This is essentially a copy of a post I did on the Intel Server Community page last week. Since it didn't feed the virtualization industry blog pages, I decided to re-post it here as well....

This is a big week for Intel, as they formally announce the availability of their new high performance Xeon 5500 CPU, codenamed "Nehalem". Citrix has anticipated the potential for enhanced performance when using the Intel Xeon E5500 with XenServer for some time now. We were fortunate to have received one of these gems from Intel in January to do our own comparison tests in our Bedford, MA test lab. Since we had just completed a series of performance validation tests for virtualizing SQL Server 2008 in a XenServer 5 environment (a very successful test series I might add...look for the technical WP on this shortly at: http://citrix.com/English/ps2/products/documents_onecat.asp?contentid=683148&cid=White+Papers), we decided to keep the same test environment and repeat a portion of the SQL test series comparing Xeon E5405 vs. Xeon E5570-based XenServer hosts to see what kind of performance improvement we would get.

Each of the test servers were configured with a single SQL Server 2008 VM with 4 vCPU cores and 7GB RAM. We used DBHammer for SQL to create a 10 million record database and generated transaction processing workloads to simulate an actual SQL Server 2008 client workload. Workloads were created starting with 200 clients. Each client workload test ran for 30 minute periods. Starting after the first 10 minutes of each test, we began taking measurements using Microsoft performance monitor and continued doing so for the remaining 20 minutes of the test. MEasurements of the maximum transactions per second rate were taken every fifteen seconds until the 30 minute test period had elapsed. Increments of 200 clients were added until the maximum average CPU utilization level of 90 percent was reached. At 90 percent average CPU utilization, it was determined that the system was saturated and testing was ended.

Given the difference in the clock speeds of the two systems tested, 2.0 GHz and 2.93 GHz respectively, we fully expected to see some level of improved performance, but what we saw was pretty astounding, even to us. The Xeon E5405 XenServer host topped out at 1,600 clients, generating 13,708 maximum transactions per second. The Xeon E5570 XenServer host, by comparison, was able to sustain a load of 2,400 clients, generating 20,978 maximum transactions per second. That's an improvement of 53%!
The results are pretty clear. Not only is the new Intel Nehalem Xeon 5500 series a powerful addition to the Intel Server Solutions lineup, but it is a clear advantage to customers seeking to virtualize enterprise application platforms like SQL Server 2008 using XenServer.

Details of this comparison test will be posted in a whitepaper to: http://citrix.com/English/ps2/products/documents_onecat.asp?contentid=683148&cid=White+Papers later this week. 

 Keith McLaughlin, Escalation Engineer
 
Keith McLaughlin is a Provisioning Server expert on the Citrix Technical Support Escalation team, joining the team when Citrix acquired Ardence about two years ago. Keith filled us in on the two sessions that he'll present at Citrix TechEdge during Citrix Summit and Synergy 2009: End-to-end virtualization with Citrix Delivery Center, with a focus on Active Directory integration with Provisioning Server, and then his in-depth session will be on Planning and implementing a Provisioning Server high availability (HA) solution.

Q. How has Provisioning Server improved from a support perspective over the past year?
Keith: The biggest improvement this year is the addition of the Streaming Service Logs.  These logs, which came out as part of 5.0 SP1 are extremely helpful in narrowing down the issue.

 Q. What Provisioning Server and Citrix Delivery Center tips will attendees learn at your session this year?
Keith: This year's session is focused on High Availability. In the session we are going to go over troubleshooting procedures and explain in depth what happens when a Target Device fails over and how to track that failover through the logs files. For the Citrix Delivery Center session, I'll focus on Active Directory integration with Provisioning Server Standard Image.

Q: What Provisioning Server Tech Tip can you give people now?

Keith: When planning your Provisioning Server deployment, give the Target Devices unique names in the Provisioning Server Console. Do not use the hostname of the machine that is being imaged as the name of the Target Device. This avoids conflicts when booting the Target Device from the Vdisk.

Q. What new tools or techniques are you using to troubleshoot Provisioning Server?

Keith: A year of working with the 5.0 is probably the biggest factor.  5.0 had many improvements over the previous version and many architecture changes.  Also seeing where customers and end users were running into problems and being able to identify the symptoms because of past experiences greatly cuts down on troubleshooting time.

 Q. What types of cases have you worked on this past year? Why?

Keith: As part of the Provisioning Server Escalation group, I have covered a lot of different issues ranging from Active Directory integration to tracking down possible bottlenecks on customers networks that could be causing timeouts on the provisioning server.

 About Keith McLaughlin

Keith's been with Citrix Technical Support for two years.  He holds certifications in Citrix Certified Administrator, CCA, for Provisioning Server and XenServer. During his free time Keith loves playing the guitar, and his favorite artist is Stevie Ray Vaughan.

Do you have a Provisioning Server troubleshooting area that you would like Keith to focus on during his presentation? Leave a comment.

 Want to learn more about TechEdge 2009, www.citrix.com/techedge. Stay tuned for our weekly close-up interviews on the TechEdge presenters.

Posts in this series:

• Citrix TechEdge - Troubleshooting Tips and Tricks

• Interview 1: Close-up with Jamie Baker

• Interview 2: Close-up with Keith McLaughlin  

Hi.

A long time SNMP Agents were only available for the HP Oem Edition. That has changed now.

XenServer customers can download certified and tested HP Agents for XenServer Retail Versions:

XenServer SNMP Agents for HP 

Danny

Jamie Baker, Sr. Escalation Engineer 

Without a doubt one of Citrix Technical Support's top engineers is Jamie Baker. Jamie works with the Strategic Managed Accounts Resolution team, SMART, which handles 24 hour coverage on critical and high priority issues, and he also is a Subject Matter Expert, SME, in various areas such as Printing, Application Streaming and currently the XenDesktop, SME, for the SMART team. Jamie took a few moments out of his busy day of solving customer issues to answer some questions on the sessions that he'll be presenting at Citrix TechEdge.

