Citrix best practices for virtualizing XenApp

VMware already published a document about the best practices of virtualizing XenApp servers on top of VMware vSphere. You can read about it and download the document over here.

Now Citrix has published a best practice document, the XenApp Planning Guide: Virtualization Best Practics with their point of view on virtualizing XenApp servers. Note that this document not only focuses on virtualizatin XenApp on top of VMware vSphere, but also the hypervisors by Microsoft (Hyper-V) and Citrix (XenServer) are taken into account.

This document also contains a lot of useful recommendations. So I would recommend reading both the VMware document and the Citrix document carefully when designing your virtual environment

Overview of the Citrix document :

Desktop virtualization comprises of many different types of virtual desktops. One option is to use a
Hosted Shared Desktop model, which consists of a published desktop running on a Citrix XenApp
server.

One of the goals when creating a design for Hosted Shared Desktops is to try and maximize
scalability while still providing an adequate use experience. Hosted Shared Desktops provide an
advantage over other desktop virtualization techniques by only requiring the use of a single
operating system, which significantly reduces user resource requirements and helps improve
scalability numbers.

However, in order to get the most users, making correct design decisions as to the resource
allocation is important. Creating too many virtual machines or too few might negatively impact
scalability.

This planning guide provides resource allocation recommendations for users running on a Hosted
Shared Desktop on either Windows Server 2003 or Windows Server 2008.

Note: Even though these best practices are based on the Hosted Shared Desktop model, they are still relevant in a non-desktop model where users only connect to published applications without the desktop interface.

The XenApp Planning Guide: Virtualization Best Practices can be found here.

Disk selection in ESXi kickstart

Automated installation is the way to deploy your ESXi configuration to your servers. After all it’s all about automating your IT operations and making your life easier. Nobody likes to do a simple task twice, so I would definitely recommend to automate your ESXi installation. ESXi uses kickstart for automating your installation. You can view more details on this in my previous post over here.

Disk selection

All kickstart scripts start with the installation of ESXi. Afterwards you can add first-boot script to configure your ESXi installation to your specific needs.

One of the first thing you need to decide is where to install your ESXi installation to. The autopart command in the kickstart file specifies where you will install your ESXi to. You’ve got 3 options to choose from :

* Local = install ESXi onto the first local disk (local hard drive)
* Remote = install ESXi onto the first remote disk (FC or iSCSi LUN disk)
* Driver = install ESXi to the device which uses this driver in the vmkernel to access the disk

So if your using local disk select local and if your booting from SAN use remote.

But wait! There’s a catch…

Some local disks, specifically SAS disks, are not presented to ESXi installer as local disks, but as remote disks. This is also acknowledged by VMware in this KB article.

The solution is rather simple, but you do need to know the specific driver for the controller of your local SAS disk. In my case the server was a HP BL460c G6 blade. Thanks to this (Dutch) VMUG post I was able to trace the driver (hpsa) for the SAS controller in the HP BL460c G6.

And this is where the driver option of autopart kicks in. If you have several types of servers and always want to install to the local disk, use the following command :

autopart –firstdisk=hpsa,local –overwritevmfs

In this case ESXi first tries to install to the disk access with device driver hpsa. If that fail it will try to install onto the first local disk. If both options fail, the installation of ESXi will fail and you will error will be shown onscreen.

Hope this gives you some better understanding in how ESXi installs itself onto disk. For more information have a look at the Setup Guide of ESXi here.

The launch of VMware Press

Microsoft has it, Cisco has it, so it’s not a surprise that VMware launched it’s own VMware Press. And if I may say so : it fills a gap. The last couple of years the portfolio of VMware has grown from a virtualization vendor to a full size cloud company that can deliver a full range of IT infrastructure software. With this growth also the demand within the IT community has grown for more information and good books about the products that VMware delivers.

