So for everyone who’s gone out and grabbed the final bits for PowerShell 2.0, you may have found one still-supported Microsoft operating system conspicuously absent. That would be the x64 Edition of Windows XP. Yes, it was never a really well supported OS, since it had the awkward position of being half Server 2003, half Windows XP. But the good news is, because of these common roots with Windows Server 2003 x64 (for example, they share a service pack) there is a way to get PowerShell 2.0 on XP-64. Just download the Server 2003 x64 version and it installs just fine – I confirmed this on my home machine (which has been happily running XP64 for the last 2+ years).

Of course, with Windows 7 64-bit out now, the days are numbered for my home machine’s Windows install…

So this has already bitten me in the ass and I just wanted to warn anyone else with test or lab environments who runs into trouble.

According to the SRM Compatibility Matrix, you cannot install SRM Server on 64-bit Windows Server 2008. Considering this is generally the recommended platform for vCenter installs, it means anyone trying to co-habitate the SRM server with vCenter is out of luck.

Haven’t had a lot to say recently, but I definitely wanted to call this out:

There’s a great blog article by Scott Davis over at the View-Point blog talking about why PCoIP is so awesome compared to its competition. This is information that partners have had for a while and is what has had me so excited for PCoIP. It’s something that screenshots and benchmarks really don’t do justice to.

These last two weeks I’ve been at a customer site working on an SRM deployment. Customer updated to the latest FLARE code (version 4.29) and this broke the currently available Storage Replication Adapter for MirrorView (version 1.3.0.4). So for those CX4 customers using SRM, hold off on the FLARE update unless you talk to your EMC representative.

I wanted to especially thank Chad Sakac for his help diagnosing this problem. Chad, you rock!

Recently some very clever people at VMware and EMC showed off some scripts at VMworld that allows you to combine SRM and VMware View. I went to the session at VMworld and it was impressive but light on details. The good news is, the scripts are now posted, and you can grab them from my Sky Drive.

Some shortcomings of the script, however, as I see it, is that it’s really impossible to do a VMware View “test” using these. Because View has to talk to VirtualCenter, AD, DNS, and between connection brokers, doing a “test”  is always missing some components. In the VMworld presentation, they used some EMC plugins to do easy failback after their “test”, but the test itself is very disruptive to anything in production.

Big thanks to Tommy Walker for providing these scripts, as well as to the very clever authors (whose names are in the script source).

On Friday HP just posted a new version of the View Client for the t5545 Thin Client. You can download it and view installation instructions here. I’m out of the office at a customer site this week so I haven’t been able to play with it, but the release notes are pretty boring (basically just adding official View 3.1 support).

When I get a chance to play with it, I will post more, but feel free to check it out and post your results!

The release candidate for PowerShell version 2.0 is now out for 5.x Kernel Windows versions (Windows XP and Server 2003). Download is available here. So far, looks like it works fine with PowerCLI to me.

Quick note: On the XP side, you must be running XP Service Pack 3.

I arrived to this session a bit late as well (noticing a theme here?) but a lot of the basics of this session were very similar to one last year on remote user experience in virtual desktops.

The gist of it is VMware has done some internal benchmarking using the PCoIP beta code (not final!) on vSphere and compared it to PortICA 2.1 – not the newest with HDX stuff, this was asked in a question pretty early and they were (deservedly) given some guff for that – and RDP (to an XP VM so only RDP 5.1).

They talked forever about their testing methodology. Essentially they tested three things:

• A synthetic benchmark they created in-house called RPerf (which I saw last year in the similar session) that basically exercises a display protocol in as low-impact a way as possible to the underlying host (so you can measure how much CPU/memory the protocol takes and not how much CPU/RAM running the benchmark takes)
• A 320×240, 25fps video with mixtures of different types of video that range from fairly static, pans, zooms, areas of motion on still backgrounds, and random static.
• An AutoIT-based workload that tests actual VM performance in addition to the connection protocol.

