Tuning into the announcement earlier today from VMware it was interesting to hear what in actual fact was a reality check to the current Cloud service providers. Before I pass opinion (and it’s my opinion only) let’s just summarise what’s been announced.

Nutshell

In a nutshell, VMware are providing Cloud hosted services enabling anyone currently using virtualised infrastructures hosted on vSphere to migrate them into VMware’s Cloud or, treat this new Cloud service as an extension of the customer’s own data centre. Of course it’s not free and the options and pricing are already available here for consumption.

Confidence

Continuing from my opening paragraph I read into this announcement that it communicates a clear message - there’s a confidence issue with the current Cloud service providers. Have the providers spent too long fighting for the ultimate service provision but unwittingly frightened people away with concerns of lock in, migration, governance or regulatory challenges? I’d say more than likely. You only have to type into a web search engine ‘Cloud Service Provider’ to find reviews, Top 10 for 2012, Service Providers that focus on developers (not to be confused with DevOps), Java specific… the list goes on.

Too much choice = uncertainty = staying put

I notice the early adopter programme is already underway with strict tie-ins and I’m fascinated to see the list of companies grow and hopefully see a case study announcement at VMworld in San Francisco later this year. It’ll be a further message sealing the acceptance than VMware are serious about the move into the Cloud and that the jostling for supremacy in the market by Cloud service providers has frustrated them – VMware are truly living up to their VMworld title for 2013 of Defy Convention.

The social media feeds (of which this is just one pixel in the huge screen of broadcast) will be awash with chatter about this and I’m keen to see more viewpoints.

VMware’s summary and post announcement write up can be found on their website here.

This article by @cloudpundit covers better ground although I think my initial thoughts weren’t too far adrift.

I created this and tested in my ESXi5.1 lab and highly recommend you open the script, read it and understand it before editing and executing. It goes without saying you should test this first yourself before using in any environments.

Click the Scripts heading in the Menu bar above.

What is CloudCamp?

It’s a series of local events held all over the world and where early adopters of Cloud Computing technologies exchange ideas and discuss challenges. It’s informal and advertised as an ‘un-conference’, supported purely by its members and volunteers.

Having attended my first ever CloudCamp in January of this year during the CloudExpo week I was throughly taken with the concept, the approach and audience mannerisms. It’s quite different to what I’ve observed of other User Group meetings where attendees listen intently to a list of speakers marched up on stage, in the CloudCamp environment every attendee has the opportunity to speak or be a panelist. The audience vote (humorously) people to and from the stage, pose questions then take great pleasure at digging a little more into the answers. It’s a light hearted affair, for everyone.

Last Wednesday, 24th April, CloudCamp was held in London dedicated to the topic of the ‘Software Defined Data Centre’ (SDDC), a phrase that’s recurring daily at the moment especially by VMware and appears at least twice a day in my Twitter stream. The keynote from Simon Wardley set the scene that Cloud adoption isn’t something that happens lightly, it requires planning and mapping out. The success of some companies compared to the stumbling of others is usually attributed to the simple fact that you need to know what you want to achieve. I’m a fan of his presentation style, it’s lively and fun, the audience engage quickly and before you know it, it’s over. Good skills to have.

Vendors followed with their 5 minute lightening slot, each describing their goals and how they can take your organisation down the route of Cloud adoption, of course using their product range. My favourite guest speaker of the evening was Kuan Hon, she challenged outside of technology focusing on regulatory issues. It was fast and furious messaging, but she did only have five minutes. Greg Ferro enlightened us about ‘Software Defined Networking’ (SDN), chatting with him later referred to himself as being known within Canopy Cloud as the Cloud Plumber. Marvellous.

Lightening slots now finished it was the time for the ‘un-conference’ to begin, members of the audience formed a panel and deliberated questions from the floor. Joe Baguley now takes the microphone and seeds in a question or two when the audience or panel need steering back on track. Again, he holds the floor and audience attention well and I can see exactly why he holds the role of Chief Technologist EMEA for VMware.

