Daniele Tosatto

The other day the folks at IDC published their worldwide quarterly server virtualization tracker report. You can see the news release here. Some of the main takeaways are:

• 18% of all new servers shipped in Q4’09 were virtualized, up 3% year over year
• Sales of virtualized servers declined 14% for 2009
• Virtualization licenses declined 7% for 2009, but were up 13% in Q4 compared to Q4 of 2008.
• HP was the #1 server OEM for annual new server shipments virtualized (38%), followed by Dell (28%) and IBM (15%).
• IDC said virtualization continues to remain a top priority

IDC didn’t publish market share for virtualization software licenses, but rather published growth stats. VMware, Microsoft and Citrix were the only vendors called out in the news release. See IDC’s news release for details.

The most interesting news anyway is about the hypervisors market share :

VMware ESX continues to be the number 1 virtualization platform with total licenses increasing 19% year over year in 4Q09. VMware Server continues to be the number 2 virtualization platform despite declining 9% year over year. Microsoft Hyper-V continued its ascent, capturing the third highest market share by growing 215% year over year, albeit off a small base. Meanwhile, Virtual Server 2005, with the fourth largest share, continued its depreciation with year-over-year licenses declining 29%. Citrix XenServer also showed impressive year-over-year growth of 290% and rounded out the top 5, coming off its third quarter of offering the product for free with certain management functionality. XenServer’s sequential growth was a relatively modest 25%…

Below you can find some some interesting points fromMicrosoft. I thought you’d be interested, too.

• Almost 1/5 of new servers are now virtualized, and MS expect the largest growth to come from servers sold to mid-market customers, and those customers finally getting around to consolidating Linux servers.
• Customers are cost-conscious when choosing a server virtualization software.
• According to IDC, Microsoft’s share of new x86 virtualization licenses, which includes Hyper-V and Virtual Server, is now 25%. This represents an increase of 3 points year over year, the growth obviously attributed to Hyper-V and not Virtual Server .
• During MS Q3 earnings call [April 22], we reported that System Center server revenue grew by more than 20%. This figure represents enterprise customers adopting System Center management tools for configuring virtual machines, monitoring and backup of virtual and non-virtual applications.
• On the same Q3 earnings call, we reported that the high-end editions of Windows Server have grown by more than 20%. This figure represents customers who are using Hyper-V, multiple instances of the OS to run multiple applications, and other enterprise features such failover clustering.
• During the last several months customers switching away from VMware, or adding Hyper-V and System Center alongside their VMware tools, became more common. These customers include Premiere Global Services (US), Group Health (US), Miele Appliances (Germany), Union Pacific (US), Telecom Italia, SuperGroup (South Africa), Mercuri Urval (Switzerland), Fpweb.net (US), Landratsamt Bayreuth (Germany), Swedish Red Cross, Apps4Rent (US), Kolektor Group (Slovenia). You can find case studies for these customers here.

Whereas best practice violations, even very important best practice violations, are not necessarily problematic, they indicate server configurations that can result in poor performance, poor reliability, unexpected conflicts, increased security risks, or other potential problems.

Best Practices Analyzer (BPA) is a server management tool that is available in Windows Server 2008 R2. BPA reports best practice violations to the administrator after BPA scans the roles that are installed on Windows Server 2008 R2.

After this update is installed on a server that is running Windows Server 2008 R2, you can run a series of Best Practices Analyzer scans on Hyper-V that will help you to bring the role into compliance with best practices.

You can use Hyper-V Best Practices Analyzer to scan a server that is running the Hyper-V role, and help identify configurations that do not comply with best practices for this role. BPA scans the configuration of the physical computer, the virtual machines, and other resources such as virtual networking or virtual storage.

You can dowload Hyper-V Best Practices Analyzer here .

Citrix makes two announcements!

The first exciting announcement is the launch of the new AskTheArchictect microsite that focuses on integrating XenDesktop with Microsoft technologies. The second announcement is the release of the long awaited XenDesktop Design Guide for Hyper-V.

XenDesktop on Microsoft Hyper-V

Citrix and Microsoft have quite a history together and Citrix is committed to supporting the Microsoft products with XenDesktop. Previously, no website existed where you could find technical guidance on integrating Microsoft products with XenDesktop. The AskTheArchitect brand that was started last year has been so successful that Dan Feller was overrun with topics, so the team decided to split it out into separate areas of expertise. Given my recent experience with Hyper-V, I volunteered for the Microsoft on XenDesktop website. In case you are wondering, the main AskTheArchitect site can be found here and includes links to other areas such as Healthcare, Application Networking, NextGen Desktop, XenApp on XenDesktop, Automation, Cloud, and Branch Office optimization.

My plan is to post on the website all the knowledge I gain on integrating XenDesktop with any Microsoft products, including Hyper-V, App-V, Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows 7, and System Center. Right now most of the content is focused on Windows 7 and Hyper-V; however, as I work engagements, attend seminars, or read new information that is pertinent I will post it there. Also, I will send out a quick Tweet informing everyone of the new content when the posted information is relevant to current trends or projects.

XenDesktop Design Guide for Microsoft

I have just spent the last few weeks writing a Design Guide that focuses on providing specific guidance for deploying XenDesktop 4 deployments on Hyper-V 2008 R2. The guide is not meant to replace other XenDesktop architecture guidance, but rather to supplement that guidance and explain some of the nuances encountered in a Hyper-V deployment. The document leverages the Modular Reference architecture and presents the next level of design detail necessary for a Hyper-V deployment.

