Paul Robichaux has an awesome article up on windowsitpro http://bit.ly/RmWfS detailing why Microsoft never integrated the two products as has been oft rumored.

Just because something CAN be done, does not mean it necessarily Should!

Scott

I was working with a customer cloning XenApp servers running under XenServer.  We were using XenAppPrep to prepare the images for cloning, then using Newsid to change the SID and the server name.

Newsid was crashing about halfway through the process when it got to the registry key for “IMA”.  The process would simply disappear with a DR Watson in the event log. After some quick googling i came across some links that spoke of the issue on 64 bit windows but not on 32 bit.

I did some additional research on Citrix and came up with the following article

This article made perfect sense.

We ran at from the command prompt to launch newsid and it ran successfully.  I have never run across this with Newsid before so I am curious why this happened. Hopefully it saves someone else some time.

I’ve talked in some pre-sales meetings about StorageLink but haven’t really been able to talk about which features work from which SAN vendor.  Citrix has posted an HCL describing just that here.

When xtravirt posted years ago about running esx on vmware workstation, I became a big fan of running virtual ESX, and it was the first time I had my own test esx server.  Well things have come quite aways in the virtual ESX space, now you can run virtual ESX on ESX (link) and HyperViZor are putting info on running an entire “cloud” Lab Manager and SRM on a single box (link).Â
Time to buy more ram.

Simon Crosby discusses the economics behind making XenServer Free! Enlightening as always.

It is just way to fun listening to him talk.

Datacore recently announced a new product Advanced Site Recovery, basically seems to be enhanced asynchronous SAN-replication with features like 1 click failover/failback which got me thinking about DR and another conversation we had recently with DataDomain.  While virtualization makes disaster recovery dramatically easier, there are still some significant challenges to a great disaster recovery plan.  Basically all approaches boil down to backups or SAN Replication.  Of the two approaches I’ll contrast two of the most interesting approaches, DataDomain on the backup side and VMWare’s Site Recovery Manager which plays on the SAN Replication side.

DataDomain dedupes your backups of your vmdk’s and can replicate them to another DataDomain in a remote site.  VMWare’s SRM uses a certified storage vendors SRA and leverages that storages asynchronous replication to move your vmdk’s to a remote sites, then automates the cutover to separate sites into a few clicks, as well as functionality like testing your dr plan without disrupting production environment.

SRM is a more complete solution that automates a lot of the recovery processes up to re-ip’ing your dr VM’s, but requires the bandwidth to keep up with the incremental block level changes on your SAN.  A T-3 can replicate about 1/2 a TB per day as a general reference point.

Where DataDomain shines is in the lower bandwidth scenarios.  With inline deduplication they can reduce vmdk’s storage on average 40x-60x, I’ve heard of cases of 100x!  They advertising being able to handle 14TB of data across a T-3 in a day!  While recovery is not automated, your dealing with vmdk’s, so its still pretty easy, restore, add to inventory, power on.

I have been wondering for some time what the purpose of a client HyperVisor is.  I was having a very hard time understanding how this differentiated from something like Vmware Workstation which is a software Hypervisor.

I stumbled across an article by Martin Ingram from Appsense over at “Virtual Stratgey Magazine”. Virtual-Strategy Article

I know that Citrix is working on their client side Hyervisor as well Client Hypervisor is not Just Xen on a laptop.

Between these 2 articles I now understand what the goal of client Hypervisors is.  It appears it really is trying to solve 2 problems. The first problem is Graphics or processor intense applications running as “Virtual Machines”, and the second one being “Offline VDI”. With the Hypervisor embedded into the hardware it extends the ability to bring the virtualization down to the local machine, and do some form of synchronization back to the master “Hosted” hypervisor.

So what exactly does this buy us? In my opinion if you run the client hypervisor and run the “Guest” on top of this with an automated check in, check out mechanism you get the features of hosted desktops (Security, Change Management, centralized backup and recovery, One to Many image management, portability) while also retaining the Offline ability and utilizing the local processing and computing power of devices.

I am actually excited to see this segment grow.  I think having local Hypervisors offer a dramatic shift in computing.  This why it is so exciting to see Intel/Citrix collaborating on this.
Intel & Citrix jointly developing client Hypervisor

Read about the joint Intel/Citrix development Here
What are your thoughts on this?

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