VMware View and Windows 7

In my last few blogs about Windows 7 I ranted a little about how I was impressed so far with the latest OS release from the evil empire of Microsoft (had to put that in there for the Mac geeks).  The biggest thing I had to whine about was that the VMware View client wouldn’t work with the new OS.  Granted this is a VMware problem not a Microsoft problem but it was none the less……irritating.  There were a few ways around the issues using XP Mode or some other client hypervisor but you still had to log in to another machine which was……..also irritating.

We’ll my whinning was silenced when my boss sent me a handy little registry hack that allows the View client to work with Windows 7 just the way it worked with XP and Vista.  So, as it was shared with me to easy my irritations I will share it with you.  Simply cut and paste the lines of text below (in red) into Microsoft Notepad and save the file as a .reg file instead of .txt, double-click  and apply the registry changes.  You may want to backup your registry first, although I haven’t had a single problem after making the registry changes.   Special thanks to Jeremiah “V-Pain” Cook for hooking me up with this handy hack!

 

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings\5.0\User Agent]

“Version”=”MSIE 8.0″

“Platform”=”Windows NT 6.0″

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings\User Agent\Post Platform]

“SV1″=-

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Version Vector]

“IE”=”8.0000″

 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings\5.0\User Agent]

“Version”=”MSIE 8.0″

“Platform”=”Windows NT 6.0″

 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings\User Agent\Post Platform]

“SV1″=-

 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Version Vector]

“IE”=”8.0000″

 

XP Mode for Windows 7

In my last post I described my experience to date with Windows 7.  In summary it has been good but there were a few programs that were not compatible with the new operating system.  The one that caused me the biggest inconvenience was not being able to connect to a VMware View session.  My first thought was to just install VMware Workstation and run an XP or 2003 OS from virtually whenever I needed to connect to View which we use to access our lab environments and give demo’s.  This works fine if you own Workstation but if not you have to purchase it which I doubt many people want to do.  Enter XP Mode for Windows 7.

I wasn’t even aware of this functionality in Windows 7 until I was surfing though www.tweaks.com  (great site by the way).  XP Mode, once enabled and installed, allows you to run a virtual Windows XP workstation within Windows 7 using Windows Virtual PC.  The best part, it is completely free and works like a champ.  There are a few things you need to have before you can enable XP Mode:

1-      You must have a processor that supports hardware assisted virtualization like AMD-V or Intel-VT.  To check to see whether your processor is compatible you can run the HAV Detection Tool.  More than likely you’ll have to turn on the hardware virtualization feature in your BIOS which will require a reboot but is simple to do.

2-      Download and install the XP Mode component which can be found here: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/virtual-pc/default.aspx  It’s a big file (500MB).

3-      Download and install the Windows Virtual PC software which can also be found here: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/virtual-pc/default.aspx  Only about 10MB.

For more detailed instructions on how to setup XP Mode, including screenshots, check out the TWEAKS.com website at:  http://tweaks.com/articles/40183/install-and-use-xp-mode-in-windows-7/

Once everything is installed you can run “XP Mode” from under “All Programs | Windows Virtual PC” and install any software you may need.  In my case it was simply the VMware View Client and some GoToMeeting plug-ins.   I tested this on my laptop and it works every bit as good as when I had XP loaded as the primary OS.  Start up and shutdown of the virtual session is fast and so far….reliable.  I have dual monitors so I’m able to run XP on one and Windows 7 on the other which comes in handy.  So if you have some programs that just won’t behave in Windows 7 check out XP Mode.

Windows 7 – First Impressions

I was able to install Windows 7 a few weeks ago and so far I’ve been impressed.  Originally I was running regular Windows Vista 32-bit which wasn’t exactly horrible but the only way I could really come to deal with it was to make it look and behave as much like Windows XP as possible.  I was a little hesitant to reload my entire laptop with Windows 7 mostly due to the 70+ pieces of software I had to load back on it and the time associated with doing so.  None the less, my original install of Vista had become painfully slow and was having more and more issues daily and I had finally had enough and went ahead with starting over with Windows 7 64-bit.

The install was very simple and straight forward and took around an hour to complete.  Once the OS was loaded I started reloading software and to my surprise just about everything worked fine including some pretty old crappy programs that I can’t seem to get away from having to keep.  There were only two software issues that popped up that surprised me.  One was the HP Solution Center software that runs my OfficeJet All-In-One.  This thing wouldn’t work at all and there is still not any updated software available from HP which kind of surprises me but oh well.  The good news is there is enough native functionality built-in to Windows 7 to allow me to do most of what I need to from a print/fax/scan standpoint.  The second piece of software that created a bit more of an inconvenience for me was the inability to connect to a VMware View session.  Hopefully this will be resolved soon but for now I’m up the creek.