The sessions he'll be covering are End-to-end virtualization with Citrix Delivery Center with a focus on XenDesktop, and then presenting an in-depth session on XenDesktop 3 architecture and design. TechEdge is the new name for the Citrix Support and Engineering Institute of Technology, CSEIT. The event is hosted by top Citrix Technical Support engineers at Citrix Summit and Synergy, and is the event for troubleshooting your Citrix Application Delivery environment

 Q. How has XenDesktop improved from a support perspective over the past year?

Jamie: The release of XenDesktop 3.0 has closed a lot of issues, added USB device support which was a big need for a lot of customers and provided pool management failover when using XenServer as the desktop hosting infrastructure. The new failover allows the administrator to configure multiple pool masters for the same XenServer pool in the XenDesktop Management Console and if the original XenServer pool master fails, the Pool Management service will fail over to the secondary pool master. This makes the product much more resilient by eliminating a single point of failure, which is always more supportable

Q. What XenDesktop and Citrix Delivery Center tips will attendees learn at your session this year?  

Jamie: We will provide tips on both how to design your XenDesktop infrastructure to take advantage of the new features in XenDesktop 3.0 and how to implement those new features, including USB device support. We will also provide tips on how to configure XenDesktop to take advantage of the robust hosting infrastructure provided by XenServer.

The Citrix Delivery Center Session will highlight how each of the components of the Citrix Deliver Center can integrate to provide secure and robust access to desktops and applications. We'll focus on each product and the features it brings specifically to complement the entire Citrix Delivery Center.

Q. What new tools or techniques are you using to troubleshoot XenDesktop?

Jamie: Besides from having a year's more experience working with customer issues and the new products, we've developed our internal tools to more quickly identify XenDesktop issues. We've updated the CDFControl utility to allow for remote CDF trace on VDA and DDC machines. This allows us to more easily set up a diagnostic trace and resolve issues more quickly.

This year we've also stood up a public symbol server. This allows us to access more diagnostic data through system dumps and memory dumps without having to bring those dump files in house. In time sensitive situations, this can save us hours of time. It also allows customers and other vendors to diagnose issues from dump files more quickly.

Q. What types of cases have you worked on this past year? Why?

Jamie: For me, being on the critical situation team, I've focused on identifying single points of failure and issues that have the potential for wide impact. The pool management service's ability to connect to a hosting infrastructure and to recover quickly in case of an issue with the infrastructure is the biggest issue we tackled this year. As mentioned above, we were able to build in failover when using XenServer infrastructure. The addition of HDX technology has improved multi-monitor display handling as well as USB device remoting and multi-media display.
 

About Jamie Baker

Jamie's been with Citrix Systems for six years, and all of those with Citrix Technical Support. He started out as a first level frontline support engineer, supporting MetaFrameXP. After two years on the phones, he moved to the Escalation team, and a year later moved to the SMART team. Jamie is currently a Sr. Escalation Engineer, and holds certifications as a CCA in XenDesktop and XenApp, as well as a Windows MCSE.

When Jamie isn't working, he loves to spend time with his wife and three year old twin daughters, exploring all the playgrounds that North Georgia has to offer. On Fall Sundays, you'll find him watching the Philadelphia Eagles and trying desperately to control his emotions so he doesn't scare the dog.

Do you have a XenDesktop troubleshooting area that you would like Jamie to focus on during his presentation? Leave a comment.

TechEdge 2009 sessions:

• End-to-end virtualization with Citrix Delivery Center
• XenDesktop 3 architecture and design
• Planning and implementing a Provisioning Server high availability (HA) solution
• Integrating and troubleshooting Citrix Access Gateway
• Enterprise Edition Advanced troubleshooting of Citrix NetScaler
• XenServer disaster recovery and automation
• Troubleshooting tools and methodology for Citrix XenApp 5 environments

Want to learn more about TechEdge 2009, www.citrix.com/techedge. Stay tuned for our weekly close-up interviews on the TechEdge presenters.

Posts in this series:

• Citrix TechEdge - Troubleshooting Tips and Tricks

• Interview 1: Close-up with Jamie Baker
  

Things are changing fast in the world of Cloud Computing, however one question remains the same. Will it save me money and how much? To follow up on a previous post on Cloud Economics 101 Part 1, I looked at a fairly simple example of 5 Servers for a dev/test environment and identified the incremental costs of buying 5 servers and running them on premise or a Colo and then compared that to Amazon EC2. The analysis did not include many variables such as real estate costs and labor savings which may or may not apply to the particular situation. The results indicated that a Premise based deployment could provide the lowest "incremental" cost when compared to EC2 if the servers were running continuously. On the other hand EC2 provided significant savings for short term workloads with no upfront costs.

What has changed recently at Amazon is a new pricing model that provides the option for "Reserved Instances" http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/#pricing which includes an upfront fee ( 1 year or 3 year term ) and a reduced per hour charge. The analysis below reflects the new pricing model applied to the same 5 server scenario as above. As indicated the new model results in a significant savings compared to EC2 standard pricing; 31% for the 1 year term and 48% for the 3 year term assuming the servers are running 24/7. However, when compared to the 40 hour per week scenario the cost at $16,146 ( or $10,229 3 year ) is higher than the EC2 Standard price of $8,320 or the Premise cost of $7,800.

So will the Cloud save money? the answer remains the same ... it depends. The new " Reserved Instance" pricing model provides substantial savings over standard pricing when used continuously but the standard pricing still is more effective for short time periods such as a 40 hour week load. As noted in the earlier posts there are many other variable cost savings by putting workloads in the cloud such as real estate costs, facility upgrades plus the intangible but real benefit of reduced time to develop/test/deploy.

The "Reserved Instance" pricing will also impact the variable workload analyzed in Cloud Economics Part 2 - Premise Plus Cloud scenario, this should provide more content for an upcoming post.    

