I was honoured to be invited as the first guest on vSoup.net joining Chris Dearden (@chrisdearden), Ed Czerwin (@eczerwin) and Christian Mohn (@h0bbel) talking about virtualisation
We spoke about managing virtual desktops, VDI, HP Flex-10 switches and firmware issues, storage and plently of other things!
You can download the podcast from vsoup.net or even better subscribe through iTunes.
Going virtual is all about sharing resources. You are no longer constrained by one server or workstation running on one physical piece of hardware. The benefit is less physical kit to look after and better utilisation of resources but the detriment is when you share, you need to share nicely. In a shared environment one VM can be greedy and take more than its fair share and your other VMs suffer.
It’s not just sharing nicely that you need to consider but also building your VMs so they need less so there’s more to go around.
VDI is all about maximising the use of your physical hardware. To be cost effective (if you can with VDI!), you want to run as many workstations on a physical host as you can without sacrificing individual VM performance.
So, if your VMs are greedy with what they need you are going to be paying more for hardware. Wasting resources on physical workstations may not cost that much more but move your workstation into your datacenter and then see how much money you will be wasting.
Hugo Peeters has a great function for using WMI to get Logged on Users:
http://www.peetersonline.nl/index.php/powershell/oneliner-get-logged-on-users-with-powershell/
This can be easily used in PowerCLI. This can be very useful when you need to do some VM maintenance in a VDI environment and need to find out who is currently logged on and know which VMs are not in use and can be worked on.
$VMs = Get-Cluster "LON_PROD1" | Get-VM | Where { $_.PowerState -eq "PoweredOn" }
ForEach ($VM in $VMs) {
Write-Host "Logged On Users for: " $VM.Guest.HostName
Get-WmiObject Win32_LoggedOnUser -ComputerName $VM.Guest.HostName | Select Antecedent -Unique | %{"{0}\{1}" -f $_.Antecedent.ToString().Split(’"‘)[1], $_.Antecedent.ToString().Split(’"‘)[3]}
}
There are many occasions when you may need to produce a report showing some aspect of your VM environment.
Many companies have various types of inventory databases which grab information from various sources to provide tracking and reporting of the various IT assets.
An example of a database could be one which pulls information from the software inventory system, patch management system, anti-virus console showing latest file update, AD etc. which could show a dashboard view of the workstations and highlight where they are not in compliance to company standards.
As a virtual workstation environment grows there is plently of information from vCenter that would be very useful to gather.
Grouping VMs by VDI groups in vCenter folders so you know how many VMs x department has would be useful to have. For the dashboard view it may be usedful having the VM Tools status. It’s could also be useful knowing which VMs are in which cluster and datastore, what virtual CPU and RAM they have and how big their disks are which can be used for capacity planning, performance analysis and reporting on what is deployed where.
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