Virtualization – Welcome

October 27, 2011

Virtual Desktop Savings is not in the Hardware

Here’s a great article that I recently was referred to:

Citrix: Virtual desktops about to become cheaper than physical ones

In it Citrix is helping to develop yet another lower cost zero-client device. These are literally just a small box about the size of a deck of cards that have ports for a monitor, Ethernet and USB. No moving parts, very slim, reliable and inexpensive. However, I still maintain that the savings of Virtual Desktop (VDI) are not in the hardware.

I think the real savings are in staffing and time. Unfortunately these are much harder to measure but well worth the move in my opinion.

You can already use the hardware you have for VDI so new zero-clients only save you money for new installations or when you are replacing a desktop that is completely dead.

You still need a keyboard, mouse and monitor (video) to hook up to zero-clients and Windows/Office & CAL licenses. If you subtract the cost of the license & kvm these days you can purchase a reliable desktop for probably about $500, and even less if you plan to purchase refurbished and replace them more often.

So, initially you do probably save $300-$400. However, you must move these virtual desktops to a server you never had to have before in the data center. More than likely you are moving them to a high-capacity set of servers, much like the Cisco UCS system we are rolling out out my district. This is very expensive.

It doesn’t stop there. My network manager and I attended a VDI training and learned that you have to make sure your network can also withstand the high traffic all the way from the data center to the user’s “desktop”. It was fine if a user had to wait a few seconds to open a Word doc but waiting a few seconds to click a mouse is unacceptable. Suddenly you may have to upgrade much of your entire network infrastructure. This is much the same issue you encounter when you first migrate to IP phones.

Oh, and what about disaster recovery? With Virtual Desktop you have effectively moved their “desktop” to a data center. Right now at our district if a desktop dies we advise the user to log onto another one nearby and schedule a tech to replace their desktop within 24 hours. With Virtual Desktop, if the connection to the data center goes down there is no nearby desktop to go to. So you have to have a disaster recovery data center (i.e. at our District Office).

This starts sounding really expensive really quick. Fortunately VMware (et al) have great tools that let you leverage the most out of your equipment. A classic disaster recovery site is unused most of the year and only kicks in when you have an emergency. From a business cost perspective it is a loss until those few minutes it is in use. VMware lets you cluster your data centers together effectively using them in tandem for full production load balancing. If one were to go down the other would simply take the entire load. You still have to purchase double the equipment but it is used much more efficiently.

I would imagine that as you scale the costs start becoming more relative. I would think that if you implemented VDI on 90% of the computers at a site it is much more economical than, say, 50%.

Like I said above, I think the real savings are in staff and time. If you can reduce the amount of equipment you have to service while increasing its reliability you don’t have to hire additional techs as you grow your desktop base and your current techs can also deal with higher level issues. Same thing with your network services staff at the data center. In addition, your users as a whole experience far less downtime and a far more reliable working environment.

How do you measure those benefits? Theoretically you can measure the amount of technology growth vs. payroll, but you really can’t measure downtime for the users unless you have a very sophisticated ticket system where you can somehow quantize and compare downtime for users.

January 13, 2010

My Planned VHD Organization

In my last post I talked about wanting to move my entire computing environment over to VHDs. Not just a development environment or test environments but everything. This would include a general work VHD for my wife and I, a video production VHD for all my video stuff, a production development VHD, various server VHDs (mostly for use during development using Virtual PC) and whatever test VHDs I want. I would no longer be booting into a standard operating system installation as we have been since the beginning of personal computers.

Some of you might be thinking,”Why in the world do this?” Well, the last time I had to rebuild a computer it took approximately 2 days. This included installing the O/S, MS Office, developer tools, all my utilities, plug-ins, and all the updates. This is wasted time. Plus, there are often times that I’ve loaded a tool I wanted to check out only to find out it has hosed something of my system. Maybe it’s not something critical but it’s enough to force me to spend a few hours trying to weed out what files or settings got changed. If I could test out tools in a exact and isolated environment just by copying my current VHD how incredible would that be? Plus, assuming I backup my VHDs regularly, let’s say I got a really nasty virus or something that wiped out my system. No big, I just delete that VHD and restore it from the backup. Since we’re talking about an entire VHD it’s just a file copy, not a restore that takes hours. Talk about system restore. :)

So, as usual, before I start researching the details of how things work my wheels started spinning faster than a hamster running from the cat.

I heard about differencing disks and started looking into them. Differencing disks allow you to create a “parent” VHD and a “child” VHD. For instance, a common example is testing how your website looks with different versions of IE, which cannot be installed simultaneously. You create a parent VHD with the operating system and whatever other software you want in the base. You then create several child differencing VHDs that reference the parent. Each child has a different version of IE, so one with IE 6, one with IE 7 and one with IE 8. The child VHDs are called differencing disks because they only contain the information that is “different” than the parent. You can also use a child differencing disk as a parent to another differencing disk, thus chaining them.

This really got my heart going. I instantly thought of a grand hierarchy design like the following:

The base Win7 VHD is the only true parent. All the others are child differencing disks. I could update the base Windows 7 VHD with whatever updates Microsoft would throw out and all the other VHDs would get it. All bottom level child VHDs (video, production, test, etc) would have Office, Windows Live, etc. It seemed like a perfect environment.

