What are important considerations when managing hundreds of virtual machines?
That’s the question this month for our MacBook Air contest. Best comment on this post wins. You’ll need a Disqus account to participate, and rules can be found here. The question raises all kinds of potential conversations, ranging from the type of security tools to VM change and deployment management. So, even if your own VM installation isn’t quite as big as Savvis’, let’s hear from you on your suggestions!

We’ll review the comments and pick a winner at the middle of the month, because this month we are running two, that’s right, two contests and two chances to win a spanking new laptop. So don’t delay, post away.

Our judge for this contest is Bryan Doerr, who has served as the CTO of Savvis, a division of CenturyLink, since 2003. Savvis, based in Town & Country Mo, is a leading provider
of cloud-computing, hosting and network services. Prior to his work at Savvis, Bryan held several positions in management, software research and software development at Bridge Information Systems, Boeing and the Johns Hopkins APL.

Our winner in last month’s contest was Mark Ekive, who gave some very thoughtful responses to our question on key data protection considerations.

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HP is joining the OpenStack community, Dell is rolling out an OpenStack cloud and OpenStack will soon release a connector for Gluster.

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HP Joins OpenStack

This week HP announced that it is joining and supporting the OpenStack. CEO Leo Apotheker has made HP’s cloud ambitions known, but this is the first indication of what stack it would use. However, although HP’s development teams will contribute to OpenStack, there’s still no announcement that HP will offer any product or service based on it.

Dell Rolling Out OpenStack-based Private Cloud Solution

Dell, one of HP’s biggest competitors and a long-time supporter of OpenStack announced the Dell OpenStack Cloud Solution, an end-to-end solution for building private clouds. It consists of the OpenStack cloud operating system, “cloud-optimized” Dell PowerEdge C servers, the Dell’s Crowbar software and service and support from both Dell and Rackspace Cloud Builders.

Gluster Connector for OpenStack

OpenStack announced that it will release a connector for Gluster that will enable users to deploy and migrate virtual machines within the OpenStack environment more quickly and easily. Here’s the feature list from the announcement:

• Instantly boot VMs using a mountable filesystem interface – no more waiting to fetch the entire VM image before booting
• Live migration of VMs with no disruption to users for business continuity and disaster recovery
• Instantly switch from one VM to another
• Migrate the VMs as well as resume the VMs on a different hypervisor, in case the original hypervisor fails.
• After migration, the destination VM comes up with preserved data
• Movement of VMs between clouds
• Easier management of VMs

This will represent a milestone in the advancement of cloud interoperability and portability.

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Disabling this feature only takes a few minutes, and can be re-enabled at any time. The only downside is that it has to be done on each virtual machine individually, at least that I know of.

Steps

First of all Start Vmware Workstation and select the virtual machine you wish to make the change to.

On the virtual machine Click on Edit Virtual Machine Setting

Select USB Controller > and uncheck Automatically connect new USB devices and click on OK to save the changes.

I would recommend you perform this steps every time a new virtual machine is create it.

But the problem is that VMware’s new prices are much higher for some customers. Ars Technica points to this thread on VMware’s community site. And CRN reports on how Microsoft is already hammering VMware on its new pricing model.

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The idea behind the new licensing was to move away from charging based on the specs of the physical server and charge based on the resources actually used by the virtual machines. One big change is a move towards letting customers pool virtual RAM from multiple physical servers.

The problem is that the new approach is actually much more expensive for many, perhaps most, customers who didn’t have a lot of of excess RAM laying around unused by virtual machines.

Microsoft described VMware’s new pricing as Moore’s Law’s in reverse – in some configurations, the cost per virtual machine actually goes up as you add more machines. One poster on VMware’s community site wrote “You could go out and buy the physical box for way less than that today, from any hardware vendor.”

VMware has always been more expensive than the competition, but that hasn’t stopped it from capturing over 50% of the enterprise server virtualization market. Competing on price isn’t usually a good strategy in the enterprise. But considering that Hyper-V is free Windows 2008 servers, and there’s a free edition of XenServer as well, has VMware finally gone too far?

Comparing vSphere to Hyper-V or Xen isn’t exactly an apples to apples comparison, but Citrix has recently upped its game with its acquisition of Cloud.com, and Hyper-V will be adequate for many enterprise virtualization needs.

