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Back in February I read a blog post from Andre Leibovici (VDI and Microsoft Outlook, analysing the variables), a very well known and respected expert in the virtualization and VDI community. His article discussed the challenges in dealing with Outlook in VDI environments, including how to address OST/PST files and how searching is affected. Although I’m a little late to the party here I thought I’d add my thoughts on this and make sure folks aren’t seeing this as a barrier to adopting VDI.
I recommend reading Andre’s post to get more information on this topic. The short version is this – Exchange/Outlook best practices do not necessarily work in a VDI environment.
When using Outlook in an Exchange environment, it is recommended to use Cached Exchange Mode. In this mode a copy of the user’s mailbox is downloaded into an OST file and stored offline on the user’s desktop. This mode offers better performance for the end user and reduces utilization on the Exchange environment as well. In addition, using Cached Exchange Mode allows users to use Outlook Instant Search for fast searching of items in their mailbox. Instant Search works by indexing the contents of the OST file so all searches occur locally and not on the Exchange server, further improving performance and reducing utilization on Exchange.
VDI environments that we see at our clients are typically configured as non-persistent or floating pools of desktops. That is, each user connects to a pool of identical desktops and grabs whatever desktop is available. When the user logs off, any changes written to the VDI desktop are discarded and the desktop returns to a pristine state. There are mechanisms and tools in place to make sure user data is retained at logoff.
So if user data is retained at logoff, why can’t we use Cached Exchange Mode in non-persistent VDI environments?
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This morning, my colleague Joe Hoegler pointed me to a new post on VMware’s Business Critical Applications blog entitled High Availability for Exchange 2010 without DAG. Joe recently achieved his Microsoft Certified Master on Exchange 2010 and has a great deal of experience with Exchange. He and I have worked together on projects where we’ve been successful in virtualizing Exchange 2010 on vSphere. We both read the article and spent some time discussing it and both came to the same conclusions, so we wanted to share some of our collective thoughts.
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This week at VMware’s Partner Exchange conference in Orlando, Florida, VMware announced three new certifications aimed at desktop virtualization. They range from the entry level VMware Certified Associate 4 – Desktop, to a new VMware Certified Professional – Desktop aimed specifically at desktops (the VCP has been around for many years but only focused on the company’s infrastructure technology). Finally, they’ve announced a VMware Certified Advanced Professional – Desktop certification as a new high level certificate. It wouldn’t be a surprise to eventually see a VMware Certified Design Expert (VCDX) certification aimed specifically at desktop virtualization architects in the future.
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I was recently given a unique opportunity to take a test drive of Unidesk’s tools for managing virtual desktops. Unidesk is working on an externally facing customer experience lab and I was given the chance to take a look at the lab and play with a fully functioning version of the product. I wish all vendors offered a fully functioning demo lab of their product as this was a great way to get my hands dirty without needing my own infrastructure.
Unidesk offers a smart approach to managing virtual desktops – they break down each component into a layer and then allow you to update and manage each layer separately. One of the great benefits of VDI in general is the ability to separate the operating system from the applications and from the user’s personality, but that typically involves different tools or different processes to update each component. Unidesk’s key benefit (in my opinion) is that all of that is now centrally managed in one location and updated through one set of tools.
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Are you looking to build Windows Failover clusters on VMware vSphere with EqualLogic storage? If so, make sure to use the new EqualLogic Multipathing Extension Module (MEM) for VMware vSphere (assuming you have at least Enterprise licensing). There are several reasons that make the MEM an obvious choice, but let’s first review what the MEM actually is.
In VMware vSphere, there are several native Path Selection Policies (PSP) that handle how the ESX or ESXi hosts connect to the storage infrastructure. For best performance, most use VMware’s native for Round Robin PSP for iSCSI MPIO. This allows you to better utilize all of your NICs rather than keeping the paths in an active/standby configuration. In addition to the native policies, VMware has also opened this up to storage vendors to write their own PSPs to take better advantage of their storage arrays.
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Quite a while back I saw that Eric Sloof had figured out how to add his Twitter feed directly into the VI Client. I thought it was clever but didn’t really give it much more thought than that.
Today I decided to take that concept and extend it to systems that you might manage alongside your VI3/vSphere environment. Storage management seemed like the obvious first choice.
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For quite a while there has been confusion over how VMware’s Transparent Page Sharing (TPS) feature works with vSphere 4 running on Nehalem (or other modern) processors. Many people were noticing that it appeared that TPS was not actually working anymore and looked for ways to fix the problem.
In my recent post on the effects of ASLR in vSphere the comments turned into a discussion about TPS on modern processors. And there are countless posts about this issue on the VMTN forums where folks are looking for a fix. In reality nothing is broken and there is no need to fix the issue.
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When VMware released vSphere 4 last year, one of the changes they made was a completely re-written software iSCSI initiator. This was done to optimize performance which is great considering how popular iSCSI SANs have become. They also gave the ability to use Round Robin MPIO (mutlipathing) in the software initiator in addition to Fixed Path and MRU which were previously available.
I’m working on a vSphere implementation using Dell EqualLogic SANs and wanted to configure Round Robin on all of my datastores. Dell has a great whitepaper on how to set this up, but unfortunately the document fails to mention one key thing: this doesn’t change the default path selection plugin (PSP) from Fixed to Round Robin. That means that you’ll have to set the multipathing policy to Round Robin on all of your existing datastores and will have to remember to do that on all future datastores. When you’ve got multiple ESX hosts with lots of datastores this can quickly become a pain.
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I’ve seen a lot of talk lately about VMware’s Transparent Page Sharing (TPS) and how it is affected by ASLR in Windows 2008/Windows 7. I wanted to see if there was any real measurable reduction in shared memory when using ASLR vs. when it was disabled. First, let’s talk about what TPS and ASLR actually are and what the acronyms mean.
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For years organizations have relied on tape drives and changers for backup and recovery of their critical data. Despite many predictions to the contrary, tape is still alive as we begin 2010.
When virtualization became popular it presented a challenge to those looking to continue to use their tape drives in fully virtualized environments. If you were using VMware you could use SCSI pass-through to present a tape drive or changer directly to a virtual machine but that prevented you from using any advanced features like VMotion. It also tied your tape drive and VM to a single host containing a SCSI card, making things complicated if that host were to experience a hardware failure.
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