Cloud Economics 101 Part 1 - Premise vs Cloud vs Colo
Cloud Economics 101 Part 2 - Premise Plus Cloud
Cloud Economics 101 Part 4 - Amazon EC2 vs Terremark vCloud

Satori was the original project name for the first XenSource / Microsoft project under which we delivered  components to Microsoft (for free download for use with Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V)to enable Xen-ready Linux guest OSes to run with optimal performance on the Hyper-V hypervisor.  This involved developing an adapter that ensured that what we call paravirtualized (and Microsoft calls enlightened) Xen VMs could interface directly to the hypercall API of the Hyper-V hypervisor and run with optimal performance, while respecting the need for a clear line of separation between GPL and proprietary code bases.   

In addition to the Satori hypercall adapter Satori delivered  enlightened disk (StorVSC) and network (NetVSC) drivers for Xen-enabled Linux guests on Hyper-V, that interface directly to the I/O Virtualization Stack in the Parent Partition of the hypervisor via the VMBus ABI.  This optimizes virtualized I/O for high performance and removes the need for emulation of legacy hardware.  Hyper-V VMs are completely compatible with the now free XenServer virtual infrastructure platform as a result of our close attention to driver and virtual hardware compatibility with Microsoft.

We are now adding an enlightened mouse driver (InputVSC) to offer major usability enhancements for Linux guests on Hyper-V.   The reason for the delay in releasing this driver is that it requires interaction with part of the USB framework in Linux, for which no GPL exports are available. To workaround this limitation the InputVSC driver code is based on a back-port of the HID driver used in upstream versions of Linux which does have GPL exports.  Code linked with the back-ported HID driver also needs to be released as GPL v2, which is what xen.org has now done. You can download the InputVSC driver for Linux guests for Hyper-V here.   (the enlightened mouse comes from [here|http://www.childrensillustrators.com/illustratorDetails.cgi/32627])

Citrix Project Satori is the result of a collaborative agreement between XenSource and Microsoft, and was carried forward after XenSource was acquired by Citrix Systems. The base Satori components are released by Microsoft as the Linux Integration Components for Hyper-V, and provide support for paravirtualized XenLinux guests running on Hyper-V. The Linux Integration Components can be downloaded here.
The complete source code and license information (GPL version 2) on this project is now availalbe at http://www.xen.org/download/satori.html.

So my OpenFiler VM crashed (OK, you got me: I was trying to 'tweak' it). That wasn't so bad but I had 25GB worth of ISOs being shared out to my other VMs. This was bad news, but I managed to save my day. Luckily I always make it a point to add discrete virtual disks (VDIs) in XenCenter when I want to add another share or iSCSI disk in OpenFiler. So maybe I was in luck.

My first step was not so successful: I had decided to bring up a quick-and-dirty Debian VM, detach the VDI from the now defunct OpenFiler VM, and attach it to the Debian VM. After doing the usual:

fdisk -l

...to see what the device name was of the VDI (which the XenCenter kindly tells you as well), I tried to mount it. Now, you may or may not know that the mount command is just a triage to the mount command that's specific to the type of filesystem you're trying to mount. Often the mount command can tell what kind of filesystem is on the device, and call the correct mount for you. You can also give the mount command a clue by saying something like:

mount /dev/sdc1 /mnt -t xfs

...which in this case tells mount that the device contains an "xfs" filesystem. Use the manual pages like this:

man mount

...for a full description of this (or any other) command.

After the mount command kept on burping that it didn't know the filesystem type, I tried to coerce it since I knew I had chosen to format the disk using the xfs filesystem type in OpenFiler. Nothing would work; it was almost like the message from mount was telling me to give up, since this filesystem is toast. I found myself telling the Debian VM that it "just didn't understand what I wanted", and that if it didn't do what I wanted, I would give It the virtual equivalent of the "elevator shaft" treatment. This is what we used to do back in the day to real hardware that wouldn't comply - next-to-top-floor drop down the elevator shaft.

My first attempt behind me, I had the brilliant idea of reinstalling a fresh copy of OpenFiler, because surely it would know what I wanted, after all this VDI was created by OpenFiler. Lucky for me that these things take minutes using XenServer: You can do things that your boss would have given you 2-weeks of sick leave, for even suggesting just a few short years ago - all from the comfort of your ergonomically correct office chair.

So there I was issuing the mount command again, and again the mount command just didn't get it (it turns out I didn't get it, but you know how that goes). Time for a cuppa tea. By-the-way, I've always been 'green' when drinking my black tea - always from a mug, never from Styro.

During my tea break, I started thinking it through (which is like reading the manual for your barn door, after your Harley has been nicked): OpenFiler actually leverages the Logical Volume manager to do its stuff. The LVM has a Volume Group, which is a collection of physical volumes, which in the case of a VM is the VDI (or VDIs) that you assign to that VM. On a real machine it would be a collection of physical disk drives. You can have lots of physical disks of differing sizes and type collected in a Volume Group, and then meter out Logical Volumes from that group. A logical volume, looks and acts like a physical volume, except the LVM may be spreading your one LV amongst several PVs, depending on the attributes of your VG. A good example is setting up RAID; at the LV level, you're not really interested how the LVM is dealing with it, but you're glad it can. When I say that an LV 'looks' like a PV, I mean it's just another block device, like:

/dev/XSLocalEXT-0cbc8c20-3268-5876-db13-128ad9d0b9c1/0cbc8c20-3268-5876-db13-128ad9d0b9c1

You can get a list of LVs on your system by using:

lvdisplay

Similarly, you can get a list of VGs on your system by using:

vgdisplay

One 'ah, ah!' moment later, I was able to explain it to myself. The xfs format wasn't on the physical drive I was trying to mount, it was on the Logical Volume. The PV has the LVM format imposed on it, and the LV has the xfs filesystem format imposed on it. So maybe if I mounted the LV that would give me what I wanted: access to that 25GB-worth of ISOs. Bingo! (That's reminds me, I'll be doing some training at Synergy this May in Vegas). Lucky for me that I had kept this particular VDI in a VG of its own, and by itself. I suspect, though, that had I had multiple VDIs in the VG, I could have still gotten it to work since LVM marks the disks appropriately to make them system independent.

