Verbeiren's Blogspot

Recommended Subsidies for Food

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 14:18:00 +0000

Something healthy should have a low cost in order stimulate people to buy it. Lowering costs can be done via subsidies, because part of the creation of the product is paid by government instead of the person buying it.
In the United States (and probably also elsewhere) this is not the case, as depicted in the following graph (from The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine):

The issue I have with the graph in the original post is, apart from the presentation aspect discussed in this post on Flowing Data, that different things are compared: percentages of subsidies to units. My alternative is expressed in % of subsidy.

I made the following assumptions and considerations:

Nutrition recommendations are expressed in units, I converted the ‘Sugar, Oil, Salt’ category to 1 unit in order to do calculations with it.
High subsidies should mean that government wants to stimulate eating these products.
The ‘Federal Nutrition Recommendations’ are converted into ‘Recommended Subsidy Recommendations’ by the following statement: If we are supposed to eat 32% of vegetables or fruit out of the total intake per day, these products should be subsidized by 32% of the total budget.
In this way, we can convert the recommended units into recommended subsidy which in turn can be compared to the actual subsidy.

I’m not particularly proud of the visualization itself (it’s quick and dirty Excel work). Perhaps the weekend will bring some time to rework the graphical part.

Using a hammer to paint the wall (part 1)

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 16:37:00 +0000

It doesn’t make sense, does it? Using a hammer to paint a wall? No, it doesn’t, because we know what a hammer looks like and we all know what it takes to paint a wall.

Similarly, we don’t run out buying a PC to know what 2 times 2 is, we don’t spend twice our yearly income for a software application that would fill out our tax papers for us, we don’t buy a mechanical crane in order to drill a small hole in the wall. And so on, and so on. You get the point…

This is the first part of a series on using tools to solve problems in real-life, especially in organizations.

The point is that human beings seem to have an obsession for tools, especially ICT tools (hardware, software). And somehow, during the development or implementation of the tool, we seem to lose sight of the reason why it is there. The development or implementation becomes the new goal, rather than the underlying reasons for selecting the tool in the first place.

Life Expectancy: Does my Insurance Company know about This?

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 20:28:00 +0000

In the previous post about life expectancy, we looked at some data of the last 20 years and extrapolated linearly. It seemed as if men and women would finally live equally long somewhere in the next decennium.

While thinking and reading about the way life expectancy is calculated, it struck me that the calculation is not fair. I started out describing the way the calculation is done and why I think it is wrong. During this, I found out that the Wikipedia page about this topic already contained the answer:

It is important to note that this statistic is usually based on past mortality experience, and assumes that the same age-specific mortality rates will continue into the future. Thus such life expectancy figures are not generally appropriate for calculating how long any given individual of a particular age is expected to live. But they are a useful statistic to summarize the current health status of a population.
(from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy)

Basically, in the calculation, one assumes that when you are born does not influence the probability with which you will die (at a certain age). This is obviously false.

The article further describes that models exist to adjust the probabilities used in the calculations in order to correct for this systematic underestimation.

Can someone guarantee me that my insurance company uses a corrected statistic instead of the original one? I’m afraid they think I’ll die 10 years earlier than statistically expected and thus charge me too much money?!

Life Expectancy: The difference between male and female

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 20:19:00 +0000

In this post on FlowingData, some interesting statistics are shown about life expectancy in the US.

Ever wondered why insurance companies have higher rates for men than women? The main reason is that on average, women live longer than men. In other words, the risk of dying for a man of, say 50, is higher than for a woman of that age.

Why is this? I have some ideas, but no means to prove them. What can be studied from the data is the evolution of life expectancy and the consequences of this evolution. When looking at US data for the last 20 years, simple (linear) extrapolation tells us that in 2047, men and women will have the same average age. Looking at the data for Belgium, the year is 2074.

I will probably be long dead by then, but according to this linear extrapolation, my grandchildren will have children that have life expectancies of 93 years!

I agree, linear extrapolation is an approximation. But the tendency is there: men's life expectancy is getter higher at a slightly faster pace than women's.

More about this topic (including some cool graphs) later.

