Virtualization & Cloud Computing Forum - 2,49,50,51,52,53,56,57,58,59,60,61

Project Required Hardware/Software

ady486 — Sun, 28 Dec 2014 23:03:14 GMT

I am planning to build a virtualised desktop for my College project, I have done some research of what kind of software i will be needed i.e Virtualbox, Vmware and I am looking to using a Bare-metal hypervisor for this Project. The project is small in scope so i require to be able to provide at least 2-3 desktop images. I would like some feedback on what hardware and software i need and what kind of security elements i should look into to make sure i am properly prepared for the project as i have not done something like this before.

Thanks. :)

VirtualBox vs Hyper-v: which is best for resource utilization

turkey-day-meal — Fri, 14 Nov 2014 02:23:23 GMT

All I need is a way to run an instance of Windows or Linux inside a virtual machine, so I can route that machines connection through a VPN service (Like CyberGhostVPN) and leave the rest of my machine untouched, so it can connect to the internet directly.

I would like to know if Hyper-V would allow the virtual machine to "share" any unneeded resources (CPU or RAM for example), so I can maximize the abilities of both the host and the guest.

I've checked with Intel and have been told my CPU is capable of running hyper-v but I've read that I'd need to upgrade to Windows 8 Pro, instead of the plain old Windows 8 that I'm running now.

Thanks for reading and any help would be greatly appreciated.

Create Two SR with one HDD in Citrix.

hack3rcon — Sun, 26 Oct 2014 13:52:11 GMT

Hello all.
Can I create two SR on one HDD in Citrix? Is it possible?

Cheers.

CitrixXen create 24GB Template!!!

hack3rcon — Sun, 26 Oct 2014 13:51:04 GMT

Hello all.
I have a HP sever with 8TB HDDs and use RAID 50. I create three Storage from Storage1 to Storage3 for Citrix. when I want to create new VM, Citrix Create 24GB template by default, What is it? How can I solve this problem?

Cheers.

Offline and Online virtual machine update(Patching) methods

Faktor11_Harry — Wed, 24 Sep 2014 18:08:40 GMT

Quote:

Originally Posted by Hossein (Post 1678)

Hi all.:)
I have a question on VM updates. How the dormant virtual machines in cloud environment are updated and Patched?
I study several academic articles such as: "Always up-to-date-scalable offline patching of vm" and etc. but these are theories about how offline updating the VM can be done. But in practice and for example in some cloud providers(e.g. Amazon and ...) How the VMs are updated is an important question left no answer for me.
The simple way is bringing the dormant VMs into online(Turning on the machine) and then applying the updates, then back it into dormant state. but I know that, this is not the best solution done in enterprise cloud infrastructures.
Several tools from Microsoft and Vmware is developed for offline VM patching but I dont knowing which offline patching mechanism is used in these tools.
Thanks.

Hi Hossein,

It comes down to how the VM's are stored and the mechanism's available to update the VM's.

In the desktop virtualization technology that my company uses, each device has a player on it which is used to execute the virtual machine, sometimes these VM's are powered on, and other times they are powered off.

The way our technology works is that we have a master image on our server which we update with new applications, windows updates etc. from there that image is uploaded into an image store as a new revision. When the player is open on the endpoint (regardless of whether the VM is on or not) the player will download and apply the update to the VM without user interaction, this process is known as out of band updating.

A similar method could be applied through SCCM or other third party software deployment mechanisms. Using these tools you could deploy an update to a VM when both the Player and the VM were closed. In fact this could be run as a service so the users don't have to be logged in at all.

When it comes to updating machines in a public cloud though, that's a different story - theoretically the same out of band updating mechanism could apply through the use of an API, but you would have to preface the transaction with a shutdown script first as to not corrupt a machine if it was running and you suddenly pulled all the information out from under it.

absolute newbie questions

Faktor11_Harry — Wed, 24 Sep 2014 16:56:28 GMT

Quote:

Originally Posted by zollen (Post 1871)

I am new to vmware but I want to learn more about vmware and unix virtualization.

1. What are the differences between vmplayer and vmware?
2. Is it possible for multiple virtual machines share the same unix filesystem? But each virtual machine may have slightly different runtime configurations?
3. Considering many multi-cores CPU's that power the virtual machines today. Are there any benefits of having multiple virtual machines where each vm hosts multiple instances of the same type of application, as oppose to one big virtual machine alone hosts all enterprise applications?
4. Are there any links that explain vmware and virtualization?

Hi Zollen!

First off - welcome to the Virtualization world!

To field your first question, the company VMWare has many different applications for different uses, all of which pertain to virtualization in one form or another (servers, workstations and applications). From a server perspective VMWare ESXi is the base hypervisor which forms the basic infrastructure for virtual machines (servers and workstations) execute on. VMWare Player and or VMWare Workstation are examples of hyper visors which allow virtual machines to execute on an endpoint such as a desktop machine or a laptop.