This demand up till now was filled by for example Duncan Epping, Mike Laverick and Scott Lowe and many more who piece by piece delivered excellent pieces of work on subjects of VMware, virtualization and cloud computing. Now VMware created it’s own VMware Press brand to deliver books with the same magnificent content of your favorite VMware product.

VMware Press is a joint venture between Pearson and VMware. The joint venture must result in books in the following fields :

* Technical books, ebooks, and videos that concentrate on specific applications of virtualization.
* Decision Maker books, ebooks, and videos that focus on the business aspects of virtualization.
* Official certification materials that support VMware’s complete certification program.

And of course the press release of a new book label would not be the same without the introduction of some new books to be released in the fall of this year

Coming Soon from VMware Press

Storage Design and Implementation in VMware vSphere 5.x
by Mostafa Khalil • Technology Deep Dive • Fall 2011
In this technology deep dive book, expert architect Mostafa Khalil teaches everything an administrator or architect needs to know about design, management and storage maintenance in the vSphere 5.0 virtual environment, including detailed procedures and guidelines, architectural design elements, best practices, common configuration details, and more.

Administering VMware SRM 5.x
by Mike Laverick • Technology Hands-On • Fall 2011
In this practical and technical guide to installing and configuring VMware’s Site Recovery Manager 5.0, expert Mike Laverick takes readers through set-ups for multiple vendors, disaster recovery, common pitfalls and errors, while along the way explaining why things happen, and how to fix them.

Automating Day-to-Day Administration of VMware vSphere 5.x
by Cody Bunch • Technology Hands-On • Fall 2011
This hands-on technical guide to automating vSphere with Orchestrator teaches administrators how to save time and resources by automating their virtual infrastructure. Automation expert Cody Bunch teaches valuable practices and tool use through a combination of real world automation examples and case studies.

Must say I’m excited about VMware Press and looking forward to read the books!

A different view on View

Yesterday I attended the VMware Partner Exchange on Tour here in the Netherlands. You can view an impression of this event on the site of Mr. Sloof over here. One of the session I attended was the one given by Raymond van ‘t Hag about the VMware View reference architecture.

Raymond is one of the specialist on VMware View in the Benelux and delivered a nice presentation about using View in combination with local SSD disks.

An interesting view on how to implement View as you can say. Since the era of server virtualization kicked in we’ve moved away from servers with local storage to SAN connected servers. This solution brings us back again to the local disks in the server. An interesting point of view if I may say so myself. But then again it has advantages with regards to disk utilization and creates a VDI solution that also can be implemented at companies that don’t have the budget for an expensive SAN solution.

VMware released a whitepaper about this View solution in a whitepaper. You can download the whitepaper over here.

During the presentation Raymond also mentioned the VMware View & Fusion-io VDI appliance. This solution is created by VMware SE Ton Hermes and delivers VDI-in-a-box. This solution is VMware View in combination with Fusion-io (faster then SSD!) and can be seen as a ready-to-use VDI solution which you can buy off the shelf. The brochure can be found here.

In all I think these are nice solutions for VMware View which definitely state that VDI is something for all companies. You don’t have to be a million dollar company to implement VDI. These solutions make it possible for any company to work anywhere, anytime and anyplace!

Security : VMware Compliance Checker

One thing to always take into account while designing and managing your vSphere infrastructure is security. VMware also recognizes this and has several resources available to help you in securing your vSphere infrastructure.

VMware now released a tool to check your security compliancy against the VMware vSphere Hardening Guide. This guide is a set of best practices to harden your vSphere infrastructure. The VMware Compliance Checker checks and reports these settings in easy and simple manner.

VMware Compliance Checker for vSphere lets you:

Check compliance for multiple VMware ESX and ESXi servers concurrently

Run compliance check on up to 5 ESX or ESXi servers at a time and produce reports.

Supports VMware vSphere hardening guidelines

Perform checks on VMware ESX and ESXi servers to conform with the latest VMware vSphere hardening guidelines.

Analyze compliance assessment results

After a compliance run, you can view the assessments by ESX/ESXi hosts, plus guests.