How to cope with change: An alternative approach

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 15:34:00 +0000

CHANGE...

A lot of people are involved in change: Every project is a change, and every change should be a project. In project management, one is used to document risks of the project and think about how to mitigate those risks. Sometimes, mitigating the risks can be costly. But on the other hand, having the risks and the possibility that something goes wrong may cost more.

A risk that is often forgotten in projects (and thus also in processes of change) is the one of 'changing people's mind'. Letting a human being start working (or even thinking) differently is a great challenge.

In other words, there is a technological barrier and a mental barrier to any project or change process. Both generate their own set of risks to be taken into account. In many cases the mental barrier is forgotten or at least underestimated.

A technique that is widely adopted in situations like this is 'chunking' the technology: go step-by-step. Start small, but gradually extend the scope of the change. Doing this on a technical level usually also impacts the mental barrier.

Recently, I was talking to a project manager for a technology company involved in the 'people change' process in relation to nanotechnology and its applications in biomedicine. He told me that the mental aspect of the whole project, the fact that little things enter our body, or even remain there for years, is to a large extend not yet common ground in our society. This is a considerable risk for the development of new applications of nanotechnology.

In order to mitigate this risk, the project manager told me they sometimes developed a completely different product first (and freezed the other project) because this new product was easier 'to sell'. So basically, you develop something in parallel in order for people to feel comfortable with this change because it will make future changes easier.

"But this costs a lot of money!" Yes, obviously, but so does developing a product that has a high risk of not being adopted because the mental leap is too big.

Did you encounter situations where the parallel development approach might have been successful? Please share it with us in the comments.

A new project...

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 20:17:00 +0000

Long time ago... I used to blog every now and then. It used to be about technology.

I changed focus in my professional career and in the meanwhile started a few other projects that limit my time to spend blogging. It is not that I do not have any ideas anymore, quite the contrary, but they usually involve extensive thinking/writing.

One project recently started is the writing of a book. When people ask me where I got the idea of writing a book, I usually answer that it has always been there, I only needed a topic to write about. Chatting with my good friend Koen Vermeir (see for instance here) we came to the conclusion that we were talking a lot about the same things, from different perspectives. We decided it was time to note that down.

Don't expect a printed copy any time soon, we gave ourselves 5 years! Stay tuned for more info though...

Why Personal Productivity may be Hard and 'The Corporation' has the answer

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 20:34:00 +0000

Eli has drawn my attention to 'The Corporation'. Shame on me for not knowing and having seen this documentary before (1). One word struck me when I heard it, because it is a topic I wanted to discuss already for quite some time in a different context: Accountability.

What does it have to do with personal productivity then?

I'm involved in quite some thinking about IT and business processes lately. Defining the process is generally easy, the measurement of their performance both from a process as well as a quality/content point of view is much more difficult (2). One thing, though, that is a core component of every step in the process is defining the person who is accountable, which is usually different from the person who is responsible for doing the work. Usually, people use a so-called RACI diagram to define the respective roles for every step in a process or task.

Personal Productivity is all about processes (think GTD, for instance) and personal work flow. Similarly, it's not easy to measure the quality of the process or deliverable. But what really makes personal productivity hard is the fact that one person is both accountable and responsible, or in other words: we have to 'control' our own work.

Maybe that is why we need a personal assistent?

(1) No, I'm not going into the details of the documentary, and I am not commenting on the reasoning of Eli at this time.
(2) No, that is also not what I wanted to talk about now (but will do in the future).

Book Review: Personal Development for Smart People (Steve Pavlina)

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 11:41:00 +0000

On a sidenote: The past weeks have been completely unproductive when it comes to writing. That does not mean I don't have anything to blog about: My second child was born the end of September and I changed jobs during that period as well. Enough changes for now. Back to business...

Introduction

I managed to read Personal Development for Smart People (PDfSP) during nightly and early morning hours and I'm happy I did. PDfSP has a special meaning for me in two ways.

First of all, because years ago, when I started my own 'personal development project', I subscribed to a course about Louise Hay's book: 'You can heal your life'. Ten years later, PDfSP is published by Hay House, founded by the same Louise H. as before. That closes the cycle for the first time.