The difference between the two - ESXi is designed to be deployed in a data center and house virtual machines for users to remotely connect to and or for certain server tasks such as a mail server, FTP server or CRM server to reside on. On the other hand, the Player and Workstation version is geared more towards users who want to utilize the resources of their endpoint a little more to run a second operating system (Windows / Linux / Unix / Open Source) - this would prove useful for application developers who need access to multiple operating systems, or users who want to execute certain tasks independently of their primary operating system for testing or protection purposes - as VM's are much easier to rebuild/replace than more traditional (physical) systems.

For your second question: The virtual machines run independently of the server and of one another when it comes to operating systems and configurations. Each VM you provision will have it's own operating system, IP address, Hard disk configuration and so on. In short, all of the machines will be executing on the same host, but all of the computation / configuration is VM specific.

For your third question: there are many benefits to running multiple virtual machines with the same application (within reason) two main reasons are. 1) maintenance, if you have only one machine and 100 users, every time you take that one machine down for maintenance or upgrades or anything else for that matter, it will effect 100 users. In the other instance lets say you had 5 smaller machines each with 25 users, you would only effect 25 users at a time. 2) conflicts and resources, although the applications might be identical not every user will be using the same application in the same way at the same time internet browsers are a great example, how many conceivable browser addon combinations would 100 users have, how much memory would that consume alone with the amount of leakage of 100 users!.

To this end though, I do understand that some (although very few) enterprise applications like to sit on one server and one server only and will refuse to license or authenticate more than once, these applications may require a VM all on their own.

And finally your forth question: the internet is full of information on this topic! instead of reading through whitepapers and vendor websites. I would definitely recommend hitting up YouTube. From there you will be able to refine your searches to suit what your wanting to find out.

For something more formal you could look up and see if there is a UNIX VMWare tutorial or lecture, for something a little more hands on, perhaps a how to install or how to configure UNIX VMWare.

I hope I have been able to answer all of your questions!

Just as an after thought and some side notes:

If your looking to provide applications and workstations in a virtual environment to any more than say 5 people I would advise against using something a workstation version of VMware Player / Workstation, I would instead consider using ESXi. Sometimes the cost of ESXi can be outside the reach of budget. There are free and open source serverside applications which are just as feature rich - proxmox for example.

Also server side virtualization isn't the only option available to you, depending on the user population and the hardware they have on their endpoints you might consider client side virtualization. The premise of client side virtualization is to distribute the compute power back out to the endpoints and away from a more traditional resource rich data center.

Either way it comes down to your preferences as a user and as an administrator which way suits your situation best.

-Harry

Require guidance in planning 2 physical servers with a SAN

Gary — Wed, 17 Sep 2014 04:13:44 GMT

Hi Everyone,

Hope that I've posted in the right place.Firstly, I have a small infrastructure visualization that I need guidance which I am still new with it.

Infrastructure:

2 physical servers with Hyper-V server 2012
x2 Intel(R) Xeon(R) Processor E5-2430L 2.00GHz, 15M Cache, 7.2GT/s QPI, Turbo, 6C, 60W
48 GB RAM
Total of 12 virtual machines on each physical server with HA
1 SAN plus 1 hot spare with 2 controllers
IP address: 192.168.0.0/23

Planned setups

[DR Plan] Each physical servers will only host 6 VM. When 1 VM crash/offline, the other physical server will host it by grabbing the images from the SAN storage.
Setting up onboard NIC with 2x Lan Port to teaming.
Get another NIC Gbit with 2x Lan Port for iSCSI

Linkage
Physical_1 --onboard NIC with team--> Gbit Intranet Switch --> Internet
Physical_2 --onboard NIC with team--> Gbit Intranet Switch --> Internet
Physical_1 --Gbit NIC iSCSI direct--> SAN
Physical_2 --Gbit NIC iSCSI direct--> SAN
SAN --ethernet Lan--> Gbit Intranet Switch

Questions

How to distribute VP to VM? For Hyper-V, does 1 core equals to 1 VP? Please kindly correct me on this.
How do i technically set-up HA in contrast to planned setup 1 above. Link to the setup would be much appreciated?
Is it possible to fully backup the images with VSS only or do I need a 3rd party software to do so?

Hopefully everyone can help out in guiding me to my questions

Thank you in advance for reading.

Unique QMid registry edit with a cloned image

4_gatch — Mon, 21 Jul 2014 16:40:21 GMT

I have multiple pools with hundreds of virtual desktops based off of a single base image. In order to recieve messages from a certain application per desktop the QMid needs to generate a new key for every desktop session. The QMid is found under HKLM
The only solution I have found deals with not installing MSMQ on the base image and instead having a startup batch script to install MSMQ once the session is created and another VBS script to determine the computers name in AD then remove the msmq ocnfig object within.

This would require larger changes to our VMenvironment so I am
looking for a better solution if there is one??