Save and Print assessment results

You can save and print the compliance assessment reports to your team for review and they can be saved for archival needs.

Download your copy of the VMware Compliance Checker here.

This is a free tool and can be used in small and mid-size companies. This tool isn’t a replacement for the security auditing tools out there. If security really is a big deal within your infrastructure take a look at the compliance center by VMware

VMware vCloud Reference Architecture

Cloud here, cloud there, cloud is everywhere at the moment and private VMware vClouds are being deployed at customers all over the world. But with all great things the start with a design. And before you can design a nice solution to fit your need, you need to understand what vCloud is and what it’s capable of.

For this reason VMware created the vCloud Reference Architecture. A document that helps you design a private vCloud and understand all of it’s components. It will help you in the creation process, building your vCloud, size it for the needs of your organization and give you pointers on how to manage it.

You can download “Architecting a vCloud” over here.

Troubleshoot VMware issues with mindmapping

I always love to learn new things to optimize my personal skills. One of those skills is mindmapping. Apparently VMware shares that point of view and has created various mindmaps for troubleshooting various issues.

Each mindmap starts with a central theme, Troubleshoot Network Issues for example. You can then select your area where you have a problem by expanding (hit the +). This will result in more specific areas with regards to your selected problem area. Eventually this will result in a set of KB articles which can possibly solve your problem.

For examples have a look at the following articles :

Mindmap – vSphere Troubleshooting Network Issues

Mindmap – vSphere Troubleshooting Management Issues

For more mindmaps, now and in the future, have a look at VMware Support Insider blog here.

In general VMware created a nice way to approach troubleshooting issues with stuff that’s already there : mindmapping & KB articles. I must say I like this lifehack!

VMware SRM and EMC Symmetrix

Lately I’ve been working on a VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM) 4.1 implementation in combination with a the Symmetrix storage arrays by EMC. Designing and figuring out how to get SRM working in combination with the storage arrays is the hard part of the job.

It requires knowledge of SRM, the EMC storage arrays and the vSphere infrastructure that you are implementing SRM into. The hard part is in the connection between SRM and the storage arrays. EMC providers a Storage Replication Adapter (SRA) , the EMC SRDF adapter, to integrate SRM with the Symmetrix storage arrays.

You need to understand how the SRA works, how to get it to working in combination with the Solutions Enabler software and how to present the replicated LUNs to your SRM.

EMC has written a document, “Using EMC SRDF Adapter for VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager”, to fully understand all the software tooling and components involved in setting up a SRM implementation in combination with Symmetrix storage arrays.

The document is divided into four chapters and two appendices:

Chapter 1, “Introduction to VMware Technology,” introduces the reader to VMware and its technologies.

Chapter 2, “Installation and Configuration,” discusses the installation, setup and configuration of the EMC SRDF Storage Replication Adapter for VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager version 4. This chapter also presents detailed best practices for installing and configuring Solutions Enabler for management of Symmetrix storage arrays.

Chapter 3, “Testing Recovery Plans with SRDF Adapter version 2.2,” presents how to configure and execute recovery plans with SRM version 4 and EMC SRDF Adapter version 2.2.

Chapter 4, “Failover and Failback with SRDF Adapter version 2.2,” discusses how to configure and execute failover and failback operations with SRM version 4 and EMC SRDF Adapter version 2.2.

Appendix A, “Symmetrix Access Controls with EMC SRDF Adapter,” discusses how to use Symmetrix Access Controls to manage access and control of the Symmetrix storage arrays visible to the VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager server.

Appendix B, “Solutions Enabler Licensing,” discusses how to license Solutions Enabler to make use of the EMC SRDF SRA features. This section includes pre-Solutions Enabler 7.2 host-based licenses as well as Solutions Enabler 7.2 Symmetrix-based eLicensing.

Hopefully this document will help others understand SRM better and to successfully implement SRM with EMC Symmetrix storage arrays. It helped me in getting the job done! Thanks EMC.