Did VMware Screw-Up With Its New Pricing Model?

Image by Adam_T4

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But the problem is that VMware’s new prices are much higher for some customers. Ars Technica points to this thread on VMware’s community site. And CRN reports on how Microsoft is already hammering VMware on its new pricing model.

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The idea behind the new licensing was to move away from charging based on the specs of the physical server and charge based on the resources actually used by the virtual machines. One big change is a move towards letting customers pool virtual RAM from multiple physical servers.

The problem is that the new approach is actually much more expensive for many, perhaps most, customers who didn’t have a lot of of excess RAM laying around unused by virtual machines.

Microsoft described VMware’s new pricing as Moore’s Law’s in reverse – in some configurations, the cost per virtual machine actually goes up as you add more machines. One poster on VMware’s community site wrote “You could go out and buy the physical box for way less than that today, from any hardware vendor.”

VMware has always been more expensive than the competition, but that hasn’t stopped it from capturing over 50% of the enterprise server virtualization market. Competing on price isn’t usually a good strategy in the enterprise. But considering that Hyper-V is free Windows 2008 servers, and there’s a free edition of XenServer as well, has VMware finally gone too far?

Comparing vSphere to Hyper-V or Xen isn’t exactly an apples to apples comparison, but Citrix has recently upped its game with its acquisition of Cloud.com, and Hyper-V will be adequate for many enterprise virtualization needs.

Did VMware Screw-Up With Its New Pricing Model?

Image by Adam_T4

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The announcements follow stepped-up competition from Citrix, which just acquired Cloud.com today.

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vSphere 5

vSphere 5 represents a roughly fourfold increase in performance capacity for its virtual machines. vSphere 5 will support virtual machines with up to 1TB of RAM, up to 32 virtual CPUs and will be able to process over 1 million I/O operations per second.

Other new features in vSphere 5 include:

• Built-in i/o control at the virtual machine and application level (not to be confused with i/o virtualization)
• Automatic deployment of virtual machines based on pre-defined policies
• Profile-driven storage, which enables administrators to create policies for different storage configurations
• Expanded automatic load-balancing capabilities

VMWare VP of Product Marketing Bogomil Balkansky says the automation capabilities go beyond those included in systems like HP Blade Matrix by truly automating the process and not just creating wizards. He also says that thanks to the vSphere API, users will be able to use vSphere from within their existing IT management systems.

VMware is also simplifying its licensing by supporting pools of virtual memory instead of licensing based on physical memory per server.

Cloud Infrastructure Suite

The suite, at this point, is is a suite in name only; customers will still need to purchase each product separately. According to VMware Chief Marketing Officer Rick Jackson, the products will become a more cohesive suite over time. The idea is to build a set of related products, create seamless integration between them and update them as a whole.

To that end, each part of the infrastructure suite is getting a few updates:

• vShield 5: VMware’s security, control and compliance system will include 80 pre-defined templates based on the country and industry specific regulations. Admins will also have more granular control over policies for segmenting applications and data into trusted zones.
• vCenter Site Recovery Manager 5: VMware’s disaster recovery product is getting virtual machine level replication capabilities and fully automated failback capacity that can move users to a backup machine and and then back to the original production machine automatically.
• vCloud Director 1.5: VMware’s virtual data center management product is getting the ability to deploy virtual machines from pre-defined templates, Microsoft SQL Server support and some new API features.

vSphere Storage Appliance

vSphere Storage Appliance is not actually a hardware appliance, but a piece of software designed to allow SMBs to use virtual storage instead of separate shared storage hardware when using vSphere. The appliance will make internal storage available as shared pools of storage.

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• IBM SmartCloud Archive, specifically designed for eDiscovery and other regulatory requirements for records storage,

• IBM SmartCloud Virtualized Server Recovery, and
• IBM SmartCloud Managed Backup enhancements to integrate the above two services in the backup stream and in automated backups.

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Virtualized Server Recovery is a new service that can make it easier to recover a VM or a server after a disruption. A customer can choose to restore a server or one of its own VMs to a VM in IBM’s cloud or to their own servers in their datacenter, for example. There are various service levels that will be able to do rapid failovers, mimicking clustering in the physical world with much faster restores and without the hassle of dealing with the customized hardware involved in clustering. The service will be available for Windows, Linux and AIX servers initially.

