Year: 2004

You can use VSMT to create images of physical computers and deploy them in virtual machines running on Virtual Server 2005. With VSMT, you can migrate source computers running the following operating systems to virtual machines in Virtual Server 2005:

• Windows NT 4.0 Server with Service Pack (SP) 6a, Standard and Enterprise Editions

• Windows 2000 Server SP 4 or later

• Windows 2000 Advanced Server SP 4 or later

• Windows Server 2003, Standard Edition and Enterprise Edition

Note: VSMT is intended to be used by IT professionals and consultants and requires use of a combination of native and add-on tools for Windows Server 2003. Users of VSMT should have proficiency with Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP), PXE, and Windows Server 2003 Automated Deployment Services (ADS). Additionally, you must have knowledge of the operating system that you are migrating, some scripting knowledge, and knowledge of the legacy hardware environment from which you are migrating

– System Requirements
To use VSMT, ADS 1.0 and Virtual Server 2005 must be deployed in the environment where the migration is to be performed.

In addition, the following are required:

• One x86-based computer to host VSMT, ADS 1.0, and Virtual Server 2005. Virtual Server 2005 can be running on a separate computer.

Note: ADS is not supported on the 64-bit version of Windows Server 2003, Enterprise Edition.

• One or more processors with a recommended minimum speed of 1 GHz. Processors from the Intel Pentium/Celeron family, AMD K6/Athlon/Duron family, or compatible processors are recommended.

Note: ADS is not supported on Itanium-based computers.

• English version of Windows Server 2003, Enterprise Edition, and installation CD.

• A hard disk partition or volume with 2 gigabytes (GB) free space to accommodate the setup process, plus enough extra free disk space for the images themselves.

• For ADS 1.0, 512 megabytes (MB) of RAM recommended minimum (348 MB minimum supported, 32 GB maximum).

“I have a lot of respect for the market leaders. But we have a value proposition which allows us to compete. Part of our strategy is to go into areas not well served by other products,” according to Bob St.John, Director of Business Development for SSI. “For example, some Citrix® users have tested the product and found it to be surprisingly responsive in that environment.”

This opens the door for organizations running Citrix on thin clients to extend the application support available. By providing these users with a complete desktop, including the complete operating system, applications which run on fat clients or additional versions of Windows, including NT 3.51, NT4, and Windows 3.1, can be supported. SVISTA also supports DOS, Linux, OS/2, and FreeBSD, greatly increasing the applications available to thin client users which, in turn, may significantly improve the return on their investment in Citrix products.

What allows SVISTA to be so Citrix friendly is the relatively small hardware footprint required. This is combined with an architecture which allows multiple VMs to run on the same hardware while providing a responsive desktop to the user. This has some value to every user but it makes SVISTA especially useful in shared environments, like Citrix and Linux Terminal Services .

In fact, the greatest interest in SVISTA has focused on its support for Linux Terminal Services. Likely because this provides these users with support for Windows and other non-Linux applications. “There is a very interesting presentation on our homepage and on http://www.serenityvirtual.com under Presentations and other information. It is called IBM EWWS presentation on Desktop Virtualization (PDF, 500 kB). It is a presentation by IBM which accurately represents how SVISTA is being implemented by IBM Global Services in several financial organizations in Germany and Austria.” according to St.John.

The 4-CPU version of VMware Virtual SMP addresses the anticipation of Intel-based multi-core processors becoming standard late next year, as well as further extending out the advantages of the “virtual infrastructure” to handle data-intensive enterprise workloads, according to company officials.

“We see this announcement as ‘feature-proofing’ our customers, given the recent shift by Intel and AMD away from clock speed as a way to get more performance out of a chip and towards multi-core processors. If you are [in] the virtualization business as we are, you better start finding ways to run workloads on multiple cores at a time,” said Michael Mullany, VMware’s vice president in charge of marketing at the company’s VMworld 2004 conference in San Diego.

VMWare already has a 2-CPU Virtual SMP capability on the market in its VMware ESX Server, which it delivered last year. The upcoming 4-Way version is not expected to ship until the second half of 2005 when the company expects the first dual-core processors to hit the market. The first such chips should be versions of the Opteron from AMD, and then in either late 2005 or early 2006 from Intel, according to industry analysts.

Some analysts believe the intention to deliver a 4-CPU version should bolster the VMware product’s competitive position against Microsoft’s Virtual Server 2005, which Microsoft sent to manufacturing last month and is expected to be available shortly. Presently, Microsoft’s virtual server product supports only uni-processors.