Putting the SDDC and SDN discussions to one side a couple of really interesting items really stood out in amongst all the chatter and banter.

• Kuan Hon struck quite a cord with the panel and audience in that her recent and current research relates to Cloud governance and compliance. She challenges and questions whether organisations are truly aware of where their data sits or is transmitted to? Importantly, it has to comply with local data protection acts of the hosting company’s country. She used the phrase, “Internet is global, laws are local.”, which really does hit the nail on the head.

• The Software Defined Data Centre discussion soon moved across to the Software Defined Networking which then jumped over to the G Cloud Programme. These three huge topics were challenged from the angles of consumer to strategist, during the interaction a panel member responded to a question citing the types of Cloud (Private, Hybrid, etc…) and followed it up by asking the audience, “How private is a Private Cloud when the equipment is not in your data centre?”. Quite a bombshell of a quandary.

If you haven’t had the opportunity to attend a CloudCamp in your area, I’d highly recommend investigating it. The full itinerary for this year can be found here.

http://www.cloudcamp.org

Twitter IDs of the names referenced above: @joebaguley @swardley @etherealmind @kuan0

Gregg Robertson (thesaffageek.co.uk) and myself will be delivering a session covering the Virtualisation Community, Tweeting, people networking and ideas of how to get involved via social media streams. If you’re new to the ‘virtual’ virtualisation community then come along to learn more, we’ll also be around for the day too.

Not able to come along and see us? Don’t panic, we’ll be making the content available afterwards, more news about that after the event.

Agenda for the day is:

Register for the London VMUG, click here to get your name down.

Look forward to seeing you there.

Anyway, the purpose of this post is to explain how to enable a Windows To Go prepared USB key to boot within a VM. It sounds straight forward enough, but in case you didn’t realise VMware Fusion doesn’t support booting USB keys unlike Parallels (their KB to enable this) for example.

Let’s assume you’ve created your Windows To Go USB key already from your Windows 8 Enterprise Edition computer.

• Firstly, create a new virtual machine

• Choose to create a custom machine

• Select the Microsoft Windows 8 x64 Operating System

• When prompted to Save As, I’ve chosen to locate the virtual machine in a separate folder

•  Provide a name for the virtual machine container file

• Once saved, edit the Settings of the VM and select the Hard Disk (SCSI) section

• Click > next to Advanced options to reveal more information about the hard disk
• Click Remove Hard Disk

• The hard disk file isn’t needed so choose Move to Trash

• Close down the VM Settings window

The first section to prepare a VM is now complete, the virtual machine is set to boot the correct operating system and the hard disk is disposed of. Next, the .VMX file must be edited.

• Using Spotlight, launch Terminal

• At the command prompt navigate to the local directory where your Windows To Go virtual machine is located
• You’ll see here, from the root (cd /) I have changed into the <DIR>  where the virtual machine container file resides
• I issue an ls -lah to show the <DIR> contents and in there a single file resides, this is the VM
• I issue the cd Windows8ToGo.vmwarevm command to access the container file
• In there, I once again issue ls -lah and see the virtual machine’s files
• To edit the VM’s configuration file (VMX) I type vi Windows8ToGo.vmx

• Now, the contents of the file shows the virtual machine’s hardware profile
• A new line is to be inserted,  firmware = “efi”
• To do this press [i] to enter Insert Mode
• Arrow down a couple of lines and press the [Enter] key to insert a new line
• Type in the text as above
• Press the [ESC]ape key
• Press [Shift] + [;] to passthrough a colon [:] to enable access to the vi command console
• Type [wq] and press [Enter]

• Close the Console application and switch back to Fusion
• Insert your Windows To Go USB drive if it’s not already present
• Start up the Windows To Go virtual machine

• The virtual machine will not start from the USB key as the device cannot be attached to the VM until the VM is powered on (chicken & egg)
• The VM has nothing to boot from so will pass through the default boot list, don’t worry about this
• Click Virtual Machine and select Settings…

•  Click the USB & Bluetooth section

• Select the Kingston DT (Workspace) device (or your equivalent)
• Choose the Plug in Action of Connect to Windows to prevent Fusion from asking “Where do you want to connect this device to?” each time you insert it

• Close the Settings windows and restart the VM

Now, there are 2 ways to boot the VM successfully into Windows.