The second reason why PDfSP resonates so well (to use a verb often found in PDfSP) is the quest for the universal foundation of things. Looking for structure in the world that surrounds us. If you've read this post, you know what I'm talking about.

About The Book

I'm not going to review the book in a conventional way, this has been done by many others before me. I would like to connect Steve's book to something I have been thinking about a lot lately.

Let us start with a few questions and answers:

Is the book any different from the myriad of self-help books and CDs around? - Yes it is.
Is the book for everyone? - Probably not.
Do you need to be acquainted with the subject in order to read it? - Not at all, but it helps.

Let me explain...

The reason why the book is probably not for everyone, is exactly the same as why not everyone likes the content of Steve's blog. Let me give an example. For some, 'oneness' is an obvious thing, no doubt about it. For others, being connected to other people sounds completely insane.

It helps to be acquainted with the subject, because at least you know that things like 'oneness', 'law of attraction', life purpose, etc. are a fundamental ingredient of most of quite a lot of books you find in this field.

Book classification

Some time ago, I started to think about a classification of personal development books. Intuitively, I've always thought 'You can heal your life' (by Louise Hay) as being more written towards woman: holistic, intuitive, not everything can be seen or proven, etc. On the other hand, 'The 7 Habits' (by S. Covey) seems to attract more to a male public: logical, analytical, no 'unfounded' messages, etc. For me, they are like prototype of two ways of expressing a personal development message. in other words, their form is different, the core message is often similar.

Coming back to PDfSP, I find it hard to classify it using the above types. (That probably proves that my classification is good!) PDfSP starts out as a male book, with a search for the foundations of personal development, but rather quickly mixes up with female aspects as mentioned earlier.

Final Remarks

If you ask me how I would describe the effect of PDfSP on me, suffice it to say that it hit me. That alone is an accomplishment only few writers have managed to achieve. If you're interested in personal development and looking for some more background and insight, you won't be disappointed. Just keep in mind that the book has 'male and female aspects'.

How to Measure Productivity?

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 19:20:00 +0000

A comment by reader 'rbis' on my previous article about the definition of productivity refers to the website and blog of productivity guru Matthew Cornell. The reference reminded me of an article by Matt in which he asks the question: How do you measure personal productivity?.

The 3 Layers Again

In my previous article, I discussed the existence of 3 layers in what people consider (personal) productivity: Layer 1 (L1) deals with so-called life hacks, tricks on how to deal with tasks and things in a smarter way. Layer 2 (L2) is about the approach to these tasks and the organization of them, or in other words the process. In Layer 3 (L3), we look at the purpose behind everything, the driving force behind the whole thing.

When thinking about these layers and the measurement of productivity, two conclusions pop up

Measurement Depends on the Layer

It is easier to measure in L1 than it is in L3. To give an example: testing ones speed of typing, or the number of blogs topics read is just a matter of counting. The fact that ones purpose is not clear or not lived out, is a much harder nut to crack.

This may sound obvious, but in practice, productivity is often seen as one big beast which has to be tackled with one method.

To come back to the article by Matt, careful reading reveals that if the layered approach had been used, things would have turned out even more transparent. Where he discusses that measures are required, he mostly deals with layer 1 and 2 activities (email processed, poor planning, inneficient meetings), whereas when talking about why measurements are hard, layer 3 comes into play (personal goals, quality instead of quantity).

Layer 2 and Layer 3 are not about Counting

It will be clear by now that L3 can not be measured by numbers, but qualitative aspects are important. And qualitative by definition means subjective. This is a good thing, but it also makes it hard and confusing.

Stephen Covey may try hard to make sure we get our personal mission statement clear, but how many of us really have one? Or how many times a year is this mission statement revised and if needed adapted? Ok, I blame guilty myself.

I think we feel it when our mission or life's purpose is clear and our activities support it. I have noticed lately that two famous bloggers, in two different areas come to a similar conclusion: They were no longer certain that what they were blogging about really made sense to them, that it is what they wanted to do. An insightful article by Robert Scoble in this sense can be found here, whereas Merlin Mann discusses some of the thought process in this article.

