The importance of (VMware) Unity

I'll start this post by talking about Citrix instead of VMware...

Part I: About Citrix's Seamless Applications

One of the things that Citrix has offered enterprises for many years already is the integration of a remote desktop with a local desktop by means of seamless windows. In theory, one does not need to know whether an application is running locally or on the server: it looks the same and reacts the same. This is important, especially if you note that Microsoft released a similar feature only with their just-released (2008) version of the Windows server OS.

Part II: About VDI

As an alternative to server based computing, VDI is gaining a lot of momentum lately. For specific users and workload, running a desktop on a virtualization platform can have significant benefits over traditional fat clients or server based computing.

The idea remains the same, however, and remote desktop protocols are required to transfer relevant data over the wire. In practice, what we 'see' on the client side is a published desktop, not an application. This is where the final part comes in:

Part III: Seamless VDI

What if we need just 1 application from our corporate VDI desktop and not the full desktop environment (with icons, Start menu, etc.)? We would need seamless applications for a VDI desktop.

Citrix obviously is able to achieve this with XenDesktop (they did it with Presentation Server), and now VMware is ready too. The technical roadblock that is required to embed applications running in a virtual desktop on the local machine is tackled. The rest is a matter of using an appropriate remote desktop protocol.

I wouldn't be surprised if the next version of VMware VDI/VDM support 'seamless' VDI applications, embedded in the local client desktop.

VMware Workstation 6.5 beta: Unity

Unity is a feature in the new beta of VMware Workstation that allows users to see only specific windows inside the VM, as opposed to a complete virtualized desktop. The feature exists already in VMware Fusion, the Mac counterpart of Workstation. This feature is long awaited and a welcome addition to the functionality of the product.

I was expecting a lot of comments about how this is a major roadblock in the ongoing battle with Citrix and Microsoft. I didn't find any references in the line of what I was thinking, so I will put them here. See my next post for what I think is the importance of Unity.

VMware vscsiStats: The paper

I wrote about vscsiStats before, but it seems I was amongst the first to do so. Luckily, one of the creators has put some more info on his blog. In this post, he refers to his paper about the technology.

VMware & PowerShell: Creating a PSdrive

I'm not the first to report it, but I wanted to share this here. My first reaction was: 'Cool!', and so is my second reaction... It is related to the fact that VMware released the beta of the PowerShell toolkit for VI.

Imagine you can browse your virtual infrastructure using a command line interface like this:

cd vi:
cd Folder01\DataCenter01\host\Web\LiveHost01

The original article can be found here. Have fun!

VMware VscsiStats: Measuring at the virtual SCSI level

I mentioned earlier that one of the presentations at VMworld Europe 2008 was about measuring at the level of the virtual SCSI adapter of a VM. A wealth of information is available when looking at this kind of information.

A tool is available on ESX 3.5 that creates histograms by default (and complete traces if wanted) is VscsiStats. As an option, one provides the vSCSI handle ID and the VM World ID. In order to get some statistics at all, one first needs to start the monitoring:

./vscsiStats -s

After some time, the relevant statistics can be fetched by issuing a command like:

./vscsiStats -i 8260 -w 1438 -p ioLength

This, for instance, yields an histogram of the size of IO pacakges sent to the virtual SCSI adapter (and thus to the storage array). To finalize the monitoring, it has to be stopped as well:

./vscsiStats -x

The result of the command above, in my test, was a graph like the one below:


This is a VM running Windows 2003. Remember this is a histogram, we put the measures points in 'buckets' according to their size and plot their relative frequency.

Remark that there is some IO with sizes 4095 bytes 8191 bytes. This is a sign that the file systems are not aligned properly. The fact that 4K sizes are the majority is nice, because VMFS is optimized for IO of 4KB.