Note - The very first boot of the Windows To Go key (immediately after I created it) did not require me to run the steps in Option 1 or 2, but all subsequent boots did, even after I deleted and re-created the VM while testing the steps in this article. 

Option 1

• Immediately during the VM boot press the [ESC]ape key to enter the BIOS
• This may look different to the usual BIOS screen you’re familiar with as this is specifically an EFI BIOS

• Select the Boot Manager and press [Enter]

• Select EFI USB Device and press [Enter]
• The VM will now boot into Windows

Option 2

• Allow the VM to boot normally, the screen will show the VM is looking to start from an EFI device and after a short while will time out as it cycles through devices it can’t enumerate and find what it’s looking for
• It’ll look similar to this and you’ll notice all the discovered devices are shown, the one we’re interested in is fs0

• At the Shell > prompt type fs0: and press [Enter]
• Type cd \EFI\Boot and press [Enter]
• Type bootx64.efi and press [Enter]

• All being well, the machine will boot up immediately, like this:

That’s it! You will need to repeat Option 1 or 2 each time you wish to start the Windows To Go VM.

Why should you apply? Well, I’d just like to do a little bit of myth-busting here too, it’s not just a title to throw on your CV or LinkedIn profile it’s about being part of a community where like minded techies and evangelists can share their passion for virtualisation. The opportunities presented to you once you’re in are pretty impressive, they range from license codes for VMware and sometimes non-VMware products. There’s swag (of course), events that are vExpert only to learn about ground break technologies. The VMworld conferences dedicate evening sessions just for vExperts and VCDXs too, so you can rub shoulders with the industry’s best. Last year both myself and Gregg Robertson (thesaffageek.co.uk) were able to chat with Steve Herrod about VMUGs, while sipping a beer. It’s not every day you can do that. Early access to Beta programs and the list goes on…

Last year I created a URL link shortener, full article here, using the vexpert.me domain name, the idea being that every time you (a vExpert) want to ping a link out you could indirectly advertise about your status. The reason? Well, I’d heard a few people mention it was hard to impart the meaning to their line manager as it wasn’t exam based. There was little awareness of the global count and it really being a select few.

Anyway, enough of my waffle get over to the vExpert application form, click here, review the criteria and apply now.

Darren.

Register here

As well as the infamous Eric Sloof (http://www.ntpro.nl) presenting VMware HA deep dive content, my colleague, and all round clever chap, Gregg Robertson ( http:///saffageek.co.uk) will be presenting a VCAP session covering topics around:

• The journey to gaining VCAP exams is invaluable even if you’re not considering a VCDX
• Resources he found helpful with his preparation
• Experience of the VCAP exams without breaking NDAs
• Discussion – Do employers in the IT industry really know and appreciate the difference between a VCP and VCAP?

The session agenda overview below is available in PDF here

There will be a few vendors you’ll be able to catch up with and undoubtedly grab a freebie or two from. The venue, refreshments and lunch are provided by the sponsors, of which none of these events would be possible so do stop by their section and chat with them.

January’s Gold sponsor is Nutanix with Silver sponsorship by 10Zig and Zerto.

If you’re after a Nutanix summary and quick overview of their latest offering why not check this post I recently pushed out.

I really hope you’re able to attend and if you do, please come and find me and say hello. It’s always great to meet new VMUG attendees.

Darren.