Enough about layers, let's get productive!

Definition of Productivity

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 12:25:00 +0000

I've always liked looking for structure and relations between things that surround me. I guess I'm not the only one? One of the things I would like to find structure in today is the term 'productivity' and what is usually associated with it. This includes so-called productivity systems, lifehacks, workflow tools, etc. In this article, I want to argument that 3 levels can be distinguished.

Efficiency is a term that is often used together with productivity. The Wikipedia page tells us:

... While productivity is the amount of output produced relative to the amount of resources (time and money) that go into the production, efficiency is the value of output relative to the cost of inputs used. ...

Most definitions of productivity are based on the production or manufacturing of (physical) goods. In sharp contrast with this, our Western civilization has evolved into a service-oriented society. Most of us no-longer produce anything physical (except for documents perhaps). This is often referred to as knowledge-work. By definition, knowledge work productivity is much harder to measure, as it involves creativity, thinking, finding solutions to problems, etc.

In my opinion, productivity-related information can be divided in 3 groups, I call them levels:

Level 1: Tips and Tricks

This level deals with the question: How can I optimally perform the task at hand. This task could be: process email, have a meeting, brainstorm, etc. Note that this level does not deal with the which task is done first or why this task is important.

The various popular life hack blogs and sites are usually concerned with this level of productivity and give plenty of tips on how to collaborate online, clean your house, etc. in a productive way.

Level 2: The Process

At this level, we ask ourselves: 'What', 'When' and 'in which order'? In other words: how do we approach things?

This level is about the tools and techniques that let you plan your life and work: todo lists, Getting Things Done, Do It Tommorrow, etc.

Level 3: Purpose

In this level, we ask ourselves 'Why'. In other words: what drives us, what is our vision and mission, what is our purpose?

In many cases, this level is forgotten about. Think about the successful manager who at the age of 60 regrets not having spent more time with his kids. Or think about people trying to do 1001 things on a day without standing still to see whether these things are really valuable.

Each of these levels can be further split in parts and obviously some things will be on the boundary or cross these levels. Generally speaking, though, every level influences the level below: Understanding your purpose (level 3) tells you which activities are valuable (level 2) and enables you to find tricks (level 1) to do them more quickly and productively.

The question remains which questions should be asked first. This is for later.

This article is the first in a series of almost literal translations from dutch blog posts by myself on choose2live.blogspot.com.

Free review copy of "Personal Development for Smart People"

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 09:11:00 +0000

Seeing this post on Steve Pavlina's blog, I couldn't resist and sent in my request for a review copy of his upcomming book "Personal Development for Smart People".

Guess what?! I was accepted. The book has to be shipped from the States and I will have to pay 10 Euro taxes because Belgian customs wants to take a look, but that still saves me some money compared to buying the book myself.

If you don't know Steve Pavlina, I suggest you check out some of his most popular blog posts to get an idea of the kind of person he is:

New (temporary) blog name

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 08:39:00 +0000

Application Availability isn't the topic of this blog anymore, so it was time to change it's name. The current name is temporary, until creativity hits me with a better one...

Any suggestions?

VMware Update Manager for Windows VMs

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 14:23:00 +0000

[ Note: yet another technical post ! I just can't resist it... ]

I had never taken the time to look into Update Manager. Today, I decided to dive in and try it out with a Windows Template I'm building.

It struck me that the update process (actually it's called 'remediate') took so long. Nothing could be seen on the server console and no CPU was utilized. Strange.

After a couple of minutes waiting, I went back to the VM console and saw a CD drive mapped. I should have known! Windows updates are deployed the same way the VMware tools are: via a virtual CD (an ISO file mounted from the virtual center server). Indeed on the VC server, I found an ISO with the exact patches I selected to be installed on the VM.

That's why the first phase of the remediate process took so long: it was preparing the ISO.

On a sidenote: This ISO can as well be used for physical machines that need to be patched! Just copy the ISO file, burn it on a CD. The only thing missing still is the so-called Update Manager guest agent which is installed on the VM to be patched. It seems that 'vum-launcher.exe' is the thing that does most of the work. Did anyone test this out already?