The rest of the story is simple, but worth mentioning since (again), doing this back in the day, would have taken you having to pawn your wedding ring, and as much time as you would have been in the dog-house for doing so. I dropped a brand new 30GB VDI into the OpenFiler VM, because even though the old VDI was recognized, I couldn't get OpenFiler to re-share it. After a few clicks in the OpenFiler admin tool, I had shared the new disk. Using the mount command by itself, i.e.:

mount

...I was able to discover where OpenFiler had mounted my new disk, and copy everything from the old disk to the new from the CLI. I was then able to detach the old disk, and delete it.

Basically, this story is true, but I may have made the stuff up about the Harley being stolen, the tea-bag and the ergo-chair. I'll leave that for you to figure out! Let me know.

Another component of Citrix Essentials for Hyper-V is Provisioning Services. Learn more in this video from the Product Manager for Provisioning, Pete Downing.

Here is a brief description of Provisioning Services inside Essentials for Hyper-V -

Learn more here.

In my post last post before VMWorld Europe, I embedded a new demo video on the StorageLink functionality with the recently announced Citrix Essentials for Hyper-V. Another component of Citrix Essentials for Hyper-V is Lab Management. In the next video, Peter Blum takes about five minutes to review the capabilities of this new feature inside Essentials.

Here are the requirements for Lab Manager -

Lab Manager host (Platinum Edition only):

• CPU: Intel or AMD x86 or x64 compatible; 1 GHz minimum; 2 GHz preferred
• RAM: (will vary by number of managed physical hosts, number of users and number of deployed VMs)
• Disk space: 10 GB minimum for small labs and 30 GB for large labs (disk usage will vary by number of templates, ISOs, scripts and software packages)
• OS: Windows Server 2003
• Database: PostgresSQL 8.3 for data store installed locally on LabManager host
  
  Lab Manager agent for Hyper-V (Platinum Edition only):

• One agent required per Hyper-V Host
• Installed on the Hyper-V host
• RAM: 512 MB minimum
• Disk space: 1 GB minimum
• OS: Windows Server 2003

Learn more here.

Network Virtualization is secure and routable

You can create a complete end-to-end network from your corporate datacenter, running on XenServer, through the VPN to the network in the cloud. All servers and hosts communicate securely over SSL VPN.

The best part about this solution is that when one vendor said that virtualization breaks the network, it really doesn't.

I just did the proof of concept between a Citrix datacenter and Amazon cloud services. Between the Citrix datacenter and the Amazon cloud, I am running a site-to-site SSL VPN. The SSL VPN running at the Citrix datacenter is running inside of XenServer on a Dell 2950 III server, optimized for virtualization.

The SSL VPN Gateway running in the Cloud is also running on Xen as a virtual appliance, or virtual gateway if you will. The Windows Server(s) in the cloud are connected to the SSL VPN using OpenVPN.

The reason for using OpenVPN on the Windows Server(s) to connect to the SSL VPN Gateway in the Cloud is twofold:

1. Amazon doesn't allow the reconfiguration of default gateways on their Amazon Machine Images (AMIs). By configuring the OpenVPN client connection, you can send all traffic from the Windows Server (S3) through the SSL VPN gateway (V2), through the VPN (vtun0) Tunnel, through the SSL VPN gateway (V1) to the private network in the Citrix datacenter AND vice versa.
2. Provides an extra layer of security for traffic traversing the intra-cloud network.

Its powerful AppExpert!

The simple solution is to leverage XenApp Feature Pack with XenServer.

Then give our friends at Marathon a call and say "I want High Availability for XenApp".....and soon complete level 3 Fault Tolerance...all provided on XenServer virtualization.

For reference, I worked with a talented coleague of mine, Barry Flanagan to produce a series of videos back in late 2007 for posting in early 2008, with Presentation Server on physical servers protected by Marathon.

Barrys Blog and Gabes Videos

Fast forward a year + and check out this video of what you could achieve with the only solution for virtual techologies that provides lock-step protection of users and their apps.

Be sure to attend the Citrix and Marathon webinar March 18th!

Marathon and Citrix XenApp Webinar

If your thinking about attending Synergy 2009 you may want to check out some of the "underground" videos taken at Synergy 2008 on a new Synergy Underground Channel on YouTube at: 

http://www.youtube.com/synergyunderground

Citrix Synergy 2009

Where Virtualization, Networking and Application Delivery Meet

MGM Grand Hotel, Las Vegas (May 4-7, 2009)

For more information: www.citrixsynergy.com

Debian Lenny aka 5.0 was released last month and you can try it out on XenServer 5 with only a few basic steps. The process is to create a Debian Etch VM which is included with XenServer 5 and upgrade it to Lenny.

I'll give my usual disclaimer and say this is totally unsupported and experimental. You could blow-up your server, your server room, your building, your car, you know the drill. If you call support they would likely laugh and hang up the phone.

That said here is the process to create a Debian Lenny VM on XenServer 5. Debian experts will likely have done this many times and marvel at the power of the Debian packging system.

1. Create a Debian Etch VM in XenServer 5 via the New VM Wizard
2. Boot up the Etch VM and configure the passwords and hostname as prompted
3. Login and edit the /etc/apt/sources.list file and change all the etch references in the file to lenny
4. Type apt-get update at the command prompt, this should only take a few minutes to run
5. After the update has finished running then type apt-get dist-upgrade at the command prompt
   1.  Follow any onscreen instructions that pop-up going with the defaults
   2. This process will take a little while depending on your download speed
6. Reboot your system

At this point you will be up and running on Debian Lenny aka Debian 5.0.0.

Last week was a good one for XenServer.  Within just a few days of each other:

• Virtualization Review published benchmark performance test results that showed XenServer to be "the porsche of hypervisors" while acknowledging the excellent runner-up performance of Hyper-V (no surprise there - same architecture, smart chaps, large team) and the rather pokey performance of ESX
• An announcement that SAP has selected XenServer for virtualization of its XenApp farms, in a deployment over 500 servers
• An announcement thatTesco PLC is using XenServer to virtualize its mission critical point of sales transaction software in a deployment of over 500 HP servers.

