext4.html (765)
2. http://networksecuritytoolkit.org/nst/index.html (566)
3. http://dabcc.com/article.aspx?id=9653 (149)
4. http://polishlinux.org/apps/cli/ext4-defragmentation-with-e4defrag/ (111)
5. http://kakku.wordpress.com/2008/06/23/virtualbox-shrink-your-vdi-images-space-occupied-disk-size/ (101)
6. http://stumbleupon.com/refer.php?url=http://sharevm.wordpress.com/2009/01/19/most-popular-vmware-virtual-appliances-for-it-administrators/ (84)
7. http://techblog.41concepts.com/2008/03/31/shrink-your-windows-disk-image-on-wmware-fusion-mac/ (67)
8. http://thedarkmaster.wordpress.com/2007/03/12/vmware-virtual-machine-to-virtual-box-conversion-how-to/ (66)
9. http://blogs.msdn.com/heaths/archive/2005/07/30/445621.aspx (66)
10. http://prefetch.net/blog/index.php/2007/01/21/determining-file-fragmentation-on-ext3-file-systems/ (61)
11. http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/virtual_geek/2009/01/updated-homebrew-esx-hardware-list.html (52)
12. http://blog.rightscale.com/2009/01/09/amazon-launches-ec2-console/ (53)

Thank you for the referrals. Hope the content is meaningful for our readers

Amazon EC2 announces developer toolkit for Eclipse IDE

I received the email annoucement from Amazon ec2 earlier today:

We are excited today to introduce the AWS Toolkit for Eclipse, a plug-in for the Eclipse Java IDE that makes it easier to develop, deploy, and debug Java applications on Amazon Web Services. With the AWS Toolkit for Eclipse, you’ll be able to get started faster and be more productive when building AWS applications.

The initial launch of the AWS Toolkit for Eclipse is targeted at Amazon EC2 developers and provides basic management features along with tools for deploying and debugging Java web applications.

The AWS Toolkit for Eclipse, based on the Eclipse Web Tools Platform, guides Java developers through common workflows and automates tool configuration, such as setting up remote debugger connections and managing Tomcat containers. The steps to configure Tomcat servers, run applications on Amazon EC2, and debug the software remotely are now done seamlessly through the Eclipse IDE.

You can read the detailed announcement here and also download the AWS Toolkit for Eclipse.

wubi : Windows UBuntu Installer is wonderful

One of my earliest posts on this blog was about installing and configuring Ubuntu 8.10 within a VM, and my feeling that I did springboard into the deep end of a frigid pool on a frosty winter day. I am delighted with the experience of installing and using wubi- the ubuntu installer for windows, on my Windows XP laptop.

User Experience

wubi is an innovative approach towards introducing Windows users to Ubuntu Linux. It preserves the user experience of installing a Windows application using a standard installer and uninstalling it later from Control Panel >  Add/Remove Programs seamlessly.

• It provides an installation wizard implemented as a  standard Windows executable (.exe), double click on it and Ubuntu gets installed; users don’t have to deal with ISO images
• wubi installs ubuntu on the desktop as a NTFS file and uses the ext3 filesystem for its contents within (escalating file defragmentation needs, many of our readers visit this blog prescisly for this topic)
• NTFS-3G (Linux NTFS) driver with write support
• Grub4Dos as a boot loader – every time the laptop reboots, I am presented with a choice of whether I want to start Windows XP or Ubuntu
• Ubuntu appears as a program in the Control Panel > Add/Remove Programs.
• Uninstall removes all the artifacts cleanly

Pros and Cons:

• The Ubuntu GUI looks stunning , however, it is sluggish compared with the response time I get on XP (Harvey Su, remember him?, has a ghoulish imagination and he has by now trained all of us to view the background pattern as a giant lion that  has a void in its skull and a  skeleton dangling from its open jaws. Definitely PG-17 material)
• Ubuntu found the printers on our LAN (this blew me away), it even found the PostScript profile (.ppd file?) for our HP LaserJet automatically, however, I when I tried to install it, the installation failed with no diagnostics.
• It could not find the Postscript profile  for another Canon printer/copier/scanner, however, unlike Windows, it did not lead me to a website where I could download it from.
• It found a Broadcom wireless driver for my Dell laptop, I was able to install and activate it, however, some interaction with our Active Directory authentication prevented me from getting access to our secure wireless network. Once again, there was no diagnostic to indicate what went wrong.
• I would be glad to send the wubi developers log files except that I don’t know what to send to whom, however, it would be nice to have a utility that gathers all the relevant diagnostics and beams it up to “mother ship” over http.
• Update: It would be cool if I could share a folder between XP and Ubuntu so that I could install the ISO’s I had downloaded earlier on  XP.

In conclusion

There is an excellent how-to guide prepared by parthodeep for your reference.

Kudos to Agostino Russo and team for an outstanding job.

Microsoft Application Virtualization (SoftGrid / App-V) Architecture and Engineering

The compelling aspect of Application Virtualization is that it lets applications be delivered dynamically as services that can be added or removed without installation. In trying to understand the underpinnings of this technology, I found two interesting chalk talks by John Sheehan, the architect of Softricity’s SoftGrid, which was rebranded as App-V, after it was acquired by Microsoft:

1. Introduction to Application Virtualization Technology
2. Achitecture and Engineering of App-V

How credible is EC2’s competition?

Amazon’s Elastic Computing Cloud (ec2) is offering over 1500 AMI’s (virtual appliances). It’s recent foray into Europe highlights its aggressive pursuit of a land grab strategy. So, what has its competition in the US been up to? Every major web hosting vendor has announced a cloud initiative:

• The Rackspace cloud is called Mosso. Its prices compare favorably with Amazon’s. Its pricing calculator and spreadsheets can be found here.
• Savvis has a VMWare ESX based offering for Windows and Linux
• AT&T is also offering VMWare ESX based hosting Windows, Linux and Solaris x86. They intend to offer Citrix XenServer and Microsoft Hyper-V in the future. AT&T offers SLA’s for cloud services, a first.
• Terremark has also launced an Enterprise Cloud, which incidentally is a utility computing cloud sans virtualization
• IBM’s cloud initiative has its products available as AMI’s on ec2.
• Sungard has not yet publicly announced its cloud plans.
• Verizon is slated to announce its cloud initiative in Summer 2009

Amazon’s ec2 is nearly three years old now (Mar 2006) and competition has started appearing on the horizon just over the past year. If you look at the timescale of announcements,

• Rackspace’s Mosso is just over a year old (Feb 2008),
• Terremark’s cloud is nine months old (June 2008),
• AT&T’s cloud is seven months old (Aug 2008),
• IBM’s AMI launch on ec2 and Savvis’ cloud is three weeks old (Feb 2009).

Since ec2 was first to market, the Rackspace, AT&T and Savvis cloud offerings have a “me too” feel to them. However, unlike other vendors, Rackspace has published pricing on the Web and it appears to be very competitive with ec2. 

Unlike Amazon, Savvis and AT&T are going the buy versus build route to get fast time to market. They are initially launching their service using VMWare technology put together using Professional Services instead of following Amazon’s approach of building a proprietary infrastructure using Open Source software as its foundation. In fact, this may be the preferred route amongst the upper echelons of cloud service providers. There is optimism that providing cloud services is a growth business. I am noticing startups like Enomaly (”Build your own private elastic cloud”) and VMOps (”launch ec2 today”, aka public cloud) offering cloud infrastrcture products.

In conclusion, credible competition is emerging and there are real alternatives to ec2 available today. However, given the state of the economy, I think the market will begin to form by 2010 and should reach critical mass by 2011-2012.