• We believe this is not a technical issue. The reality is that Microsoft has responded to support calls from customers, running applications in virtual machines.
• IBM, Dell, and HP all have support offerings for Windows running in a VMware virtual machine.
• There are tools and procedures available to replicate virtual machine workloads on physical platforms.

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The toolkit supports migration of Windows NT 4.0, Windows 2000 Server and Windows Server 2003 systems to virtual machines running on Virtual Server 2005. According to Microsoft, the toolkit will also support the movement of operating systems and applications running in other virtual machine environments to Virtual Server 2005.

The problem: Under moderate server loads, users of Citrix MetaFrame Presentation Server, Microsoft Terminal Server and VMware frequently experience poor response times, extended log-in periods, protracted screen-refreshes, and very slow print queues. Under heavy loads, application loading can increase to minutes instead of seconds, SQL queries and other compute- and data-intensive operations can lengthen to the point where the process must be killed for lack of responsiveness. The result is increased user frustration, decreased user productivity. And more calls to system administrators.

Context switching and disk thrashing: As increased demands are placed on system resources – particularly storage resources – context switching rates can quickly rise above healthy levels. At very high rates, less work is actually being accomplished. This is because threads and processes are increasingly unable to access the resources they require, so the operating system must switch many times from one waiting thread or process to another until it finds one with available resources. This condition is frequently accompanied with high levels of disk thrashing.

The solution: SuperCache mitigates this problem. SuperCache inserts itself into the disk I/O path at the block level, and caches the most active blocks of data on the logical disks selected. With the deferred-writing feature enabled, SuperCache dramatically improves the effectiveness of each context switch, greatly enhancing server responsiveness, resulting in a much more satisfying and productive user experience.

We’re taking the same approach with this book that we have with our previous Citrix and Terminal Server books. VMWare ESX Server: Advanced Technical Design Guide will be a real-world architectural field guide that shows you how to design VMWare ESX environments. It will not be a re-hash of the instruction manual, and it will not be filled with screenshots.

It will follow the look and feel of our past books, including the bulleted lists of advantages and disadvantages for each design point.

The book will be available in April 2005. A preview chapter is now available for download. We’ve chosen “Chapter 5: Designing the Guest Environment” as the preview chapter. This huge chapter goes into all the details you need to understand to design a guest environment, including master installation, ISO management, virtual machine networking, controlling resource usage, managing DSK files, and virtual machine deployment.

We’ll bring more chapters online over the next several months. At this point, the final book’s table of contents will look something like this:

Section 1. Introduction to ESX Server
1. VMware Overview
2. ESX Architectural Overview
3. VMware ESX Implementation

Section 2. Infrastructure Design
4. Network and Storage Strategies
5. Designing the Guest Environment
6. Managing the server (Console OS and MUI)

The Leostream VMC is a software application that provides centralized management and control of “virtual machine” software available from market leaders VMware Inc. of Palo Alto, Calif. and Microsoft of Redmond, WA.

Virtual Machine software carves up large multi-processor servers and divides it into individual and multiple computing units, or “virtual” servers, hence allowing multiple copies of Windows(R) or Linux(R) operating systems to be run simultaneously, and independently, on the same Intel-powered server.

Storage Area Networks (SANs) do an analogous job for computer disk storage – a large pool of storage can be split up into a number of “virtual” disk drives and shared between the servers attached to that SAN.

The Leostream VMC SAN Edition is the first shipping product to integrate the management of Virtual Servers with Virtual Storage in a low cost and easy to use system.

It extends Leostream’s existing Virtual Machine management functionality (management, reporting, and access control) to include a unified view of the virtual storage as opposed to the myopic view of the individual servers.

In addition, it enables “SAN clustering” where a number of servers running virtual machine software are attached to a common SAN in such a way that the hardware failure of one server automatically results in the affected Virtual Machines automatically “failed-over” and restarted on another server in the cluster with the minimum of downtime. Without Leostream the failure of one server can affect 20 or more virtual servers. With Leostream the affected Virtual Machines are quickly rebooted on new hardware, significantly mitigating the effect of hardware failure.

“We designed our SAN solution from the ground up for a virtual machine world. With suitable SANs we can even fail over virtual machines running in one building to a host system running in a building several miles away,” said David Crosbie, Leostream CEO.

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