The results were pretty favorable to PCoIP. In many cases it wasn’t the fastest, but it was never the worst. Sometimes it would barely lose to RDP in the LAN case, and barely lose to PortICA on the WAN case. It was never far behind the in any of the tests they showed results for, and in many cases was the fastest. The other big benefit was PCoIP had lower overhead in CPU and RAM than either PortICA or RDP. Tests were run entirely with the software PCoIP implementation – no hardware.

I arrived late to this session, but it looks like the beginning was about how to plug into today’s View product and make automated changes or fire off scripts based on events and such. The basics of it was the integration points you have today are very very limited – you have the two CLI tools (SVIConfig and VDMAdmin), log file monitoring, and editing the ADAM LDAP directly.

In View 4 new features will include an event reporting central warehouse – a database with a rollup of events from all clients, agents, and servers. It will include an event database with information on what events mean what along with resolutions, and will allow for querying using VDMAdmin or SQL tools such as Crystal Reports.

The best news though is PowerShell automation support! That makes View the 3rd product (after vCenter and Update Manager) to get PowerShell support. Using PowerShell should obviate the need to ever directly edit the LDAP, which is good because PowerShell can validate your input and will be far less dangerous. You can use PowerShell to stand up an environment from scratch, everything from global config, pairing it with a vCenter server, and making pools and VMs. You can also query the event warehouse for reporting purposes, and perform actions on sessions and VMs managed by View. Some examples:

#Set View License Key
Set-license -key AA113-XXXXX...
#Set the Pre-Login Message
Update-GlobalConfig -PreloginMessage "message"
#Update the power policy of a pool so you can preboot VMs at 5AM to avoid boot storm
Update-AutomaticDesktop -id DesktopJoe -PowerPolicy AlwaysOn
#Create a new Individual Desktop by using PowerCLI to get VM Object and pipe it to View CLI
Add-IndividualDesktop -id DesktopJoe -DisplayName "Desktop" -vm (Get-VM -name JoeVM)
#Entitle a user to a desktop
Get-User ADUserName | Add-DesktopEntitlement -desktop_id DesktopJoe
#Disconnect an active session
Get-ActiveSession -User "Joe" | Send-SessionDisconnect

This was the best news I’d heard all day. Finally, I can do all the neato stuff I can do in standard vCenter in View!

They then went into a bunch of Microsoft SCOM integration stuff which seemed pretty useless to me, and I was so buzzed from the PowerShell stuff I barely paid attention.

This session was about VMware’s Client Hypervisor Platform, or CVP. CVP was announced a while back by VMware. Here are the highlights of the session.

CVP is a powerful client hypervisor solution, which is part of the greater VMware View offering. It is not going to be offered standalone, it is a View product only. It helps create what the presenters called a “thin” thick client.

There are two approaches to doing a client hypervisor: Direct Assignment or Advanced Device Emulation.

In Direct Assignment, technologies like Intel VT-D or other software techniques are used to pass through a physical device (such as a video card) directly into the VM. This has some advantages such as lower overhead, and if you’re running Windows in your VM then all you need is a set of Windows drivers, which are easy to find. Passthrough is also much easier to program…

It has several downsides, however. For example, it ties your VM to that particular hardware which reduces portability. It also becomes difficult to interpose on that device. For example, if the video card is owned by the VM, there’s no way for the hypervisor to access it. Same goes for the network card. The point being – if all you’re doing is passing through your physical devices, why do you need a Client Hypervisor? Just run native. You can’t add value when using passthrough on everything. For some device types (such as USB) where the O/S is expecting hardware to appear and disappear, passthrough is okay.

VMware’s strategy is around Advanced Device Emulation. Client only needs a driver for the emulated hardware device, because the hypervisor itself contains the driver for the underlying physical hardware. The advantages here are that it divorces the VM from the hardware, making portability easy, as well as simplifying hardware upgrade and recovery. Also, the Hypervisor can add functionality by managing the devices, such as enforcing network security policies and the like. This does mean that the hypervisor needs to have complete drivers for the underlying hardware.

