Early this summer I wrote a guide covering Pocket ACE that has finally made its way through the system. Pocket ACE is a new feature included in the release of ACE 2 Enterprise Edition. Pocket ACE allows an ACE Administrator to deploy a Virtual Machine to a portable storage device. A user can take that portable
device and run their virtual machine by attaching the device to any supported x86 based system.

I wanted to take the time to acknowledge a few people that were instrumental in helping along the way. Matt Ginzton, Gilad Ben Zeev, Chris Leroy and Ed Albanese. Matt is a Sr. Staff Engineer at VMware and always helps me with all things ACE and Pocket ACE related. Gilad is a Sr. MTS Engineer at
VMware and played an important role in helping me better understand our instance customization. Ed Albanese is a Product Manager at VMware. Ed plays an important role by directing and reviewing content and ensuring the highest quality. Chris Leroy is a Sr. MTS Engineer at VMware and helped in the areas of disk i/o
performance, sync performance and overall review contributions. This guide is intended for IT Architects and technical influencer's looking to better understand
Pocket ACE. I hope you find it useful. The guide can be found here, VMware Pocket ACE Guide.

On July 31, ESX 3.0.2 was released. VMware ESX 3.0.2 is a maintenance release that represents numerous functionality, performance, and compatibility enhancements to VMware ESX Server. As part of this release. VMware has included Wyse multimedia support. With this addition . Wyse Multimedia support can now be installed into compatible guest operating systems, enabling supported devices to receive encoded video streams via RDP/ICA. The decoding of the video is handled by the client device reducing the resources and overhead needed by the virtual machine running on ESX.

Check back for more detailed examples and information. I have been testing the Wyse multimedia enhancements for some time now and plan on posting
more detailed information. Official information and full details can be found here: VMware ESX 3.0.2 Release Notes For information on installing the Wyse multimedia support see KB1001699

The Terminal Server team has been really busy over at Microsoft and the fruits of their labor can really be seen in the latest release of Longhorn Beta 3. Potential and existing VDI customers are always telling me they really want a simple, clean, low cost and easy to manage way of delivering, existing and candidate applications compatible with Terminal Services to their desktops.

One of the features I have been waiting to see from 2008 server and the Terminal Services team is RemoteApp. RemoteApp is a new feature that introduces usability concepts that have been around for a while, but have really started to take off even more, as the desktop environment continues to change.

So what is the concept? A RemoteApp application accessed from a Terminal Server displays as if it was another application loaded on the user’s local desktop. This concept is nothing new really. On the Terminal Services front there have always been seamless windows from Citrix. Sun’s SGD product had the concept of the integrated client that took the seamless windows concept a step further by integrating the applications into the start menu and desktop.

On the virtualization front, its similar to the Unity feature of the VMware Fusion product for MAC. In order to leverage RemoteApp with VDI desktops, XP desktops will need the RDP 6.0 client installed. Vista desktops will have this by default. Getting started is simple. Any application loaded on the Terminal Server can be selected as one available, as a RemoteApp using the TS RemoteApp Manager. Once you have selected the applications that will be available, you have the option
of creating an .rdp file or .msi package. These contain the connection and configuration information of the application and can be distributed to VDI desktops using file shares or software distribution methods.



As a quick test, I loaded Dreamweaver 8, created an .msi package and published it via Software Distribution using Active Directory. Once installed, an application icon shows up in the Start Menu under Programs/Remote Programs. An icon can also be created on the users desktop if desired.

When a RemoteApp is started, a splash screen will appear indicating that an application is being started. This really is the only indication to the end user that the application is remote. An important note is if more than one RemoteApp is run simultaneously they share the same Terminal Server session.

Once the application is running you can see, not only does it run as a seamless window, but it also carries the theming from 2008.



RemoteApp should be exciting to VDI administrators because of how cleanly it’s implemented. When available, it should prove to provide a simple and clean way of
providing centrally hosted applications to VDI desktop users.

Fu - sion – noun the act or process of fusing; the state of being fused. A long time ago, early in my career I never would have imagined I would need or want to use anything beside Windows. I started out as a Windows Server and Network admin. I really had no aspirations or interest in learning other operating systems. Over time, that changed as our business was looking for alternative and innovative ways to do things.

Ever since, I have helped customers find alternative ways to do things and focused on interoperability, primarily in the desktop space. Before joining VMware, I worked for a company that ran zero Microsoft products, no Windows Operating Systems and no Windows or Windows based applications. The also were thin. They had over 38,000 thin clients deployed globally. Talk about Green. They were Green before Green was in.

I was there for six years and was exposed to every alternative imaginable. They had quite a few Macbook pro’s running around. I myself did not have one, but was always enamored by their design. I never really thought it was practical for me to use one.

