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Thread: Clustered VMWare for Multi Terminal Services Servers

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    Clustered VMWare for Multi Terminal Services Servers

    Has anyone done this? What I am looking at is moving from a Windows 2000 TS / Citrix Metaframe cluster to Virtual Windows 2008 Ent TS, I will have 3 pretty beefy systems (min 24GB RAM, Core i7 based Xeons etc etc - From Dell or HP) and each one will host a few TS servers.

    Reasons? none bare metal, easy to restore.

    What would the down sides be for this?
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    Re: Clustered VMWare for Multi Terminal Services Servers

    Stupid q...

    Storage, where is it!

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    Re: Clustered VMWare for Multi Terminal Services Servers

    I'd hope it was all SAN based... I assume you're looking to move away from Citrix? It might be worth looking at the cost of Xendesktop if you're provisioning desktops rather than Remoteapp stuff - the savings can be pretty beefy (though I'm looking at VMWare View at the moment to secure our remote workers).

    Anyhoo - something I'd be interested in people's opinions on too.

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    Re: Clustered VMWare for Multi Terminal Services Servers

    Could equally ask why VM? HyperV R2 would give you clustering for free.

    Are you going to be load balancing the TS's and if so, how?

    Never had any issues with Virtualised TS's as such although I'm speaking from a HyperV, not VM perspective (but that shouldn't make an ounce of difference).

    Just to throw a different angle at you, I tend to find it's the apps that get installed on a TS that cause the issues, not the base OS itself. I'm looking more at vitualising the apps rather than the entire package. Even a bare metal restore would be < 1 hour.

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    Re: Clustered VMWare for Multi Terminal Services Servers

    Slightly off topic.

    But just been reading up on hyperV. It cant seriously be true that is has no vmotion style vm migration?

    Surely that is a mistake. Can anyone answer that? It simply cant be true.

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    Re: Clustered VMWare for Multi Terminal Services Servers

    You use Virtual machine manager to do it.

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    Re: Clustered VMWare for Multi Terminal Services Servers

    Quote Originally Posted by Jiff Lemon View Post
    You use Virtual machine manager to do it.
    But vmotion is live when that is offline.

    That cant be true.... or why would people use hyper v at all.

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    Re: Clustered VMWare for Multi Terminal Services Servers

    Windows Server 2008 supports Quick Migration - saving a VM state running on one cluster node, passing ownership of the disk resource over to another node which then resumes the VM, so the downtime of the VM is the time it takes to save & restore the state.

    Windows Server 2008 R2 supports Live Migration - a VM running on one cluster node is migrated whilst running over to another node. This is achieved through the use of Cluster Shared Volumes and Volume Shadow Copy, the only blip of the service is when the VM does a network gratuitous ARP to let the switch know it's moved (less than 1 second in demos I have seen).

    SCVMM is more about migrating VMs between hosts that are not (necessarily) clustered, and works with Virtual Server and both versions of Hyper-V - it's for the really big environments, and it's meant for administration/restructuring, not HA.
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    Re: Clustered VMWare for Multi Terminal Services Servers

    HyperV is an option I will also be looking at.
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    Re: Clustered VMWare for Multi Terminal Services Servers

    Here are a couple of blogs that might be of interest when considering Hyper-V virtualization and Remote Desktop Services (RDS - formerly Terminal Services).

    Worth subscribing to for the announcements and guides that the dev teams themselves publish.

    W2K8R2 with Hyper-V, RDS & Clustering leads implicitly to Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) too, if that's of interest.
    If it's more of a "remote application" setup you are looking for, Citrix is still the big boy but for smaller ventures RemoteApps, RDS Gateway, RDS Web Access & Session Broker have been very popular additions since W2K3's implementation of TS.
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    Re: Clustered VMWare for Multi Terminal Services Servers

    Whilst we're discussing HyperV, lets also not forget that there's the completely and utterly FREE version available too.

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    Re: Clustered VMWare for Multi Terminal Services Servers

    disclosure: when it comes to virtualisation , my flag is fairly well planted in the VMware camp - I'm a VCP on VI3 & 4 and when it comes to production environments for servers at the moment I wouldn't trust anything else. That said I'm coming from a large enterprise point of view. Hyper-V has a few plus points but they are currently out weighed by the negatives for me

    Are you looking at server consolidation at all ? Terminal servers are interesting candidates for virtualisation as you can go one of two ways for scaling - if you wanted to just abstract the hardware you coudl have one or two big VM's per host ( in which case you'll be paying out a lot on vmware licencing for poor consolidation ratios ) or you could run a larger number of vm's per host ( for example the average accorss my environment is around 16vm's per host - this can be extrapolated to the poitn where you end up with a more VDI like infrastructure , but then you would have want to have extra benefit from application level virtualisation as Jeff said.
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    Re: Clustered VMWare for Multi Terminal Services Servers

    We will probably try and run about 4 or 5 VMs per host as its 2008 Ent I think that is the most you can with the license. These TS Servers will only run one app.
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    Re: Clustered VMWare for Multi Terminal Services Servers

    with Ent - it would be 4.

    have you considered just having 2 larger servers with 48Gb RAM or so which woudl save on vmware licencing - the cost savings would be eaten up by either extra ent licences or a datacenter licence per host. but you save on hypervisor costs and any management software licenced per hypervisor CPU
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    Re: Clustered VMWare for Multi Terminal Services Servers

    a datacenter licence is another good idea, as they will be going into one our suites
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