Updated post 31/01/2013

Earlier this week Condusiv hosted a webinar specifically focusing upon V-locity. It was a scheduled 30 minute slot but due to so many questions, good ones too, it ran over slightly. So, if you’d like to learn more about how V-locity works, it’s intelligence and optimisation techniques, I’d recommend watching this video of the webinar.

Updated post 11/01/2013

I’ve updated this post after discovering my lab environment wasn’t providing a consistent platform for the tests to be completed upon.

My sincere apologies to Condusiv for poorly reporting on their product however; I’ve undertaken the testing again and received dramatically better results. Please see the tables below, you’ll observe a vast difference now. For clarity and tracking I’ve crossed through the old results but left them visible as there was a marked difference even in my IO constrained environment.

Since looking into this product I’ve also had the opportunity to run the Benefits Analyzer Tool too,  the output of which can be seen towards the end of this article. Excellent results reported on my vCenter even for a low utilisation home lab environment, I suspect there’s much potential to be observed in the real world based on these findings.

Summary

While attending the UK VMUG recently in November I took time to wander around the mini-solutions exchange and chat with some of the vendors to see how the market was doing for them, dig a little further and learn about new technology. Of the many offerings available, one product from Condusiv grabbed my attention – specifically V-locity4. It claims to boost virtual machine performance up to 50%, without the need for extra hardware by optimising data reads and writes using the virtual machine’s own RAM. With so many virtual infrastructure complementary solutions in the marketplace, it’s hard to invest time for every single one but something about the description and its deep seated roots from the old VAX days led me to think it was worth further investigation.

[Disclaimer] I’d like to clarify to you, the reader, that I’m not affiliated with Condusiv, have not been sponsored, paid or beaten into submission to produce this article. Images and statistics that I’ve included in this article that are not my own have been provided to me from Condusiv for the purpose of clarity and respect for accuracy.

The test ‘lab’

To set the scene for the testing it’s important to explain my mini-lab. It’s nothing along the lines of Michael Webster’s or Mike Laverick’s so please don’t be too disappointed . If you’re familiar with my blog site you’ll notice that I have Sean Duffy’s vMetrics updating once an hour so it’ll affirm my kit list here.

Hardware

• 2 x HP ProLiant N40L Microservers each with 8GB RAM and local disks
• 1 x HP ProLiant ML115G5 with 8GB RAM and local disks
• 1 x Iomega IX-200 with 2 x 1TB drives in RAID 0
• Cisco unmanaged desktop switch, 8 Port, 1GbE

Software

• VMware ESXi v5.0 Build 821926
• VMware vCenter v5.0 Build 804277

Configuration

• VMware ESXi installed locally in each server, not USB or AutoDeploy
• IP Network using 192.168.15.0 / 24
• Static IP for hosts and storage
• Virtual machines use a mixture of static and DHCP
• DHCP provided by Cisco Linksys EA4500 router
• Single iSCSI presentation of 1TB from Iomega
• Single Datacenter and single HA & DRS (most aggressive setting) Cluster

I think that’s enough to be getting on with, now onto the building of the V-locity 4 setup.

V-locity test machines

Virtual hardware

I created 2 x MS Windows 7 (64-bit) virtual machines, each machine created with identical virtual hardware:

• 1 x vCPU with a single core
• 3GB RAM
• Video card with 8MB RAM
• LSI Logic SAS SCSI Controller
• 1 x 32GB Hard disk, Thick Provisioned Lazy Zeroed
• 1 x CD/DVD, disconnected when not in use
• 1 x vNIC (E1000)

Guest operating system and personalisation

• MS Windows 7 Professional with Service Pack 1 (ISO build 623707) installed, automatic updates turned off
• Performance Profile, Maximum
• Screen saver turned off, screen sleep and computer sleep disabled
• No other software installed (anti-virus, Adobe, etc…)
• Virtual machine names:
• vlocity-01
• vlocity-02
• IP configuration left at default of DHCP
• VMware Tools installed into both virtual machines, build 821615
• DRS Rule created to keep both machines together (thinking about the benefits of shared memory etc…)

IO Generating software

For this test, IO Meter software was downloaded from here and installed into both virtual machines. I chose the default options and when the installer completed I answered, “The program installed correctly”, when prompted by MS Windows. When I launched IO Meter I granted the program “Allow Access” for both prompted messages.