As for performance and usability of Windows 7 it has been really good so far.  I haven’t had any major problems yet and the speed of the new 64 bit OS is definitely improved as you would expect.  Everything is very configurable and intuitive.  There are lots of new shortcuts and little features that I’m still learning but there are plenty of links out there on the web to help you out.  Here’s one that I’ve found useful so far:  http://blogs.msdn.com/tims/archive/2009/01/12/the-bumper-list-of-windows-7-secrets.aspx

I know lots of people who delayed implementing Vista in their environments in the hopes of something better with Windows 7.  From what I’ve seen so far I’d say that was a great decision.  I wouldn’t say it has enough improvements and innovations to win over you crazy Mac users yet but if you’re a Window person its worth giving Windows 7 a look.

Hard Drives – Options Galor

EMC Drive Sizing

When working with SAN/NAS configurations one of the core design decisions is almost always centered on the hard drives.  No surprise right, after all, that’s the whole purpose of the SAN in the first place…..to store data on disk.  Almost always in design discussions with clients and our own account executives the question would come up “Well, how much more expensive is this drive than that drive?” or “What drives are available now?”.  It seems like every few months a new drive capacity, drive speed or both comes out and prices keep changing.  To remedy this internally I created a quick cheat sheet specifically for EMC’s available drives.

All pricing is MSRP but it gives you a good comparison of the types of drives that are available and the cost per usable gigabyte for each. 

 

Just a few things to remember:

-          Size isn’t everything (all you perv’s out there hold the wise cracks!).  I/O is just as important.

• All 1TB blocks of data storage space are not created equal.  I/O is an important consideration in this game.
  • 1 x 1T SATA disk = ~80 I/O
  • 3 x 600GB 10k FC disks (RAID5) = ~360 I/O
  • 10 x 146GB 15k FC disks (RAID5) = ~1800 I/O
• Once you have your space and I/O requirements dialed in you can start to play the numbers game with the available disk option to get the most bang for your buck.

-          Drive pricing is constantly changing (monthly in some cases) so stay in touch with your vendor as you are nearing a new storage upgrade.

-          Drive sizes are getting larger so check with your vendor to see if there is anything new coming down the pipe in the near future that may save you some money.

EMC Clariion RAID Group Recommendations

Last week we had a client that needed a replacement disk drive for an older EMC Clariion array.  Now this is by no means anything complicated but the drive needed wasn’t available anymore.  The questions was posed, “ Can you mix 15k and 10k fibre channel drives in the same RAID group?”  Hmmmmm, I hadn’t run across this yet so I had to look it up.  The short answer is YES you can but it’s not best practice.  So what is the best solution in a case like this?  Simple, buy a larger capacity drive of the same speed (10k rpm, 15k rpm) and use it in place of the failed drive.  You’ll lose the additional capacity of the drive but the performance won’t be affected.

In the process of looking for the official answer to this question I came across several other little tidbits that are good information to know about Clariion arrays in regards to drives.  To give credit where it’s due most of this and additional info can be found at www.emcstorageinfo.com

-          All disks in a RAID group will match the smallest capacity drive.

-          The Vault Drives in a Clariion MUST all be the same size.

-          SATA and FC drives can NOT be mixed in the same disk tray or DAE

-          SATA drives can only use a SATA Hot Spare and FC drives can only use a FC Hot Spare

-          A 15k FC drive can use a 10k Hot Spare and vice versa.

-          A DAE allows one speed change within the shelf but it is recommended to have all the same speed drives in a DAE.

-          If drive speeds will be mixed in a DAE the faster drives should be installed in the leftmost drive slots first.

EMC Storage Viewer Plugin for vCenter

If you have EMC as your storage platform and VMware vSphere or ESX 3.x as your virtualization platform there is a handy little plug-in from EMC that can help make life a little easier for you.  Afterall when you have to deal with everything from “it won’t print!” and “I just deleted my entire departments file directory, can you restore it?” to “that supervirus.exe attachment seemed like something cool so I just double-clicked it” who couldn’t use a few tools to make things easier right?  I’m talking about the EMC Storage Viewer plug-in. 

In a nutshell, the plug-in gives you greater detail and ease to see which vm’s are tied to which datastores and which LUNs they reside on inside the storage array. There are a couple versions available depending on if you’re running ESX 3.5 or vSphere and best of all they’re free!  They can be downloaded with you’re EMC PowerLink account.  Now for those of you who’ve used PowerLink before, well, lets just say it isn’t the easiest place to find stuff so let me save your searching:   From the HOME page goto Support > Product and Diagnostic Tools > Symmetrix Tools > Symmetrix Tools for VMware. 

Instead of trying to reinvent the wheel here let me just point you Chad Sakac’s blog where he has all the details of the product and even a cool short video to walk you throught the install.  You can view it here:

http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/virtual_geek/2009/04/where-to-get-the-emc-storage-viewer-vcenter-plugin.html

So if you have EMC Clariion or Symmetrix and VMware check out the Storage Viewer plug-in for vCenter soon.

QLogic CNA’s – The Gen 2’s Are Here

For those of you who have made the jump to Cisco Nexus or FCoE you are probably already familiar with what a CNA adapter is and have them installed in your servers.  For those of you not yet familiar with the technology, just think of it as the next generation of HBA that allows you to run Ethernet and FCoE over the same adapter. 