(Oh, and XenServer Virtual Infrastructure, including all management is 100% free. Get it here)

Combined with the detailed and thorough independent benchmarks of Project Virtual Reality Check, these recent market validations place XenServer at the very forefront of virtualization, and are a tremendous validation of the hard work of the XenServer crew, and the incredible commitment by the powerful Xen community, which develops the engine of this Porsche. 

The Tesco announcement is personally important to me:  Some 40% of food in the UK is purchased at Tesco, and all those point of sale transactions cross XenServer in real time. So when my mum swipes her card at the check-out, XenServer needs to do its thing!  Personal too, in that this deployment, targeted at 1,500 servers, plays a key role in enabling Tesco to reach its commitments for a reduced carbon footprint.  Sure, XenServer does that every day, in countless enterprises and clouds, but this one is a little more personal.

The stand taken by Keith Ward and team at Virtualization Review is also personal.  Though Keith has been quick to point out that his team did not violate the VMware EULA in its performance benchmarking of XenServer, Hyper-V and ESX, FUD from the VMware side appears to allude to the fact that this may be so.  Hats off to this courageous team which attempted to provide a thoroughly unbiased comparison of the performance of the three hypervisors, and continually consulted VMware for guidance to ensure that they were using valid use cases:"The Porsche of hypervisors? XenServer. Raise your hand if you saw that coming. It outperformed Hyper-V and ESX in most categories. The pokiest? ESX. Again, not at all what I expected. In fact, even in the few tests ESX came out on top, it barely edged out the competition. Microsoft did well across the board, and is definitely a fine product."

Of course, I immediately wondered what my friends at VMware would do to spoil the party.   Remember, this is the organization that challenged IDC and Yankee group on their empirical research that showed VMware was vulnerable to Microsoft Hyper-V and Xen, and losing share to both.   

The VMware benchmarking team are smart folks.  They appear eminently reasonable:"Benchmarking is a difficult process fraught with error and complexity at every turn. It's important for those attempting to analyze performance of systems to understand what they're doing to avoid drawing the wrong conclusions or allowing their readers to do so. For those that would like help from VMware, we invite you to obtain engineering assistance from benchmark@vmware.com. And everyone can benefit from the recommendations in the Performance Best Practices and Benchmarking Guidelines paper.  Certainly the writers at Virtualization Review can."

However Eric Horschmann slaps Virtualization Review with the conclusion that "We're Not Against Benchmarking - We're Only Against Bad Benchmarking" implying that VMware had no input into or approval over the results, and moreover asserting that benchmarking is such a deep science that it clearly is only accessible to a small VMware clique whose methodology is not to be shared with mere mortals.

In Horschmann's rather lengthy but shallow critique of the work done by the Virtualization Review team, he only mildly alludes to the fact that VMware engineers were in full approval of the methodology and tests used.  Keith Ward confirms that"We talked extensively with VMware during the process, and an engineer in the benchmarking department approved our methodology before we went to press."
Moreover"To ensure the validity of our test results and testing environment, we enlisted the help of Stuart Yarost to formulate and validate the test plan. Yarost is an ASQ Certified Software Quality Engineer and Certified Quality Engineer with more than 22 years' experience in the software and quality fields. Yarost currently holds the position of Vice Chair of Programs for the ASQ Software Division. A special thanks to Yarost for his help."
Now, given that XenServer is doing so well, I'm inclined to be really positive to the folks in the corner with the black eye.  So let's assume Eric Horschmann and the lads at the VMware Ministry of Truth are right.  That means

1. Keith Ward, Rick Vanover, Stuart Yarost and team (including engineer from VMware who approved of the methodology), you're all idiots.
2. Benchmarking hypervisors requires deep science, and ESX as the industry leader is profoundly deep, requiring such profoundly, super deep expertise to tune and benchmark that it is just not possible for ordinary humans (hence the VMware EULA that forbids publications of comparative benchmarks - and Horschmann clearly states that this is why the EULA is so restrictive). Virtualization Review was foolish to think that even with a staff of trained VMware engineers, an independent consultant, and advice and approval from VMware, that it would be possible to reproduce the fine art that is uniquely owned by the VMware benchmarking team. (I've commented on this previously in "VMware Wins! (Bad Science Required)". What they didn't know of course is that results are meaningless - this is just spin.
3. Since rational, well disposed folks trying to make their ESX installation work as well as possible failed utterly in the attempt (that is, XenServer and Hyper-V clobbered ESX on performance), we conclude that probably no normal user could get ESX to perform either.  It really is a super complex (expensive) hypervisor, and it's so difficult to get to work that if you're merely a well intended VMware user, you have no hope.
4. Therefore, probably most VMware installations run extremely badly, since they are run by mere mortals who could never understand how deep and fickle the beast called ESX is.  And even if you've spoken to a VMware engineer about how to get it right, you're probably still doing it wrong.

Wake up VMware.  Your response rings hollow, and we are afforded yet another laugh at your expense.

What's Citrix TechEdge?

TechEdge, the new name for Citrix Support and Engineering Institute of Technology (CSEIT), started nine years ago as a small in-depth troubleshooting training event hosted by Citrix Technical Support for support agreement customers.  Over the years, this event has grown from 50 customers to over 300 customers and now  provides training to our support agreement customers prior to Citrix Synergy and to our partners as a part of Citrix Summit.  This has become the event for troubleshooting the Citrix Application Delivery environment.

 Meet the support experts who can answer all of your technical questions:

Citrix Technical Support's top Escalation team engineers are hosting the TechEdge 2009 sessions. Here are some interesting facts about the team.

• On average these guys work and close 65 to 100 cases each per year.

• There are a total of 65 engineers on the team, so that's over 5,000 cases total per year.