VMware’s CVP has the following features:

• Improved guest 3d support using a new type of virtual SVGA card. Supports DirectX 9.0L for Aero Glass.
• Paravirtualized Wireless device. This is important because unlike a wired NIC, a wireless NIC only has one radio, so your hypervisor and VM can’t both be tuned to different networks. You need to give control of the radio to someone, so they allow the guest to control (using its native management capabilities built into the OS) that radio through a special VMware WiFi virtual device. This also means it works with guest-based “supplicants” like iPass.
• USB is fully supported and is Passthrough like Workstation.
• External Display and MultiMonitor capable. Allows extended desktop, mirroring, rotation either in built-in OS control (Windows 7) or through a special tab from VMware (WinXP, Vista, analogous to the ATI/nVidia control panel applets that do the same)
• External Storage support for eSATA (!!) and built-in laptop card readers.
• Power Management awareness – respond to guest power state (i.e. allow the VM to suspend or shutdown the physical hardware). Respect the guest power policy and connect special events to guest like the lid switch or the sleep/power buttons on the physical hardware.
• Encryption support: the VMX and VMDKs are all encrypted using the onboard Intel vPro TXT and TPM capabilities. Uses 256-Bit AES encryption. When asked if this would be optional or modifiable, that is still to be determined.
• CVP is based on linux and in the pre-beta version they showed, it actually had a shell we could break out into. In the final version we were assured this would not be available.

So what good is all this supposed to do? The idea is the user checks out a Virtual Machine (or one is pre-provisioned for them)  to their CVP device. That device is managed by View Manager, which accesses an embedded View Agent in the CVP. This is used for policy enforcement, heartbeats, configuration changes, endpoint statistic gathering, and managing transfers from the View Server. The VM can run offline and also is smart enough to adapt its virtual hardware (like number of CPUs, GB of RAM) to the underlying physical hardware. VMware is targetting only a 256MB overhead for CVP. Today the CVP can run one VM only, but could store more than one.

CVP is an embedded Linux Type 1 hypervisor with a minimal set of packages installed. It’s optimized for fast boot time, and will be fully qualified on individual hardware platforms (like ESX). It does not contain a general purpose OS, so no doing work in the CVP. VMware itself provides updates such as patches, bug fixes, and new hardware enablement. It will be updated monolithically like ESXi is (full firmware updates), and this is updated from the View Manager server. The codebase is really unrelated to ESX, it’s more based on Workstation for Linux.

CVP requires Intel’s vPro and integrates with it’s Active Management Technology (AMT) for a bunch of things like Inventory collection, remote power on/off, and configuration backup onto the AMT private storage. It will be compatible with all AMT-enabled management tools like Altiris, LANDesk, etc.

The CVP itself has no listening ports, so it should be impossible to break into via the network. The disks are encrypted, Intel TXT + Trusted Boot protects integrity of the hypervisor in hardware. After installation, laptop will only boot approved hypervisor (no booting to a rescue CD). Encryption keys are stored in the TPM module and are used to encrypt the drives.

I asked several questions at this session:

• The demo from last year involved booting from a USB Key. Will boot from flash be supported?
  • Initial release installs on hard disk and runs there.
• Will the CVP also work as a remote View client (with PCoverIP support)?
  • That is on the roadmap but will not be in version 1, only locally running VMs.
• At VMworld 2007, tech for streaming a virtual appliance and booting it while data was still in flight was demoed. Will this be in CVP?
  • They have the code, but user issues kept it out of first release. How does user know when it’s safe to go offline? When they resolve this issue they will bring that code in.

Overall I am pretty excited about CVP. I understand the HCL may be fairly limited at launch, but it really does have tremendous potential for View environments.