V-locity, installation

For the purpose of this review, the test required that the software is installed into one virtual machine, this way you’re able to see a virtual machine running with it and without it. In this scenario my virtual machines are:

• vlocity4-01 – IO Meter installed without V-locity 4
• vlocity4-02 – IO Meter installed with V-locity 4

I download the 30-day trial from the Condusiv website and launched the installer.

[Yak Shaving Tip] If your test lab doesn’t have internet access make sure you have a copy of the ‘Microsoft .NET Framework 4.0 Client’ software to hand and install this into the virtual machine where V-locity 4 will reside. The installer will check and retrieve it (if required) from the internet during the deployment but if your lab doesn’t have internet access you won’t get very far.

I chose the Advanced installation as I’m not a huge fan of the Express installs, you never quite know what you’ll get. Anyway, I’ve included the main screenshots below so you can see their options.

Configuration, both virtual machines

The virtual machines were configured to complete the same tasks, in this test I opted for 2 types of interrogation.

• 100% read
• 50% read and 50% write

I ran the tests with the sequential setting and then random setting to compare the results and see where the benefits exposed themselves within my environment.

When each test was executed on the vlocity-02 virtual machine a run time of 3 minutes was completed followed by a wait time of 2 minutes prior to the actual logged and reported upon figures. This allows the V-locity system time to track the workload and balance it’s algorithms accordingly.

As this software is very Read cache focused the benefits of Write performance will only reveal themselves during low fragment write requests. In my testing scenario here I used a 4kb block size and 4kb write so in reality I didn’t expect to gain too much from this.

IO Meter configuration specifics

To summarise the IO Meter Worker profiles:

• Each virtual machine was allocated 2 workers
• A maximum disk size value of 50,000 sectors using the local ‘C’ drive of the virtual machine
• Each worker was assigned the same task from the Global Access Specifications
• I set the Results Display to Last Update and every 2 seconds
• Reporting was saved to a CSV file

V-locity performance results

All tests ran for a minimum of 10 minutes to allow the guest OS within each virtual machine to stabilise and the host hypervisor to balance out the compute workload.

Sequential access

(Unstable test environment entries crossed through)

• 100% read test improved IOps by 45%
• 50% read and 50% write improved IOps by 52%

(Tests undertaken in a more stable environment)

The table below clearly shows that with V-locity 4 running within the virtual machine the:

• 100% read test improved IOps by 899.87%
• 50% read and 50% write improved IOps by 307.51%

You’ll notice that the CPU utilisation is higher in the vlocity-02 virtual machine, this is because the agent is using the idle CPU cycles to process in-flight requests, these are relinquished when the guest operating system needs them. To cover the host perspective, vCenter performance reports showed no Balloon or swap activity so this didn’t appear to adversely effect my alerting or reporting.

Had I pushed out smaller 1kb or 2kb writes then V-locity would have applied its caching and intelligence to only lay down an actual write once the block was size was complete, so  the poorer performance more than likely reflects the underlying storage rather than the product.

Random access

(Unstable test environment entries crossed through)

• 100% read test performed worse to the tune of -8.75%
• 50% read and 50% write improved IOps by 48%

(Tests undertaken in a more stable environment)

The table below clearly shows that with V-locity 4 running within the virtual machine the:

• 100% read test improved IOps by 408.76%
• 50% read and 50% write improved IOps by 38.21%

As I mentioned in the Sequential access section above the CPU is noticeably higher for the Read tests, whereas Writes required a lesser amount of CPU processing. The random access test in my environment using a 4kb Write on a 4kb block size reveals my storage can’t quite keep up with the intensity of random requests.