• The average engineer has ten to fifteen years experience in the IT industry; the most common certifications are CCA and MCSE, ANG NetScaler and AGEE.
  

What they'll cover:

• End-to-end virtualization with Citrix Delivery Center
• XenDesktop 3 architecture and design
• Planning and implementing a Provisioning Server high availability (HA) solution
• Integrating and troubleshooting Citrix Access Gateway, Enterprise Edition
• Advanced troubleshooting of Citrix NetScaler
• XenServer disaster recovery and automation
• Troubleshooting tools and methodology for Citrix XenApp 5 environments  
  
  

Who can attend?
All partners who have registered for Summit, Citrix Technology Professionals (CTP) and customers with active support or maintenance agreements as of the first day of the event (May 3, 2009).
 

When and where?

The event will be at the MGM Grand Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, Nevada on Monday, May 4th from 8:00am to 5:30pm. 

Here's what a few past attendees had to say:

"This was probably the most valuable day of iForum [Synergy]. It was extremely technical and really provided a lot of insight into managing a Citrix environment."

"In-depth seminars, get to meet face to face with the people that support us, a wonderful venue."

Check out past event presentations and videos:

TechEdge 2008
October 29, 2008
Orlando, FL
Presentations and Session Videos

CSEIT 2008
May 19, 2008
Houston, TX
Presentations and Session Videos

CSEIT 2007
October 21, 2007
Las Vegas, NV
Presentations and Session Videos

Click here to register for TechEdge 2009

Learn More:

Want to learn more about TechEdge 2009, www.citrix.com/techedge. Stay tuned for our weekly close-up interview blog posts of the TechEdge presenters. Please let us know your thoughts, questions and feedback.

This post is part of a series on the TechEdge event:

• Check out my interview this week with Jamie Baker to discuss his sessions on End-to-end virtualization with Citrix Delivery Center and XenDesktop 3 architecture and design.

The question on many people's minds has been answered. Yes, you can virtualize Exchange Server 2007 on XenServer. To go one step further, the results of our recent performance and scalability tests for Exchange Server 2007 with Citrix XenServer demonstrate that not only can you do it, but there are some very compelling reasons why you probably should. Here's why...

Exchange adminstrators have always had to work within a fairly narrow range of limitations from Microsoft when it comes to sizing single or multi-role Exchange servers. While Microsoft's intentions for these sizing limits is likely to obtain maximize performance while minimizing the points of failure that might affect users, the practical reality of those sizing guidelines is a limited ability to take advantage of the ever-increasing capacity and power of today's server hardware. That means that when the enterprise needs to add users, it usually means adding more servers; and we all know how challenging that can be these days. By virtualizing Exchange Server 2007 with Citrix XenServer, administrators now have the ability to operate their Exchange Server farm within Microsoft's sizing guidelines while using XenServer VMs as building blocks to achieve the scalability that isn't possible in a physical Exchange Server environment. 

In our technical whitepaper entitiled "Virtualizating Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 with Citrix XenServer", we demonstrated that Exchange Server virtualizes very well on XenServer. Not only did virtual Exchange Servers running on XenServer exceed Microsoft performance recommendations in every performance category, but in many cases virtual Exchange servers exceeded the perfomance of their native server counterparts! Here's an example of what I mean. This was taken from the latest tests we just completed using Exchange Server 2007 VMs with Windows Server 2008 on XenServer 5.0:

Click on the above image to see the full size chart
 
In terms of SendMail latency, Microsoft's recommendations are for less than 500Ms average latency and less than 1,000Ms in the 95th percentile. In the above results chart, we see that the SendMail latency performance measurements of the four virtual Exchange servers we tested was less than that of the native Exchange servers they were compared to. Results were consistent for both the 2,000 and 4,000 heavy user mailbox tests. Scalability tests measuring SendMail latency for up to 8,000 heavy user mailboxes was just as impressive, especially considering the 8,000 heavy user mailbox workload on a single XenServer host.

Click on the above image to see the full size chart

Results were equally as impressive in each of the other performance measurements categories we tested for, including Disk IOPS latency, CPU utilization and RPC latency.

So, now we know that the overhead for virtualizing Exchange Server 2007 on XenServer is very low and that when doing so Exchange Server 2007 performance is remarkably solid. One challenge solved. But what about reliability and availability? After all, Microsoft Exchange Server is nearly always viewed as one of the more mission-critical applications in the data center. XenServer addresses availability and reliability using our live VM migration feature, XenMotion (free with XenServer Enterprise Edition), together with the High Availability features that come with Citrix Essentials for XenServer. Our tests showed that active Exchange Server VMs were easily migrated between XenServer hosts with no loss in performance whatsoever. Tests also showed that after "protecting" VMs using XenServer's HA feature, we successfully re-started failed Exchange Server VMs on another XenServer host in less than three minutes. As soon as each re-started VM was recognized by Exchange, it immediately resumed taking on a workload. Other HA options include protecting storage and network connections using everRun VM from our alliance partner, Marathon Technologies. Another challenge solved.

This means we now have demonstrated perfomance when virtualizing Exchange Server 2007 with Citrix XenServer, and that performance comes with, and not at the expense of reliability, high availability and scalability. No trade-offs. No sacrificing one to get another.

It makes more sense than ever before for IT managers to take a serious look at the advantages of virtualizing Microsoft Exchange Server with Citrix XenServer. Check out the technical whitepaper and see for yourself. It contains extensive test configuration scenarios and results data along with recommendations and best practices so that anyone can easily configure and run their own pre-production pilot (highly recommended). And now that the Enterprise Edition of XenServer is available free of charge at www.citrix.com, the cost to see the benefits of virtualizing your Exchange Server farm with XenServer yourself has never been lower. Don't just take our word for it. It's time to see for yourself.

Cost Savings, Green Benefits and Improved Server Management.