Get vSphere network info using PowerCLI & CDP

PowerCLI is powerfull stuff. It can be used to set specific configuration for your vSphere environment, but it can also be used to collect information. This post will go into detail how to get network information using VMware PowerCLI and Cisco Discovery Protocol (CDP).

Cisco Discovery Protocol (CDP)

CDP is used to share information about other directly-connected Cisco networking equipment, such as upstream physical switches. CDP allows ESX and ESXi administrators to determine which Cisco switch port is connected to a given vSwitch. When CDP is enabled for a particular vSwitch, properties of the Cisco switch, such as device ID, software version, and timeout, may be viewed from the vSphere Client. This information is useful when troubleshooting network connectivity issues related to VLAN tagging methods on virtual and physical port settings.

CDP under VMware vSphere

By default ESX(i) has the CDP protocol on the vSwitch configured to the mode Listen. This enables you to view all relevant information with regards to your Cisco network.

To show this information under the vSphere client you have to enable CDP on the ESX(i) host and the Cisco switch. This KB article by VMware is a good reference on how to enable CDP. You can also view the configuration guide of ESX or ESXi.

If all works fine you can view the network information by clicking the info icon next to the vSwitch :

For more information on CDP under vSphere see this KB article.

PowerCLI & CDP

When CDP is enabled you can use PowerCLI to generate network information output for your vSphere environment. This is very usefull information which you can use for troubleshooting or in my case to prepare for a migration.

The KB article by VMware already gives a good PowerCLI script to get network information of all the connected NICs on a specific ESX(i) host.

Get-VMHost | Where-Object {$_.State -eq “Connected”} |
%{Get-View $_.ID} |
%{$esxname = $_.Name; Get-View $_.ConfigManager.NetworkSystem} |
%{ foreach($physnic in $_.NetworkInfo.Pnic){
$pnicInfo = $_.QueryNetworkHint($physnic.Device)
foreach($hint in $pnicInfo){
Write-Host $esxname $physnic.Device
if( $hint.ConnectedSwitchPort ) {
$hint.ConnectedSwitchPort
} else {
Write-Host “No CDP information available.”; Write-Host } } } }

If your not a scriptkiddie, you can also use PowerGUI and import the VMware Community PowerPack to do the work for you. This will, when you are connected to a vCenter host, provide you with a list of all the NICs in your ESX(i) hosts and their network information.

Relevant links

More information on CDP & ESXi: VirtualClouds.info – Configure Cisco CDP on ESX(i)

Best practices for XenApp on VMware

VMware released a best practices guide for XenApp on VMware. I have been looking forward to a best practices guide by VMware for a while, since more and more companies are deploying their XenApp infrastructure on VMware vSphere.

This guide describes the best practices for implementing an XenApp infrastructure on VMware vSphere by focussing on the following topics :

 Citrix XenApp Architecture on vSphere – Provides background on Citrix XenApp architecture and the
rationale for deploying on VMware vSphere.

 VMware ESX™ Host Best Practices for Citrix XenApp –Provides proven VMware best practices for
vSphere hosts running XenApp workloads. Includes guidance in the areas of CPU, memory, storage,
and networking.

 Citrix XenApp on vSphere Best Practices – Deploying Citrix XenApp on vSphere requires that proven
best practices for the XenApp application continue to be followed. The focus in this section is on
configuring virtual machines for XenApp.

 Monitoring Performance – When migrating XenApp to a vSphere infrastructure, maintaining
performance levels that are equal or better than those achieved in physical deployments is essential.
Monitoring before and after a migration helps validate whether the migration was a success, and can
also help establish a baseline understanding of the performance characteristics. This section takes a
look at the vSphere tools available to help monitor the vSphere environment.

 vSphere Enhancements for Deployment and Operations – Provides a brief look at vSphere features
and add-ons that can enhance the deployment and management of XenApp.

You can download the guide over here.