Summarising all of this

I’ve certainly established there are marked differences and wins to be had using this software in my own lab environment. Yes, you can clearly see the software is designed for the acceleration of disk Reads but it can also address Writes as I’ve elaborated upon above. From my perspective though I’m glad I’ve seen a little degradation in my environment as I now know where my bottlenecks would be and it’s proof where V-locity wouldn’t be of value in my setup. No two environments are the same even with identical major core applications so until you’ve actually had a look and tested it for yourself I wouldn’t rule this product out. I have to admit that I’ve not spent any time looking into the rest of the product and it’s features – I was drawn in by the technology and not the add-ins. One item of interest for those of you looking to kick the tyres more is the “3 Day Benefit Analysis” report, this watches the virtual machine activity to help shape its ‘working’ profile. A report can be generated after this capture to assist with any business case or justifications that you may need – a utility that’s also a reporting tool, nice.

Here’s my report (in full) having run the Benefit Analysis tool against my vCenter server, as you can see there’s benefits to be had by using V-locity. A quick snippet below…

The Condusiv website covers off many more of the V-locity 4 features and how it can help to address IO bottlenecks and redundant IOs, so I won’t list them here. For peace of mind the product has been tested by VMware and awarded the VMware Ready logo, you can read more here about this.

So, wrapping up this mini-investigation I hope you too are now intrigued to see how it’ll perform in your lab. I’d been keen to hear your findings and also if you’ve it deployed into your development, test or production environments.

My vSoup podcast is live – hurrah.

Virtualisation podcasts come in all shapes and sizes and the vSoup offering is no exception. Tune into vSoup if you want to listen to light hearted technology chat and learn more about the people in the virtualisation community.

Many thanks to Chris (Dearden), Christian (Mohn) and Ed (Czerwin) for the last minute arrangements and making this session happen. To listen it’s here, Ed’s Top Tip for product name representation is a ‘must listen reason’ for this podcast.

Cheers, Darren.

I’ve been catching up on recent community happenings in the virtualisation circles, it’s amazing how much time you can ‘lose’ reading detailed blog posts and learning about vendor technologies. Anyway,  one item stood out which I wanted to share with you. It’s origins are from a country commonly referred to as being ‘down under’, if this isn’t a term you’re familiar with I’d like to be clear here that I’m not referring to a country that’s dead and buried. Of course, I’m referring to Australia.

Craig Waters recently kicked off his own version of the informal chat catch-ups with industry recognised peers and started publishing them on his website. Given that there are a few of these types of media informal chats / interviews out there you might be wondering quite why he’e embarked on this? Well, that was my initial thought. Since actually visiting his website and reading his thoughts behind it I can see why he’s pursuing this route.  In summary, it’s about awareness and his observations of how the social media pace in APAC is very different to that of the US and EMEA. The full article can be read here on his site http://blog.rack.org.au

As a vExpert and VMUG leader for Melbourne, he’s certainly up to speed with the value and importance of the virtualisation community for the community plus, his own website is only part of his contributions as he’s involved with the APAC Virtualization Podcast too. That’s a lot of work to juggle on top of a day job.

The vCatchup

Since kicking off this idea in mid-November he’s already managed to organise and interview the following people:

• Scott Drummonds (@drummonds)
• Grant Orchard (@grantorchard)
• Vaughan Stewart (@vstewed)
• Nick Marshall (@nickmarshall9)
• Alastair Cooke (@demitasseNZ)

Quite an impressive list of industry known people plus the audio and video files are also available in their native format so it’s not an iTunes only subscription. You’ll find these made available directly underneath the video window for each interviewee.

You can jump straight to the feedburner vCatchup here but I’d recommend visiting his site first and watching the videos.

The iTunes podcasts are available here should you want to just go and grab the lot.

Find out more

Craig’s community contact details:

• Twitter: @cswaters1
• Blog: http://blog.rack.org.au
• YouTube: http://youtube.com/user/blograck