[Update] VMware Bug: Waiting for a patch

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 08:16:00 +0000

I was right in expecting that a host reboot would not be required to intall the patch.
I was wrong to think this means I did not have to move my VMs away or shut them down. Maintenance mode is required to install it. Lame!

Fortunately, I still have some 3.0 servers around.

VMware Bug: Waiting for a patch...

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 14:55:00 +0000

Ok, I couldn't resist... I had to get my opinion out on the 'by-now-famous' bug in the ESX 3.5u2 hypervisor.

This morning, I was worried. I imagined having to shut down several updated ESX servers hosting more than 100 VMs, patching the servers and bringing the VMs up again.

Looking around and discussing with Tim Jacobs, I looked back at one the posts he refers to. It struck me that the error is logged in '/var/log/vmware/hostd.log'. This means that it is the host management process that is logging the error. To me, it would make sense if the VMkernel doesn't care about licensing and just does its job.

As a consequence, it must be possible for VMware to create a patch that does not require a host reboot.

This afternoon, I look forward to such a patch.

Up to something different ...

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 14:24:00 +0000

According to Google Analytics, this blog has between 25 and 50 visitors per day, with over 70% from search engines. Feedburner tells me that there are little over 50 feed subscriptions, which I find nice. The small Google banner on the right has generated around $20 in five months or so. All these things make me happy. This might soon be over.

Virtualization and VMware products in particular are nice to work with and blog about. Especially when it comes to capacity planning and analysis, a lot is still to be discussed. But not by me.

I made a jump (content-wise) about 5 years ago, going from an academic research group to the IT industry. The jump I'm about to make in a couple of weeks is probably even bigger. Probably starting in a project management function, with the intention of getting into BPM, Service Management or who knows what...

Why Management Consulting?

Because of the money? No
Because of the challenge? Probably
Because it interests me? Sure enough.
Because it's related to what really keeps me busy. Sure!

But also because I do not see myself implementing VMware infrastructure products (or any other product for that matter) for 5 more years. It is not the thing I have in mind for my older days. Is management consulting the answer? Perhaps, we'll see.

Why not IT?

There are some possible answers:

1) What really interests me with products like VMware and such are the foundation layers, the theory behind, the statistics, the stories, etc. This probably stems from my theoritical background. Suffice it to say I was most interested in the talk of Irfan at VMworld Europe 2008.
This is one of the main reasons I was attracted to VMware in the first place, just take a look at some of the earlier posts to see that people at VMware are publishing papers in scientific journals.

2) What I liked a lot in past projects is what we call the 'design phase'. Discussing with a client about requirements, expectations, boundary conditions etc. and coming up with a good compromise that is cost-effective. This requires thinking and communication, two things I miss a lot in the 'implementation phase' of a project.

But then again, looking at the Belgian context, making a design for 3 ESX servers and 2 VLANs isn't really that exciting. We simply don't have that many large corporations in Belgium and the cake has to be shared with other consulting firms.

3) When designing or implementing a software product, one is bound to what is deliverd by the vendor. It is very frustrating to deploy a solution, only to find out that the software contains a bug that only pops up under the specific circumstances at the customer's site. At best, you can get a hotfix or patch from the vendor to cover this up, but bottom line, we depend on the quality of work of others.

By the way, coming from a Linux background, I'm convinced that this last argument is an important one in the discussion about open source versus closed source software. Agreed, most of us are not capable of coding our own software, but if required we could hire an independant developer to fix our bug when the vendor does not support us!

Did I have bad experiences with VMware? With Citrix? Or with any other product? Yes I had, with most of them. Think about some vendors not giving support to applications that run in a virtualized environment, think about the famous VMotion bug that has caused a client of us to have a lot of issues with an SQL server, think about so many other things that cause us to spend 80% of the project time getting the 20% of the product under control.

Update: I typed most of this letter last week, could I possibly know that today (August 12, 2008) would be called "D-Day for VMware" by Tim Jacobs and even worse by others? Ironically, I upgraded most of the servers at a client site yesterday (11th), only to find out that a bug causes major havoc as of today!