I live in a VM, I have VDI in my office and work from a virtual XP desktop day to day. I use offline files and folder redirection for syncing between my VMware assigned laptop and my VDI desktop. When I came to VMware, I got the standard IT assigned laptop that was about good enough to run Word and Outlook. Trying to run all the VM’s I needed for testing and generating content, plus doing my day to day work when traveling just sucked. I could not stand it any more. I really needed something with a a little more RAM and more importantly something faster than a 4200 RPM drive. Between the pain of the IT assigned laptop, falling prey to the continued assault of MAC commercials and the day to day glow of the Fusion team. I started looking into getting a Macbook pro, as I knew Fusion would be the ticket too bring it all together. I waited and waited till the Santa Rosa systems shipped. Then a few weeks back, I officially broke down and got a Macbook Pro. I would not quite say I was a switcher yet. I really was only looking for a well designed machine that had enough power to do what I needed when traveling, doing demos, testing etc.

The plan was to run XP by moving my assigned laptop image over, piece of cake by the way using converter, built inside ACE 2. Then, I figured I would load Vista since I had not seen Aero and needed to do some VDI testing. I had been doing VDI testing and playing with the desktop environment. I like it, I think its sweet. I like the sidebar etc.Before I loaded Vista, I played with OS X a little and got familiar with Expose, the dashboard etc. I have never used a Mac and was getting my bearings. Finally, I loaded Vista in a boot camp partition. Well, Aero 3D flip was a disappointment, too me its just a 3D alt-tab. OS X expose, and the dashboard are much more appealing.

At the end of the day, I needed XP and Vista and OS X was growing on me. In steps Fusion after all, I had been dying to play with our unity feature. I am just
blown away, thus far it exceeds my expectations and really is exactly what I was hoping for, seamlessly integrates the desktop experience with Unity. It’s simple to switch between Unity or a full screen Windows desktop. I can create snapshots of my laptop image. I run can run my boot camp partitions as VM’s. USB device support. If you are considering switching but still need to hang on Fusion is the ticket. It is the ultimate interoperability tool.

Starting with ESX 3.0.1 iSCSI support was introduced. This opens up the opportunity to leveraging lower cost storage options when hosting virtual desktop instances. The topic of, what disk to store desktop images on, is one that gets tossed around like a hot potato. For some customers it seems like a non-issue. Their cost per gig is the same regardless if its enterprise fibre channel storage or low end storage. Some are not interested in introducing a second architecture into their data center as is the case when considering iSCSI.

For others, cost is an issue, and the possibility of leveraging iSCSI is very important to them. In my lab, I currently have an older NAS array
with around ½ terabyte of usable storage.

Several months back I decided it was time to start running some virtual desktops on it and see what performance is like.
I quickly realized, there was a little bug where ESX would not see iSCSI LUNs on my NAS appliance. So, for some time I ran an unsupported patch. Because it was unsupported, I left things as is and did not really watch the performance. This past week I was building some Solaris Express VMs for another test, when all hell broke
loose. Somehow, during the eternal boot of the Solaris VM my ESX system hosed. Because I was having such an issue, I decide it was time to do
some basic patch management. In all fairness, I was way behind on all my ESX patches. I had actually moved more VMs to iSCSI than I had
realized. All of which where very important.

The moral of the story is now, an official iSCSI patch is available for ESX 3.0.1. Patch number ESX-6657345 solves previous issues with iSCSI. After loading the patch on my systems I still was having an issue though. My ESX hosts could not log into the iSCSI target. What was really odd, is my NAS box did not see
the login attempts. It logs denied connection attempts and it saw nothing. The messages log on my ESX hosts were logging connection
refused. I tried removing and adding the iSCSI adapter through the VIC which also did not work. Finally, I got everything working and very
stable using the following steps.

Download patch ESX-6657345 and install it using esxupdate

• From the VIC under configuration, storage adapters disable any iSCSI adapters
• From the ESX console run esxcfg-swiscsi –d
• From the ESX console run esxcfg-swiscsi –k
• From the ESX console delete any iSCSI targets listed in /var/lib/iscsi/bindings
• From the ESX console run esxcfg-swiscsi –e
• From the ESX console run esxcfg-swiscsi –s
• From the VIC under configuration, storage adapters enable any iSCSI adapters
• From the VIC under configuration storage adapters rescan for the targets

After completing this, I was back in business and it has been much more stable. Soon I hope to share how some virtual desktops are working via
iSCSI, stay tuned.

The ACE 2.0 Release Candidate is now available here. A ton of work went in between the last beta and this build. I think all the developers deserve a huge pat on the back for their late nights and hard work hammering though last minute issues. A new cool feature in this build is the integration of ThinPrint. This greatly enhances the printer management and capability of ACE instances. Its easily configured using the policy settings of an ACE Master. Once enabled, it automatically handles the addition of the required virtual serial port as well as installing the .print components for ACE packages. When an ACE instance that has the virtual
printer option enabled is deployed. The .print client manager is automatically installed on the host and accessible from the system tray icon for controlling the behavior. Its only available while the ACE instance is running.

ThinPrint.