Here’s the catch. A parent VHD cannot be changed. If you do so, the child differencing disk will be corrupted (because the differences no longer are current) and you will loose the child VHD and all data in it. Microsoft even recommends that you set parent VHDs to read only to protect against inadvertent changes. Wow, that’s a real bummer. I believe some of the enterprise level virtual vendors let you do scenarios like this across serves, thus making it easy to deploy updates and all, but that doesn’t help me. I want to run native VHDs on my Win7 machine. Oh well. Scratch that.

I think technically this could be set up just for the sheer exercise, though I won’t bother to take the time to try it.

So, now that reality has stepped in how do I plan to set this up? I’ll have a separate standard VHD per environment with no differencing disks. A great tip from Stephen Rose during his Virtualization 101 for Developers presentation was to make copies of your base VHDs, mark them read only and put them in a backup folder. That way if you ever want to create a new one you don’t have to start from scratch.

So, I plan to create my base Win7 image. I’ll put a read only copy of that into a VHD Backup folder. I’ll then install Office, Windows Live, etc onto that image, and put a read only copy of that into the backup folder. At this state this is my general use VHD. I’ll make a copy of that, rename it as my video production VHD and install my video production software on that. I’ll make a read only backup of that as well incase it gets hosed or I want to try out some fancy new video software in the future without harming my current VHD. I’ll make another copy of my general use VHD, rename it to my production development VHD and install all my development software. You get the idea.

When you boot off of a VHD you always have access to the base C drive (which will be a different drive letter). So, as far as document storage there are details there I’ll have to work out. I don’t know how security is worked out but I doubt I’ll be able to access documents in my original My Documents folder. I’ll have to see what the best practice is out there. I’ll probably have a generic data storage folder on the C drive that I’ll keep all of my documents in. I only have one drive in my laptop so I can’t throw everything onto a D drive like my desktop.

Just a few tips to leave you with:

Backups are important! VHDs can get quite large and so are my video files. While most other documents are small and I can use some sort of cloud storage for my documents or versioning system for my code this won’t save me the time and hassle of losing my VHDs. I have yet to see an online backup provider like Mozy or Carbonite that has the upload bandwidth I would require for something like this. I’ll plan on having a couple of eSATA drives that I can back up to on a regular basis.
You can’t boot from a VHD on an external drive. That’s just the way how Microsoft’s I/O mini-port driver works. They probably did this to make sure you can’t set your laptop to boot from something that might not be there. Plus, if your external drive got disconnected for any reason, such as a loss of power or your USB cable falling out, it might instantly corrupt your VHD.
If there is not enough drive space to expand your entire VHD you can’t boot from it. For instance, let’s say you have 250GB available on your hard drive and you create VHDs that can expand to 150GB. If over time you get to a point where you don’t have at least 150GB available to the VHD (including the current physical size of the VHD) you can’t boot into it. Until you can get rid of some data that VHD will be effectively unbootable. This is probably a good reason to keep your existing O/S on your system rather than having a pure VHD system.

I’ll keep updating how it goes.

January 13, 2010

Converting my entire production environment to VHDs

Ever since virtual PC type systems have been out, long has been the dream to run any type of operating system you want, multiple operating systems at the same time, all working independently of each other.

However, only in the last year or two has this really become a reality with the latest hardware supporting virtual environments natively. Now Windows 7 lets you boot off of a VHD as if it was a standard hard drive making full use of your actual hardware devices.

After attending Stephen Rose’s presentation on Virtualization 101 for Developers my eyes were suddenly open to the possibilities of what could be done. I could move my entire development environment to a virtual PC image. This would allow me to copy that image at any time allowing me to test beta products, new upgrades, etc without worrying about damaging my current environment. Many times I have upgraded to new releases (or betas) that caused previous programs to stop running, Dlls required in legacy projects to be removed, etc. In some rare cases (SQL Server 2008 RC2) I had to reload my entire environment because I could never get my machine back to its original state.

Now that Windows 7 allows you to boot from a VHD my wheels are suddenly turning. I could move my entire computer use (not just development) to VHDs. This would allow me to have a base image for general tasks like email, MS Office, etc that my wife and I could use for general day to day tasks. I could have another environment for all my video editing work, which is especially useful since video compression codecs can sometimes cause havoc. I could have a production development environment and as many beta environments as I want. If I want to download a 30 day trial of any product I just create a copy of the appropriate VHD, boot off of that and try out the product. After 30 days if I don’t like it I just delete the testing VHD and it will have never touched my production VHD. If I do like the product I just delete the testing VHD, purchase the full copy and install it to my production VHD. Very nice and clean.

I just purchased a new HP dv7 laptop with the Intel core i7. So, this is the perfect time to get started. While it is possible to wipe the drive clean and use VHDs without any core operating system at all I’ll leave the HP environment intact. That way I can always fall back to that just in case. If for some reason my sound stops working I doubt HP will be willing to care if I can’t reproduce it in the standard OS.

So, I’ll document how I set this up and how it works out in future blog posts. Enjoy the ride!