4) I like to talk to people, think, brainstorm, discuss on the blackboard, etc. Feeling synergie when people get together. Giving training (as I used to) comes close, but is often too much one-direction. Workshops (as I do often now) is good, but doing the same thing 10 times in a row is not my intention.

5) Technology changes really fast. At first, I found this exciting. Nowadays, I sometimes think it has become a burden. Don't understand me wrong: I have nothing against new features and clever products and I'm the first to check out what's new. The expectations of some clients, however, are such that sometimes you're expected to know all about these things before they are released and that you know these things by heart.

The above deals with the content of the IT work. I have a lot to say about the form as well (how project consulting is misunderstood and how people are resources, rather than assets). That is an intirely different discussion.

Back to the Future

What about the future? Well, as my current interests and future work will be about different things, I'm still unsure as to what I'll do with this blog.

Somehow I like blogging about what keeps me busy. I am co-author of a (dutch) blog (http://www.slimmerwerken.be) and what does not fit there usually ends up on my personal (dutch) blog (http://choose2live.blogspot.com).

What holds me back to continue verbeiren.blogspot.com is the fact that in IT, nobody really cares if your English text is not perfectly written without spelling or grammar mistakes. When writing about business processes, communication itself or personal productivity this may not hold true.

So the first question is whether I should at all blog about my future activities (in English). The second question naturally follows: should I keep this blog (and change the subject/content), or stop it here and create a different one.

If you have any advice, please let me know in the comments.

VMware, backup and VSS

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 06:17:00 +0000

People looking for information concerning backup and the latest features included in ESX 3.5u2 should take a look at this article by Tim Jacobs.Not only does it introduce VSS, but it also details why VSS support for VMware backups is a good thing.

Keep up the good work, Tim!

Using Excel to manage a Virtual Infrastructure

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 27 May 2008 07:36:00 +0000

I have always been a big fan of Excel in terms of using it as a graphical user interface for doing things one should probably not think of at first sight: generate Word documents, as a database interface, generate scripts based on input, etc.

This is exactly what Carter Shanklin has done in this video (and the accompanying script). The idea is simple and the solution elegant. It can be applied to a variety of other tasks that require a lot of similar actions.

Under the hood, a little vbscript is used to launch a powershell script that does the job. You need the VI Toolkit for it to work, of course...

Read more at the source.

Seamless VDI Windows (or application publishing)

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 07 May 2008 11:14:00 +0000

The famous Brian Madden has written an article which touches upon similar arguments as what I wrote before concerning seamless applications in a VDI context in order to try and understand why the prices for XenDesktop are so low.

It appears Ericom and Quest have products that already enable this feature. VMware is technically able to (as I pointed out). Apparently, Citrix does not offer the feature in its XenDesktop product, maybe Brian is right in suggesting that Citrix can not afford to take away business from its Presentation Server (currently XenApp) product:

The bottom line is the fact that XenDesktop is so cool yet so cheap is really going to come back to haunt Citrix. And they're stuck. They can't raise the price because they have to compete with VMware and Quest. Quest already has the single app VDI publishing feature, but no one is paying too much attention to them (yet). But can you imagine what would happen if VMware added single-user app publishing to their VDI solution? And if they kept the price down to under $200 or so? What would Citrix do then? Talk about game-changing!

Follow the discussion here.

The importance of (VMware) Unity

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 08:02:00 +0000

I'll start this post by talking about Citrix instead of VMware...

Part I: About Citrix's Seamless Applications

One of the things that Citrix has offered enterprises for many years already is the integration of a remote desktop with a local desktop by means of seamless windows. In theory, one does not need to know whether an application is running locally or on the server: it looks the same and reacts the same. This is important, especially if you note that Microsoft released a similar feature only with their just-released (2008) version of the Windows server OS.

Part II: About VDI

As an alternative to server based computing, VDI is gaining a lot of momentum lately. For specific users and workload, running a desktop on a virtualization platform can have significant benefits over traditional fat clients or server based computing.