A virtual desktop pool is a group of identically configured virtual machines on a Remote Desktop Virtualization Host (RD Virtualization Host) server. All virtual machines in a virtual desktop pool are identically configured; a user should see the same virtual desktop regardless of which virtual machine in the virtual desktop pool the user connects to.

Therefore, when you’re setting up a VDI system, you often want the virtual machines in a pool to be “stateless images,” so that when the user logs off, the virtual machine is reset to a known state. There’s an easy way to do this with Windows Server 2008 R2.

First, prepare your virtual machine in the initial state you want. Log off once you have finished your preparations.

Second, create a Hyper-V snapshot of the virtual machine.

Finally, rename the snapshot so that it contains “RDV_Rollback” (without the quotes) anywhere in the name.

That’s it. Now, as soon as the user logs off, the virtual machine will automatically roll back to this snapshot, reverting all changes made by the user.

Some things to keep in mind:

1. This feature is only applicable to virtual machines in a virtual desktop pool, not personal virtual desktops.
2. The RDV_Rollback marker must be on the most recent snapshot.
3. The rollback is only done if the user connected through the Connection Broker. If you connect directly, then log off, no rollback will happen. (This allows you to make further changes and take a new snapshot.)
4. The rollback will not happen if there is anyone logged onto the virtual machine (even if they’re disconnected).

If there is a problem when Remote Desktop tries to apply the snapshot, a message will be logged to the Debug log of the TerminalServices-TSV-VmHostAgent eventlog: “Failed to request Hyper-V to apply a snapshot. Verify Hyper-V status. VM=<vmName>, Hr=<errorCode>”.

If you see this error, make sure that you haven’t modified Hyper-V’s Role-based Access Control to remove the permissions for “TS VM Host Agent.”

New capabilities will enhance both virtualized server and virtualized desktop deployments:

• Remote FX: With Microsoft RemoteFX, users will be able to work remotely in a Windows Aero desktop environment, watch full-motion video, enjoy Silverlight animations, and run 3D applications within a Hyper-V VM – all with the fidelity of a local-like performance. For more info, check out Max’s blog here.
• Hyper-V Dynamic Memory: With Hyper-V Dynamic Memory, Hyper-V will enable greater virtual machine density suitable for servers and VDI deployments.

What Virtualization Users Have Told Us

When it comes to virtualization and memory, virtualization users have repeatedly provided the following requirements:

1. Use physical memory as efficiently and dynamically as possible without impacting performance.Customers investing in virtualization hosts are purchasing systems with larger memory configurations (32 GB, 64 GB, 128 GB and more) and want to fully utilize this system asset. At the same time, they’re purchasing this memory to provide superior performance and to avoid paging.
2. Provide consistent performance and scalability. One frequent comment from virtualization users is that they don’t want a feature with a performance cliff or inconsistent, variable performance. That’s makes it more difficult to manage and increases TCO.

Their comments are clear: Maximize our investment in the hardware resources, provide high density, and with a minimal performance impact.

(Speaking of performance, Hyper-V R2 performance is exceptional. Microsoft recently released an in depth performance analysis on Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V R2 Virtual Hard Disk Performance using a variety of workloads including SQL, Exchange, Web and more. This is a must read:http://download.microsoft.com/download/0/7/7/0778C0BB-5281-4390-92CD-EC138A18F2F9/WS08_R2_VHD_Performance_WhitePaper.docx)

Virtual Machine Performance & Density

If you think about Virtual Machine Performance and Virtual Machine Density as a continuum and you can place the slider, where would you position the slider?

Up to now, Microsoft’ve opted to err on the side of performance with excellent results. Now, customers are asking to start moving that slider over to increase density and still minimize performance impact.

So, what is Dynamic Memory? At a high level, Hyper-V Dynamic Memory is a memory management enhancement for Hyper-V designed for production use that enables customers to achieve higher consolidation/VM density ratios.

HP always offered a basic capacity planning tool to its customers that want to use ProLiant servers for virtualization.
In November 2005 it released one for Microsoft Virtual Server 2005. In March 2007 it released one for VMware VI 3.0.

Yesterday the company released also one for Microsoft Hyper-V R2. This one is not a web tool like the previous versions, but a 50MB Windows application that customers can download and use without restrictions.

To collect data from physical servers, the Sizer tool interacts with the Microsoft Assessment & Planning (MAP) Toolkit (both 3.x and 4.x are supported) or the Windows Performance Monitor, but it can also import information from other tools.
Once data is available, this tool produces a detailed Bill of Materials (BoM) that includes servers and storage equipment, with pricing specified for the customer’s country.

It also includes an update engine which automatically downloads new inventory parts and refreshes prices.
A check of this engine shows that the capacity planning engine is marked as version 4.0:

After a couple of months in beta, Citrix releases Essentials 5.5 for Hyper-V just before the holidays.

This version of the management platform for the Microsoft hypervisor includes a new technology called StorageLink Site Recovery.

This feature allows the Hyper-V administrators to control the replication features that their SAN arrays without using multiple consoles. From the Essentials console they can test the recovery process with what-if analysis, and restore the protected VMs in isolated, test networks.

The notable thing is that StorageLink Site Recovery is available for every version of Essentials, including the Express one which is free of charge (but it won’t appear there before Dec. 23).
HP announced its support for this technology a long time ago and now confirms integration with StorageWorks SANs.