IBM has had a managed cloud backup service for several years now. But missing from this offering is the ability to restore a particular server at a point in time, or the ability to move from physical to virtual machines. “We are trying to be as holistic and full-function as possible in our offerings,” said Richard Cocchiara, IBM CTO of Business Continuity & Resilience Services.

Pricing is on a per-use case for each running VM and data stored in the cloud. Given the number of use cases, if you are a current IBM customer, you are probably better off to call your representative. At some point in the future, IBM might have specifics available online like other cloud computing companies. The services will go live later this summer, depending on the customer’s geographic location.

Jessica Carroll, the managing director of IT of the US Golf Association and a current SmartCloud managed backup customer, is very interested in the new services. “It appears to be a more agile disaster recovery solution than the traditional hot site configuration. More agile may translate to quicker and more reliable recovery, which is an attractive concept,” she says.

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• IBM SmartCloud Archive, specifically designed for eDiscovery and other regulatory requirements for records storage,

• IBM SmartCloud Virtualized Server Recovery, and
• IBM SmartCloud Managed Backup enhancements to integrate the above two services in the backup stream and in automated backups.

Sponsor

Virtualized Server Recovery is a new service that can make it easier to recover a VM or a server after a disruption. A customer can choose to restore a server or one of its own VMs to a VM in IBM’s cloud or to their own servers in their datacenter, for example. There are various service levels that will be able to do rapid failovers, mimicking clustering in the physical world with much faster restores and without the hassle of dealing with the customized hardware involved in clustering. The service will be available for Windows, Linux and AIX servers initially.

IBM has had a managed cloud backup service for several years now. But missing from this offering is the ability to restore a particular server at a point in time, or the ability to move from physical to virtual machines. “We are trying to be as holistic and full-function as possible in our offerings,” said Richard Cocchiara, IBM CTO of Business Continuity & Resilience Services.

Pricing is on a per-use case for each running VM and data stored in the cloud. Given the number of use cases, if you are a current IBM customer, you are probably better off to call your representative. At some point in the future, IBM might have specifics available online like other cloud computing companies. The services will go live later this summer, depending on the customer’s geographic location.

Jessica Carroll, the managing director of IT of the US Golf Association and a current SmartCloud managed backup customer, is very interested in the new services. “It appears to be a more agile disaster recovery solution than the traditional hot site configuration. More agile may translate to quicker and more reliable recovery, which is an attractive concept,” she says.

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A JumpBox is a “ready-to-use” virtual machine that will run in minutes on any computing environment that supports virtualization. Follow me after the fold to learn how JumpBox could help you save a ton of money and time with their many virtual machines.

Overview

Running your open source applications as JumpBoxes gives you a great number of advantages over running traditional installs built from scratch. Primary among them is the huge amount of time you can save by not having to build from the ground up. All JumpBox downloads are compatible with all major forms of virtualization like VMware, Parallels, Microsoft, Xen Open Source, VirtualBox and Amazon EC2.

Overview

Once deployed a JumpBox delivers a fully-functional instance of an application that you can start using right away. Virtual Machines come with key components built in. For example, if you are going for LAMP based app, say Drupal, a virtual machine will have the Linux OS, Apache web server, MySQL database and PHP among other requisites preinstalled. All you have to do is run the JumpBox and work on the app you want.

The Library

JumpBox claims to have the world’s most complete selection of “ready to use” open source server software. And this statement of theirs could be very true since they have more than fifty-five different open source apps spanning all major product categories in the library.

OpenSource Library

If you’re looking for an application that’s not currently in the library, you can leave a request. Based on the popular request, new apps are added to the library from time to time.

Pricing

Pricing

You’ll have to choose from two of the paid plans starting from $49 per month. Runtime support is the major difference between the Pro and Business plans. There are no free plans at JumpBox, but there is a free trial period of 15 days with each account. Credit card information has to be submitted while signing up, but it won’t be charged till the free trial is over. If you’re planning to avail Amazon’s cloud services, you’ll have to pay extra.