The idea remains the same, however, and remote desktop protocols are required to transfer relevant data over the wire. In practice, what we 'see' on the client side is a published desktop, not an application. This is where the final part comes in:

Part III: Seamless VDI

What if we need just 1 application from our corporate VDI desktop and not the full desktop environment (with icons, Start menu, etc.)? We would need seamless applications for a VDI desktop.

Citrix obviously is able to achieve this with XenDesktop (they did it with Presentation Server), and now VMware is ready too. The technical roadblock that is required to embed applications running in a virtual desktop on the local machine is tackled. The rest is a matter of using an appropriate remote desktop protocol.

I wouldn't be surprised if the next version of VMware VDI/VDM support 'seamless' VDI applications, embedded in the local client desktop.

VMware Workstation 6.5 beta: Unity

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 07:52:00 +0000

Unity is a feature in the new beta of VMware Workstation that allows users to see only specific windows inside the VM, as opposed to a complete virtualized desktop. The feature exists already in VMware Fusion, the Mac counterpart of Workstation. This feature is long awaited and a welcome addition to the functionality of the product.

I was expecting a lot of comments about how this is a major roadblock in the ongoing battle with Citrix and Microsoft. I didn't find any references in the line of what I was thinking, so I will put them here. See my next post for what I think is the importance of Unity.

VMware vscsiStats: The paper

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 06:43:00 +0000

I wrote about vscsiStats before, but it seems I was amongst the first to do so. Luckily, one of the creators has put some more info on his blog. In this post, he refers to his paper about the technology.

VMware & PowerShell: Creating a PSdrive

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 13:28:00 +0000

I'm not the first to report it, but I wanted to share this here. My first reaction was: 'Cool!', and so is my second reaction... It is related to the fact that VMware released the beta of the PowerShell toolkit for VI.

Imagine you can browse your virtual infrastructure using a command line interface like this:

cd vi:
cd Folder01\DataCenter01\host\Web\LiveHost01

The original article can be found here. Have fun!

VMware VscsiStats: Measuring at the virtual SCSI level

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 15:06:00 +0000

I mentioned earlier that one of the presentations at VMworld Europe 2008 was about measuring at the level of the virtual SCSI adapter of a VM. A wealth of information is available when looking at this kind of information.

A tool is available on ESX 3.5 that creates histograms by default (and complete traces if wanted) is VscsiStats. As an option, one provides the vSCSI handle ID and the VM World ID. In order to get some statistics at all, one first needs to start the monitoring:

./vscsiStats -s

After some time, the relevant statistics can be fetched by issuing a command like:

./vscsiStats -i 8260 -w 1438 -p ioLength

This, for instance, yields an histogram of the size of IO pacakges sent to the virtual SCSI adapter (and thus to the storage array). To finalize the monitoring, it has to be stopped as well:

./vscsiStats -x

The result of the command above, in my test, was a graph like the one below:

This is a VM running Windows 2003. Remember this is a histogram, we put the measures points in 'buckets' according to their size and plot their relative frequency.

Remark that there is some IO with sizes 4095 bytes 8191 bytes. This is a sign that the file systems are not aligned properly. The fact that 4K sizes are the majority is nice, because VMFS is optimized for IO of 4KB.

VMware: Virtual VCB Server/Proxy for iSCSI storage

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 09:53:00 +0000

(I know, I did not get past day 1 of VMworld Europe 2008, perhaps I will write some more about the other two days later this week...)

Something different now: It is known that VCB for VI 3.5 adds support for iSCSI devices, in itself this is not a big deal, but there is something really 'cool' about this: it means we can use a virtual server to act as a VCB proxy! This is a big step forward in my opinion.

How can this be done?
1. Install a virtual server
2. Connect the virtual network card of the server to the iSCSI network (either giving it the correct VLAN tag, or connecting it to the proper vSwitch).
3. Install a software intiator (e.g., the one you can download from the MS website. This step is pretty much the same as for a physical server.
4. Install & Configure VCB.
5. Configure the SAN to correctly present the LUNs to the backup proxy (based on the iqn).

Now, combine this with the possibility to add an iSCSI or NFS storage appliance to your virtual infrastructure, and you're ready to have a complete virtualized backup solution that is no longer tied to physical hardware.