In addition, a lot of work was put into how Pocket ACE's handle situations where a user may accidentally or purposely unplug their USB stick. This is a interesting situation. In essence, a USB flash stick becomes your hard drive and unplugging it while the VM is running is the same as unplugging the hard drive of a physical system as it running. Needless to say, some amazing work has gone into Pocket ACE to protect the integrity and recovery of an ACE instance if this occurs. All the skins and GUI's are finalized as well so, for early beta testers there will be some changes in the way things look. A few weeks back I received a Garmin 60CSx. Since I do not really own my own personal computer I keep an ACE instance for my personal stuff that I need to move around. Obviously, being able to load Maps and Waypoints was going to be a must have. Using after loading the Mapsource software from Garmin that includes the USB drivers my ACE instance picked up my GPS unit right away and I am golden.

ThinPrint.

Because I work out of my home when I am not traveling, I have the plus of having my lab equipment local and the negative of having my lab equipment local, in that, the ambient noise and power consumption can get a little out of control. As often as I can, I look for the most powerful, quite systems I can find and consolidate.

When I first started researching desktop virtualization, a few years back. I started out with a Newisys 1U pizza box. It was one of the early units with Dual Core Opteron processors. The bad part is its defining loud. I kept it in a separate room and you can hear it all throughout the house. It has hosted my primary virtual desktop for over two years. Some time back, I decide to use a Sun U40 workstation as my Virtual Desktop testing environment. It has Dual Opteron’s and 10GB RAM with 4 x 250GB SATA drives. The problem I had going into it, was I knew it was not on the ESX HCL and because it’s based on the NVIDIA ck804, getting it too work seemed it would be near impossible. When ESX 3.0.1 released last year, I figured I would make another run at it. I have had it running for some time but, only shared the details with a few people 1:1

This week I decided to consolidate my lab systems further using ESX. Setup some iSCSI shared storage for my ESX hosts, for VMotion and testing virtual desktops running on iSCSI. This guide will outline the steps I took and explain what you need to do too run ESX on a Sun U40 Workstation and a Sun Java Station 2100. None of these systems are on the ESX HCL so this is completely unsupported. However, these are great systems for a lab environment as they are powerful and very quite.

Running ESX on a Sun U40 Workstation

Build of Materials:

• Sun U40 Dual AMD 250 procs
• 10GB RAM
• 4 x 250 SATA drives
• * Sun Dual Gigabit Ethernet Adapter
• * Sun - LSI SAS HBA - SG-XPCIE4SAS-Z :4 x1 4-Port SAS PCI-E HBA internal connection LSI3041E
• * SAS Cable # SAS-847P-F/.5m from www.cs-electronics.com

• Notes a key component

Flash the U40 bios to the latest bios with patches using the downloadable supplemental CD.

Install the NIC, SAS HBA, and cable the Sun U40 disk back plane. Once installed boot the system and go into the bios. Turn off the onboard SATA controllers. Also disable the on board NIC’s the NVIDIA Ethernet will not work with ESX 3.0.1. Save and re-boot

Enter the LSI bios and configure and Array. I used a stripe volume risking failure for more capacity. I tried to create VMFS volumes on the disks individually however that did not work. You have to set the disks into some sort of array.

Boot from the ESX 3.0.1 CD at the GRUB prompt boot with esx noapic and install ESX as desired.

Running ESX on a Sun 2100 Java Station

Build of Materials:

• Newisys 1U pizza box
• 2 x Opteron Procs - forget the model
• 4 GB DDR2 2700 RAM
• 2 x 72GB SCSI drives

• Sun 2100 Java Workstation
• 2 x Opteron 248 Procs
• 2GB DDR2 3200 RAM
• 1 x 72GB SCSI drive

Flash the 2100 with the latest bios from the supplemental CD. I removed the 4GB of RAM from the Newisys system and put it in the 2100. I took the 2GB from the 2100 and moved it to the U40 making it 12GB. The 2100 has SATA ports on the motherboard and can take an additional four SCSI drives. I am sticking with the 72GB SCSI drive for now and have it hooked into the iSCSI shared storage with a 140GB volume. I might play with the SATA later. Boot from the ESX 3.0.1 CD and install as you prefer. On the storage side I have a 1/2 TB NAS appliance. It also is not on the HCL. It also will not work without an unsupported patch. Read hear for more details - http://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?messageID=468517 I also kept failing to realize the volumes needed to have 10% of space left for Metadata. Go figure after a lot of wrestling I got that sorted out. After applying the patch the NAS is working fine.

One note to mention, I run Virtual Center in a VM and it was running on the Newisys system to start with. I moved it with P2V to the U40 and shared storage. Once I had the 2100 running, I simply cold migrated it too the 2100. All the other VM’s that were on the Newisys system I also cold migrated before decommissioning it. Since my processors are not the same stepping level, I can not live VMotion but cold migrate and HA are working. At some point I might even out the processors. I am just glad I have two really, really quiet systems.