TSX-EMEA: Afternoon Session
In the afternoon I attended the session from Equalogic. In case you don’t know they are iSCSI SAN provider who bundle a lot of “virtual storage” functionality in their product. The finer detail of the offering went over my head. I wouldn’t regard myself as a storage specialist – and in part that’s why I chose to attend. I’ve heard very interesting things about this company. Very fast, very efficient, very cost-effective. There seems to be an inherent slowness to take on new technology around the field storage. This is understandable considering its about your most important stuff – your data. Additionally, if you have spent millions of £$€ on a SAN, a new storage offering doesn’t seem horribly appealing. But for new customers without an existing storage infrastructure these companies are interesting.
I followed up that session by attending a VDI Overview presented by Richard Garsthagen, Product Marketing Manager for VMware in EMEA, and also organiser of TSX. I regard myself as a VDI sceptic, coming from a bias of Citrix background. This year I did not renew my Citrix instructor certification as I want to dedicate my time to virtualisation for which I am better known (and better paid!!!). So I’m coming at this with new eyes. Still I feel there are couple of major problems remain with all the VDI “offerings”. Firstly, you have cobble together a couple of solutions together to deliver a desktop – virtualisation layer, broker layer, SSL layer and a desktop device for the user to sit at. Secondly, regardless of how great VirtualCenter is – it is not geared up to create hundreds of desktops quickly. Sure VMware LabManager could do that – but at what cost? Thirdly, I worry about the storage issue of 150 virtual disks on my expensive SAN storage. Clearly, some kind of “master” vmdk with snapshots for each of our users is the way forward (and LabManage can do that today) this would keep the storage costs down, and help with patch management as one VMDK means on level of software and OS patching.
Richard kept himself fairly neutral seeking not to promote any particular 3rd party. But he did step out of that briefly to rave on about a cool utility. He mentioned how he used Nlite (works with Windows XP) and Vlite (works with Vista) to massively strip down the Windows OS to the bare-bones. The buzz word seems to be JeOS or “Just Enough OS” (pronounced “juice”). The concept is familiar to Virtual Appliance builders who strip down operating systems to their bare-essentials for performance, stability and easy of patch-management. In the General Session this JeOS ideas was floated out as new way of viewing how ISVs deliver software to customers.
Nlite/Vlite are tools which do this for you for Windows. I great deal of what slows down a Windows XP VM can be stripped out (such as 100’s of drivers for hardware) because the VM represents a fixed and unchanging definition of a VM (no support for USB in the case of ESX). So what was the result of using Nlite against a Windows XP VM? Well, Richard claimed he’d experienced incredibly quick boot times – like 5-10 seconds to power on and reache a logon screen. Additionally, the foot print of the ISO used to build the VM was reduced to 90MB of core files. Lastly, the hard disk and memory foot print was significantly reduced. The some total of this Windows XP optimisation was being able to run more copies of Windows XP on the same hardware. Fundamentally, this means each VM “costs” less to run per instance.
You have to wonder how long it will before the VDI “market” grows significantly enough that Microsoft do this kind of optimisation for Windows client OS for us – shipping their “wow” experience as a virtual machine for the datacenter. Let hope if they ever do this that it isn’t tied to solely to their virtualisation platform! 