Getting Started

Dashboard

After a ridiculously simple sign up process, a status page with links to a detailed demo and the account page is displayed. The dashboard displays key information regarding your account including the license key. Some JumpBoxes will require a license key during initial configuration, so keep it close by.

List of Jumpboxes

Hit the Library link at the top to get going. In this page you will find a list of featured jumpboxes. If you don’t see something you are looking for, navigate through the extensive list of categories on the left pane to find it. For the purpose of this article, I chose to go with a JumpBox that runs WordPress.

Jumpbox Virtual Machine Infomation

A page detailing the capabilities of the JumpBox follows next. In the same page, you will find all the necessary technical information of the JumpBox including the size, the operating system of the virtual machine and the like. Since these are virtual machine images, the sizes run into few hundred MB and above depending on the app you have chosen.

Amazon EC2 Installation

For those planning to use Amazon Elastic Cloud, you are in luck. JumpBox offers to install the virtual machine directly on your EC2 account. You can sign up from the same page and install it too.

Running the JumpBox

Jumpbox Virtual Machine

To run the JumpBox on your system, you will need to install Oracle Virtualbox or VMware player. Both of them are free to download and I chose VMware player for this review.

Jumpbox Virtual Machine Loading

Once the download is complete, head over to the folder and extract the zipped archive. After extracting, double click on the vmx file and sit back to enjoy the infrastructure that is being deployed.

Configuration Settings

Depending on the processing power of the system, the JumpBox load time will vary, but it shouldn’t take more than a few minutes in either case. Point your browser to the IP address shown on the screen to configure the JumpBox.

JumpBox Configuration

The details required mostly pertain to the app that you are installing and in my case, I was asked for the admin password and email information along with the time zone information.

Using WordPress from JumpBox

WordPress Details

Use the WordPress admin login and blog URL links to access them. I tried the admin control panel and was pleasantly surprised to see it is no different from the window that I am currently composing this article (hosted on Media Temple) and the one running from a JumpBox on my desktop.

WordPress Control Panel

It was very smooth and responsive and has the same features of a latest WordPress distribution.

JumpBox Administration

Jumpbox Administration

Use the JumpBox Administration Portal to perform various system level tasks. The link might throw a SSL error in the web browser, but hit Proceed Anyway to access the admin panel.

System Status

From this intuitive Graphical User Interface you can change the host name, configure email relaying, enable SSH/SFTP, install an SSL certificate, turn on stats or configure automated backups. The interface and the tools available in the admin panel are identical across the entire library making it easy for users handling multiple virtual machines.

Final Thoughts

JumpBox allows you to work more efficiently and focus your energy on the activities that matter. Whether you’re downloading JumpBoxes to run locally or launching them in the cloud via Amazon EC2, they share the same two-minute deployment experience. Instead of recurring monthly payments, pay per download of JumpBoxes would be an awesome addition that would help many a people.

Share Your Thoughts!

What is your take on JumpBox? How much time and money will be saved by going with JumpBox instead of building from scratch?

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Virtualization giant VMWare released VMWare View for iPad on Wednesday, in an effort to help enterprise users gain access to their workstations without sending IT departments into a tizzy.

VMWare View for iPad [iTunes link] is the company’s virtual workstation solution for large businesses and enterprises and it’s free for existing customers. Virtual machines are created and stored at a data center and these machines are then the location-agnostic desktop points for end users.

VMWare View for iPad will let users treat the iPad as a thin client, and users can then access their desktop, file documents and other data from within the application, over Wi-Fi and 3G.

VMWare is a bit late to the party. Competitors Citrix and Wyse have had iPad clients available for their products since last year. Wyse’s PocketCloud app even supports VMWare View virtual machines. Still, for VMWare View customers, having an official solution is an attractive offering.

VMWare told us that “this is just the beginning” of the company’s commitment to the iPad. The company took its time to deliver what it calls a “finely tuned solution” that should help businesses easily bridge the gap between their older Windows software and the cloud-based systems of the future.

VNC and RDP apps for the iPad are nothing new, but VMWare touts its PCoIP protocol as delivering a better, more fluid user experience, whether a machine is being accessed over a strong Wi-Fi connection or over 3G.