The major players in the market, no surprise, are Emulex and Qlogic just like in the HBA market.  Qlogic recently released the newest Gen2 CNA cards and I expect that Emulex won’t be far behind.  So what are some of the benefits of the new Gen2’s?  Well, here’s a short list:

-          Single-Chip:        The older cards required multiple chip sets to handle the different functions of the card resulting in a full height card which created space issues in some servers.

-          150% Faster FCoE data transfer rates

-          Up to 60+% more efficient from a power stand point

-          Full FCoE hardware offload to increase virtualization performance

-          Compatible with SFP+ copper cables for the Nexus 5000 (much less expensive)

There are some very good promotions available for the dual-port cards until the end of the year so check with your reseller if you are looking to go down the CNA road or if you’re already on it.

Cisco Nexus 1000v and Cisco VN-Link

I won’t even pretend to be an expert in the area of Cisco networking but I just wanted to write something short around Cisco VN-Link and the Cisco 1000v (don’t expect technical here).  Most of you are probably aware of the new Cisco 1000v virtual switch that is basically a plug-in to VMware vSphere but are probably less familiar with or haven’t heard of VN-Link in any detail.  So what are the differences between the two?

It is beneficial to think of VN Link and the 1000v as two types of virtual switching solutions from Cisco.  The 1000v is a software based distributed switch integrated into the VMware vSphere hypervisor.  So when vm A wants to talk to vm B (or C or D……)  the traffic really never has to leave the hypervisor and is handled within this distributed virtual switch.  So what about traffic leaving the hypervisor for the outside world (physical servers, non-vmware vm’s, etc.)? For traffic going outside the virtual world to the network Cisco tags its traffic with a VN Tag to ID which vNIC it came from.  VN-Link is similar in some ways to the 1000v but it does it’s work at a hardware level (Nexus 5000) and uses this VNTag to do so.

The 1000v is specific to VMware but VN-Link can be used by other hypervisor vendors like Microsoft Hyper-V, Citrix Xen Server, Henry’s Hillbilly Hypervisor or whatever else pops up down the road.  These vendors can then develop their own distributed switch solutions using this technology.  Now I know I missed a truck load of info and probably made some errors in my over simplification here but hey, I told you I was still somewhat Cisco stupid at this point.  If you want more detailed info on the subject straight from the horse’s mouth, check out:  http://www.cisco.com/en/US/solutions/collateral/ns340/ns517/ns224/ns892/ns894/white_paper_c11-525307_ps9902_Products_White_Paper.html

Here’s a VERY rough whiteboard that a trainer shared with me last week that shows the differences in traffic flow between the two solutions.

Microsoft Hyper-V R2, not ready?

http://searchservervirtualization.techtarget.com/news/article/0,289142,sid94_gci1366981,00.html?track=NL-654&ad=722981&asrc=EM_NLN_9135324&uid=8451108

An interesting article,  of course you have to keep in mind that this presentation was given at VMworld last week.  The presentation was given by the Burton Group ( www.burtongroup.com ).

VMworld Day 3 and Day 4

VMworld – Day 3

Another day of sessions.  The frist round of the day started with a presentation on the new Data Recovery feature in vSphere.  For those of you not familiar with this, it is a backup solution built right in to the vSphere product.  It is really designed more for the SMB space and not for environments with hundreds of vm’s.  Our engineers had some issues with the first few configurations of this feature but I think the bugs have been worked out and it is a good backup solution for smaller shops.

Next up was a presentation on deploying the Cisco 1000v.  To say the least the session was packed but unfortunately the presenter was, well, pretty dry and boring.  All that aside the session was pretty good.  Not a lot of new news for me but some decent info on the architecture and capabilities.

The last session for the day was Re-architecting Backup and Recovery for Virtual Environments.  It was given by a guy from The Burton Group.  I was amazed at how many people showed up for this session.  As the presenter put it, “this stuff is boring, I assume you are all here because backup sucks and you want to know how to fix it.”  He was right.  Overall it was a really good session.  Lots of discussion around things to look out for and all the various options and solutions available for vm backups.

After the sessions were done it was party time.  This year VMware hired Foreigner as the band.  Awesome concert, amazingly they sounded as good as they did 20+ years ago.  Oh yeah, did I mention all the free food and beer you could handle …… always a plus in my book!

VMworld – Day 4

Final day here at VMworld.  Nothing to earth shattering to report.  Hit a few of the vendor booths in the morning.  Talked to the guys from Atlantis Computing and saw a quick demo of their ILIO product.  Hit a technical session on VMware Fault Tolerance which was pretty good.  After that I had two separate sessions on running tier 1 databases (SQL and Oracle) on vSphere.   Finally I hit a session on SRM architecture and road map ahead.  There are a bunch of tweaks scheduled for the next release (support for vSphere, roll-back, improved storage visibility

So there you have it.  Now all I have to do is get up at 3am and head to the airport for my way too early of a flight back to Raleigh.