Citrix Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ: CTXS), the global leader in application delivery, recently announced that leading enterprise resource planning (ERP) manufacturer SAP AG will be virtualizing an estimated 500 servers with Citrix® XenServer™ by the middle of 2009. SAP has also deployed Citrix® XenApp™ application virtualization technology to deliver applications to both SAP employees and external partners. In addition, SAP expects to receive the benefits that a combined XenServer and XenApp solution provides - such as streaming standardized workload images and superior management functionality - which the company anticipates will generate a 35 percent savings in terminal server costs.

SAP was looking to consolidate its server infrastructure and also wanted to create a much more flexible and dynamic computing architecture. Following an extensive test of XenServer, the company decided to move forward with a multi-stage roll-out of the server virtualization solution onto 500 servers, initially in the company's Saint Leon Rot, Germany office. In the next phase of the project, the servers that power the worldwide training centers will be virtualized, followed by the project management division with several hundred development, test, and support environments. After the server virtualization project in Germany is complete, the roll-out will continue at the end of 2009 to SAP's offices in Asia and the United States.

SAP has also deployed Citrix XenApp application virtualization technology to deliver more than 40 applications, including Microsoft Office and the SAP Business Suite software, to its entire user base. In total, there are more than 50,000 end users who access the XenApp infrastructure to work on tasks such as product development and support.

XenServer is FREE !

Read more news like this.

Its powerful AppExpert!

Installing XenServer on a USB Drive.

I wanted to be able to use my Lenovo T61 to run XenServer but I did not want to give up on my Vista OS since XenServer won't allow you to partition your hard drive.
So I figured I could use my USB drive to boot from, and then have XenServer installed on it. The good news is that it works, but there are some caveats.
If you want to run XenServer from a laptop while preserving your original O.S., this is what you need to do:
1) Find out if your Laptop (or PC) supports Booting from a USB device. Change the order to have your ATAPI CD first, your USB HDD second and your ATA/SATA HDD third
2) Find out if your Laptop (or PC) supports Virtualization Technology (e.g.: on T61 press F1 for BIOS utility, Config, CPU, and hit Enter under Virtualization Technology to enable it.
3) Because USB support is not preloaded by the mkinitrd image, some steps are required prior to installing XenServer. To get XenServer to boot from a USB drive, follow the steps described on this article written by Chris Wolf, Virtualization Review magazine's "Virtual Advisor". I disabled my Internal hard drive prior to doing these steps to ensure that I did not accidentally wiped off its contents

Installing and Running XenServer 4.1 on an External USB Drive
May 9, 2008 - by Chris Wolf
Source: http://virtualizationreview.com/columns/article.aspx?editorialsid=2618

"I often get asked about running hypervisors from portable storage devices and in this column, I'd like to talk about a method for installing and running XenServer 4.1 from a portable USB hard drive. This is useful if you are testing multiple hypervisor solutions and do not want to multi-boot the hypervisors on local server storage. Since XenServer Express Edition is free, you can evaluate the product for as long as you like and eventually upgrade the license if you want to unlock the product's enterprise-class features.
Of course, the physical host server is going to need to meet XenServer 4.1's system requirements. Servers with support for hardware-assisted virtualization (one of XenServer's hardware requirements) should also support USB device boot. Many USB flash drives offer enough storage space for a XenServer installation (16GB is required per the official requirements). Note that the actual software installation will only consume about 2GB. However, keep in mind that USB flash drives perform considerably slower than traditional hard disks. So if performance is a consideration, I highly recommend using a 2.5" external USB drive. In preparation for this article, I used a Seagate external USB 2.0 40 GB hard disk.
While not required, I disabled all internal hard disks in the test server's BIOS so that the XenServer installation would only see the external USB drive. This prevents accidentally installing XenServer on an internal server hard disk.
At this point, you should be ready to install XenServer 4.1. You can do so by following the installations steps documented in the XenServer 4.1 Installation Guide. Note that you will only be prompted to select the installation drive if the system can see multiple attached drives. If you take the cautionary step to disable all locally attached physical drives, you will not see this option. If multiple drives are present, you will also be prompted to select the drive for virtual storage, which again should be the external USB drive.
Once the XenServer installation completes, you will be prompted to hit Enter to reboot the server. This is where the trouble will begin. USB support is not preloaded by the mkinitrd image, by default, which will eventually cause a kernel panic and automatic reboot when XenServer starts. Note that if you are not seeing XenServer boot, that's probably because the USB drive was listed farther down in the boot order than another system drive. You can select to boot from the USB drive by clicking the hotkey to access the boot options menu and selecting to boot from the USB drive at that point. For example, the boot options menu on many Dell servers is accessed by hitting the F11 key when the server boots.
To get XenServer to successfully boot on an external USB drive, follow these steps:
1. When the server boots, hit the hotkey for the boot options menu.
2. Ensure that the XenServer installation CD is in the CD-ROM drive.
3. In the boot options menu, select the option to boot from the CD-ROM.
4. As soon as the Welcome to XenServer setup screen loads, immediately press the F2 key to view the advanced setup options.
5. Now type shell and hit Enter.
6. When the system finishes booting, run the following command to create a temporary folder where you will mount the external USB drive:

mkdir /tmp/sda
7. You will now mount the USB drive to the temporary location. Note that I'm assuming the USB drive is the only drive attached to the system and therefore is mounted as /dev/sda. To mount the first partition of sda to the /tmp/sda folder, run this command:

mount -t ext3 /dev/sda1 /tmp/sda
8. You will now need to copy the sys/block drivers from the setup environment to the USB drive. However, you will first need to change the driver file permissions prior to the copy. To do this, run this command:

chmod -R 664 /sys/block
9. You can now copy the contents of /sys/block to the USB drive. To do this, run this command:

cp -R /sys/block/ /tmp/sda/sys/block/

Note: Disregard the resultant "Input/Output error" message. The file copy will complete successfully.
10. Next you need to change the root location to /tmp/sda. You can do this by running the command:

chroot /tmp/sda
11. Now let's change to the /boot folder on the USB drive. To do this, run the command:

cd /boot
12. Now we will rename the original primary initrd image file because the new image file will have the same name as the original file for ease of configuration. To rename the primary initrd image file, run this command:

