A slight break from the norm today, although still vaguely virtualisation-related.
Background
A few years ago, when we rennovated our house, I installed a Smarthome system powered by Idratek. This controls all aspects of heating, lighting and security in our house.
The master house controller software ran on a Dell PowerEdge server I had been using as a media and NAS server, running under Windows 2003 server OS. I had been meaning to replace this server since moving all my data onto a QNAP TS-410 NAS appliance about a year ago, as this uses a fraction of the 160W that the Dell server consumes.
Well the server finally gave up the ghost with the heatsink on the motherboard snapping, and CPU overheating. Although the system thermal overload prevented permanent damage to the CPU, it highlighted the fact that I should really accelerate it’s replacement.
I’ve been beta-testing the next release of the Netscaler firmware (v9.3).
Since more Netscalers are being deployed as virtual appliances (VPX editions) it’s important that the resource usage of the appliance does not impact the host or other VMs running on the hypervisor.
Existing 9.2 VPX
This is the CPU graph from a 9.2 Netscaler VPX hosted on XenServer:
Netscaler VPX 9.2 cpu graph
It’s a little hard to see from the image but both virtual CPUs are pegged at 100%, even though the Netscaler itself is doing practically nothing (click on the image for the full-size version). This is the CPU display from the Netscaler itself:
The internal CPU usage counter
This means the XenServer host is having to dedicate quite alot of physical CPU resource to service the two high virtual CPUs which are just sitting in an idle loop. In my 8-core XenServer host, this single Netscaler VPX is constantly consuming a quarter of the total CPU resource – not a very friendly “citizen” in the virtual world.
Netscaler VPX 9.3 beta
Now let’s compare the CPU graph from a 9.3 beta VPX running on the same physical host:
Netscaler VPX 9.3 beta CPU usage
As the second graph shows, virtual CPU usage now reflects the actual busyness of the device, and my XenServer host is much happier as a result.
In a recent blog post, Microsoft announced it would release a cut-down version of Windows 7 called Windows ThinPC “WinTPC” to turn PCs in to thin clients for VDI-usage.
The big benefit is that this OS won’t require a VDA license to access your VDI session, thus reducing the cost of VDI meaning you don’t need to buy an OS license for your endpoint device just to turn it into a thin client.
I’ve just published an in-depth article over on the Citrix Community Lab website on configuring a QLogic iSCSI HBA to connect to an iSCSI LUN to provide a storage repository for XenServer.
Comments and feedback welcome.
Microsoft have published three updated troubleshooting guides for Terminal Services/Remote Desktop Services. There are three different articles according to which server OS you are running.
Useful information when used in conjunction with the Brief Troubleshooting Guide from Citrix
Ever wondered about the variety of options for connecting XenServer to iSCSI storage? HBA? TCP Offload? Software iSCSI?
A new post over at the Citrix Commuity lab examines the options in more detail and discusses the pros and cons of each approach.
Hope you find it useful
It’s traditional (apparently) to have some kind of review of the previous year, so I thought I’d take a look at my website activity over the past year.
Blog migration
Having got a bit fed up of Drupal I moved my main blog over to WordPress. The import process went reasonable well sucking in the previous RSS feed, however it only imported about 30 previous posts, which meant some (that were indexed by Google) have become unavailable.
Industry news feed aggregator
I continued to maintain and add relevant feeds added to the industry news feed aggregator. For those who haven’t seen this, it consolidates the RSS feeds from over thirty server-based computing and virtualisation news and blog sites. More will be added as they appear during 2011, and if you have any suggestions on ones I should add, please add a comment with your suggestion.
Synergy Berlin
I created this WordPress-based site to provide a travel, accommodation and local attraction guide to the Synergy and PubForum conference in Berlin. This will continue to be the home of travel, accommodation advice for the 2011 conferences including BriForum Europe, PubForum Dublin and Synergy Barcelona. For the Barcelona site I’m lining up some native Spanish content courtesy of the Barcelona Citrix User group along with a new domain name (synergybarcelona.com already registered). The plan for 2011 is to expand this to cover non-European conferences too and consolidate all into a single web site.
Citrix UK User group
The Citrix UK User group was re-launched during 2010 and we needed a web site. Rather than just a basic WordPress blog site, I added the popular BuddyPress community add-on which provide forums, messaging and other features to create an online community.
Citrix Community Lab
This only just made it into the 2010 list. Documenting the progress on creating the cloud-based Citrix Community lab it will also eventually host the booking/reservation/billing system when the lab goes live in 2011.
What’s involved?
Each site above involves a number of steps to get it up and running:
- Decide on and then register the internet domain name
- Setup some web hosting
- Install WordPress
- Choose and install a WordPress theme. I try and use a different theme on each site to provide some variety. Fortunately, there are lots of high quality free themes available.
- Install plug-ins to add additional functionality (such as Twitter integration, spam prevention, single sign-on etc)
- Add some content
- Publicise the site on Twitter
- Hope to get some visitors!
Thanks to all our readers
Thanks to all who have read and contributed to the above sites during 2010. I plan to continue to maintain, update and add new sites for the community during 2011. Hopefully you’ll stick around for the journey in 2011!
I’ve just finished putting the finishing touches and adding some content to the official Citrix Community Lab project website.
I’ll continue to blog about my progress on creating the lab there, so feel free to subscribe to the RSS feed to get updates.
A couple of years ago I presented a light-hearted session at PubForum Dublin on maintaining standards and performance in your XenApp farm.
Given the PubForum videos don’t stay online for long on the official website, I thought it was about time I uploaded this somewhere more permanent for others to enjoy (hopefully!) so here it is courtesy of Vimeo.