Users can use swipe gestures to pull up the iPad keyboard and to perform tasks. The app also includes a virtual trackpad for better tracking accuracy and easy access to function keys and other extended keys that might not be on the regular iPad keypad.

VMWare View is also compatible with external Bluetooth keyboards and can be used with the VGA connector to hook up to an external display.

This video demos VMWare View for iPad.

Business Users Want to Use the iPad

Business users of all stripes are embracing the iPad. The device’s form factor, low weight and incredible battery life make it a great travel companion. Software vendors likes SugarCRM, Salesforce.com, Box.net and FileMaker are all embracing the iPad and other mobile devices, because these devices are often a better fit for workflow and productivity than a laptop or desktop computer.

Solutions that can also allow users to access their Windows desktops make these types of devices even more attractive for businesses.

We look forward to the day when data from a workstation or VM can be directly accessed from a native app like an e-mail client, database program or word processor.

Fifteen years ago, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison failed to sell the world on a future of thin client workstations. That vision is becoming realized with the advent of cloud computing, bare metal virtualization and devices like the iPad.

More About: ipad, ipad apps, ipad business, remote desktop, virtualization, vmware, vmware view

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• Download our free apps for Android, Mac, iPhone and iPad

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Recently we asked you if you run virtual machines on your PC. Here’s what you said:

It would seem, from these results that most people use virtual machines. However, I’m sure that people who currently run virtual machines have a greater interest in answering a poll like this. The next question, however, is a little more revealing:

Not surprisingly, many of you run Windows XP as a virtual machine (more about running XP as a VM.) As you may or may not have noticed, we don’t really talk about XP much on Windows Guides any more. In fact, most of our recent guides are Windows 7 only or are written with Windows 7 in mind. It’s also interesting to see how few of us run Chrome OS as a VM. I wonder if we ran this poll again, in a year, what the results would look like for Chrome OS and Windows XP usage.

Question for Windows Guides Readers

Are you still interested in Windows XP guides? Is this something on which I should focus more or are you happy with the Windows 7 content currently being made available? Please let us know in the comments.

Further Reading:

• Get Free Windows Books
• Subscribe to Windows Guides

Previously, we showed you what Windows Virtual PC and XP Mode are, how to create any virtual machine with Windows Virtual PC, and how to create a virtual PC with Virtual Box.

I use virtual machines frequently (mostly to write guides for this site when I need to test a tweak in different versions of Windows) and sometimes just to learn how to use another operating system like Linux Mint or Free BSD for example.

Here at Windows Guides, we love your feedback and have a quick poll for you to share your feedback with us:
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Further Reading:

• Which Windows 7 version do you really need ?
• Screenpresso: Quite Possibly the Best Free Screen Capture Tool for Windows
• Free LockedUp Applications without Brute Force [How To]
• Use Your Keyboard and Mouse on More than One Computer with Synergy
• Windows Wont Load? Use a System Repair Disc/USB Drive to Fix Your PC

Once in a while, one of your applications will lock up and you would have to kill it (in the good sense of the word). Of course this will cause you to lose any unsaved data. At least you will learn to save your work more often, right?

But wait, there is something you may try first … before shutting it down “ungracefully”…

Using RESMON

1. When the application locks up, click Start and type: resmon in the search box.
2. Right-Click the RESMON.EXE and run it as an Administrator .
3. In the CPU pane, find the process that’s locked up (it should be indicated in red).
4. Right click it and select “Analyze Wait Chain.”

If there are two or more processes shown, the one at the end of the list is the one that’s locking up your application. If it’s not a critical process (i.e., an essential windows or application component), you can check it and click “End Process.”

Depending on your level of luck, this should release your application and it will start responding again.

It doesn’t work every time, but it’s worth a try – Good Luck!

If you would like to know more about the Resource Monitor, check out this article by Rich.

Further Reading:

• Do You Run Virtual Machines? Which Ones? [Poll]
• Which Windows 7 version do you really need ?
• Screenpresso: Quite Possibly the Best Free Screen Capture Tool for Windows
• 100 Free Icon Packs for Windows, OS X, Linux, & Websites [Part 1 of 2]
• 100 Free Icon Packs for Windows, OS X, Linux, & Websites [Part 2 of 2]