mv initrd-2.6.18-53.1.13.el5.xs4.1.0.254.273xen.img initrd-2.6.18-53.1.13.el5.xs4.1.0.254.273xen.img.old
13. Next, we'll create a new initrd image that includes the USB driver. To do this, run this command:

mkinitrd --with-usb initrd-2.6.18-53.1.13.el5.xs4.1.0.254.273xen.img 2.6.18-53.1.13.el5.xs4.1.0.254.273xen
14. At this point, you will now be able to successfully boot XenServer from an external USB drive. To reboot, the server, type exit and hit Enter and then type reboot and press Enter. Remember to select the external USB drive from the boot options menu when the server boots.
When the XenServer system successfully boots, you should see that the post installation script that XenServer attempts to run will fail. The post install script will try and configure the third partition created during the XenServer installation as a data store for VM files, but will fail in the process. Since the script fails to add a local data store, you'll just need to do this manually. Note that this assumes that you have enough additional storage on the external USB drive for VM storage.
If you plan to use local storage for VMs, follow these steps:
1. Login to the XenServer console using the root account and the root account password you specified when you installed XenServer.
2. Run fdisk -l to view the available partitions on the attached USB drive. The command execution and output is shown below:
[root@xensrv1 ~]# fdisk -l

Disk /dev/sda: 40.0 GB, 40007761920 bytes
64 heads, 32 sectors/track, 38154 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 2048 * 512 = 1048576 bytes

   Device Boot  Start   End   Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1    *      1  3907  4000752 83 Linux
/dev/sda2        3908  7814  4000768 83 Linux
/dev/sda3        7815 38154 31068160 83 Linux
3. As you can see, most of the drive's storage blocks are allocated to /dev/sda3. This is the partition you will configure as a local data store for VM files. Next, you need to query the host universal unique identifier (UUID) which is generated when XenServer is installed. To do this, run this command:

cat /etc/xensource-inventory

The command execution and its output is shown here:

[root@xensrv1 /]# cat /etc/xensource-inventory
PRODUCT_BRAND='XenServer'
PRODUCT_NAME='xenenterprise'
PRODUCT_VERSION='4.1.0'
BUILD_NUMBER='7843p'
KERNEL_VERSION='2.6.18-53.1.13.el5.xs4.1.0.254.273xen'
XEN_VERSION='3.1.0'
INSTALLATION_DATE='2008-05-05 17:44:15.745293'
PRIMARY_DISK='/dev/sda'
BACKUP_PARTITION='/dev/sda2'
INSTALLATION_UUID='d3e7e1e6-80f3-4241-a6cf-3bf83971c0e6'
CONTROL_DOMAIN_UUID='3e5b935a-c14e-4059-aae5-45bb87b8b864'
DEFAULT_SR_PHYSDEVS='/dev/sda3'
DOM0_MEM='752'
MANAGEMENT_INTERFACE='xenbr0'
4. Note the INSTALLATION_UUID value listed in the cat command's output. You will need it to create the new local storage repository. You can now add the local storage repository by using the xe sr-create command with the following syntax:

xe sr-create content-type="localSR" host-uuid=<INSTALLATION_UUID> type=ext device-config-device=<disk partition> shared=false name-label "<friendly label>"
On my test system, the following values were used:
INSTALLATION_UUID: d3e7e1e6-80f3-4241-a6cf-3bf83971c0e6
Disk partition: /dev/sda3
Friendly label: "Local USB Storage"
The full command used to configure the local storage repository in my test environment is shown below:
[root@xensrv1 /]# xe sr-create content-type="localSR" host-uuid=d3e7e1e6-80f3-4241-a6cf-3bf83971c0e6 type=ext device-config-device=/dev/sda3 shared=false name-label "Local USB Storage"
The remaining configuration can be performed with the XenCenter management server, which can be installed on any Windows system in your environment. XenCenter is the GUI-based central administration tool for XenServer environments. You can get more information on XenCenter on the Citrix XenServer page.
You should now be able to login to XenCenter and manage the new XenServer with its available local USB storage. At this point, you are ready to install a VM on the local storage. Of course, if you do not have additional room on the local disk, you can configure network storage (i.e. NFS, iSCSI, Fibre Channel) and store VM files on the network storage array.
Now you can create a new VM by clicking the "New VM" object in the XenCenter toolbar and entering the required information in the New VM wizard.
When you're done testing, just shut down any running VMs and shut down the XenServer. If you disabled any local hard disks in the system BIOS, just re-enable them and your test server is returned to its original configuration. "
May 9, 2008 - by Chris Wolf
Source: http://virtualizationreview.com/columns/article.aspx?editorialsid=2618

How can you get an even better return on your XenApp investment? Virtualize it with Citrix XenServerTM. Then fortify it with Marathon everRun®. Fault tolerance for XenServer virtualization is the most cost-effective way to introduce the highest degree of application resiliency for your most mission-critical XenApp deployments.

Attend the upcoming Citrix and Marathon live webinar to learn how virtualizing Citrix XenApp with Citrix XenServer helps you:
• Lower operating expenses by consolidating XenApp servers
• Increase IT flexibility by provisioning XenApp across physical and virtual servers
• Enable zero-downtime maintenance with XenMotion live migration

You'll also discover how fortifying XenApp and XenServer with Marathon Technologies' everRun software give you the confidence to:
• Increase your SLAs for your most critical XenApp deployments
• Protect your Citrix License Server and Data Store from downtime with automated availability

Webinar Details:
Virtualize and Fortify XenApp for Lower Costs & Higher SLAs
Date: March 18, 2009
Time: 8:30 am PST, 11:30 am EST, 4:30 pm GMT
Duration: 60 minutes
Speakers: Sridhar Mullapudi, XenApp Sr. Product Manager, Citrix Systems
Peter Blum, XenServer Principal Technical Marketing Manager, Citrix Systems
Tom Reed, Sr. Solutions Architect, Marathon Technologies

Register now at https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/587322586