Back in the 1980s when PCs were first entering corporations, IT workers had to fight off the mainframers who wanted to keep their 3270 IBM terminals on their desktops. A similar battle is being waged these days with so-called thin clients, which lie at the heart of a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) rollout.

You can read more about the economics of using thin clients for your main desktops in a story that ran today in ITworld here.

VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure) is a growing trend. The idea is to stream a standard boot image from a central storage repository so you can save on desktop support and maintenance costs. You avoid having to run endpoint protection products, or patching individual desktops, and you can distribute your desktops around the world as long as you have a reasonably fast Internet connection and a Web browser to kick things off.

But VDI is fraught with complexities. You can read why in my post in ITWorld today here.

A lot has happened in the last nine months of 2009 since we wrote our update on virtual servers. Citrix has made Xen Server free and released a new version 5.5 in mid 2009. Microsoft has released R2 of Windows Server 2008 that extends Hyper V in new and useful ways, and adds support for Red Hat Linux guest OSs finally. And VMware has come out with about 57 new products mostly labeled version 4 to manage and integrate their line, and handle greater densities of VMs per server.

You can read my full report here on Datamation’s Web site.

While the idea may not be on many IT radar screens yet, a few shops are beginning to implement these tools as a way of keeping their desktops inside the data center where they can be more readily managed, updated, and secured. The idea has some merit, particularly for those of us that began our computing careers in the mainframe era with 3270 terminals. But the road to total desktop virtualization isn’t easy, and can be overwhelming.

You can read my story that was posted this week to CIOupdate.com here.

I had an opportunity to visit Emerson’s new data center located here on their St. Louis campus. The most interesting feature isn’t inside the building, but a 100 kV (DC) solar array that is attached to the roof of the building and provides about 15% of the power requirements for the equipment inside. The array is canted a bit for the optimum angle, because Emerson wanted the building placed in a particular spot on its campus that didn’t match the best orientation for the array. Currently, it is the largest collection of solar panels in Missouri.

The data center has a mirror (without the array) in Iowa that is used for disaster recovery and R&D purposes. It is also the first commercial deployment of Liebert’s NXL power conditioning system (pictured at right). Eventually, the data center will house 400 servers, and another innovative feature is that all rack-to-rack connections will be handled by fiber optics, rather than copper.

Locating a data center in Missouri makes a lot of sense and cents too: we have one of the lower power rates in the country, and combined with high telecom bandwidth and a moderate climate means that power needs are also reasonable. They also make use of lower-powered CPUs, virtualization technologies and showcase a number of other Emerson power products, as well as rack-specific cooling, to minimize air conditioning loads.

IT managers have a lot more motivation when it comes to keeping their storage area networks or SANs up and running. More and more data is being stored on these virtualized networks, and they continue to be popular. In a survey conducted of 388 executives in December 2008 for SHARE, storage virtualization was underway at half of respondents’ companies but that management was still a challenge and many of the implementations were at the departmental rather than enterprise level.

So what can you do to keep your SAN properly maintained? Read my article in Baseline magazine for  several suggestions.

Virtual machine technology is proliferating across enterprise data centers. Server consolidation, energy savings and better resource utilization are all good reasons to consider using one physical server running a series of guest VMs. But as you dive deeper into VM technology, especially for virtualizing servers, you need to have a better understanding of the issues involved, particularly when you reach the point at which you run your VMs on what are called “bare-metal hypervisors.” 

My feature in this month’s Baseline magazine goes into more details. 

What is the cheapest PC you can buy that can sport 8GB of RAM? You would think this was a simple question, and within a few minutes of online shopping you could figure it out. Alas, this has turned into Yet Another Project, and I am nowhere near the answer.

Why would anyone want such a machine? Any 32-bit version of Windows can’t use much beyond 3 GB of memory. If you are going to effectively use 8 gigs of memory, you need a 64-bit operating system. I actually have one that I am using right now – my Mac OS. But getting a Mac with all that memory means getting their pricier Mac Pro desktop. And while you can save some money by getting a used Mac Pro, by the time you bulk it up with enough RAM and disk, it isn’t much of a bargain anymore.

My reason for all this RAM is to host a collection of virtual machines for testing purposes. VMs consume a lot of RAM, and there are situations where I want to be able to run more than one VM at a time for testing networking products. I have been using the desktop VMware Workstation along with Fusion on my Mac, and have quite a collection of VMs now that I use in my tests. But my Windows PCs only have 2 GB of RAM, so I can’t really run more than one VM at a time. I needed something more powerful. A few months I had a client that sent me a DVD with seven different VMs on it to use for a series of tests.

So I thought to contact a system builder friend of mine and I ask him to spec out for me what I called a “white box ESX PC” – ESX is VMware’s virtual server operating system, and it is designed for this purpose, to run a lot of VMs on a single physical piece of hardware. And while ESX technically isn’t 64-bit, it can run very effectively with lots of memory.

But getting the right configuration was tricky, because it is also not designed to run its VMs on an ordinary hard disk that you would find in your average desktop. There are some discussion forums on this topic, but we were in uncharted territory.

To see what I was getting myself into, HP loaned me one of their Proliant servers that comes with ESX pre-installed. (Most of the major PC server makers have a selection of pre-installed machines with either ESX or Citrix’ Xenserver, but these are not low-end machines.) It took me weeks of effort to get the right licensed software from VMware to operate it and put the VMs on the box. I realized that ESX wasn’t going to work for me –there was just too much overhead. And while VMware gives away a freebie version called ESXi, I was too fed up at this point to try that route. If you want to learn more, check out this article here.

So then I went online and starting poking around to see if I could order a desktop PC with 8 GB of RAM and be satisfied running the 64-bit Vista OS. I first went to Dell, mainly because I buy a lot of Dells and can find my way around their Web site. Back in the day when megabytes were a lot of RAM, Dell was one of the first vendors to sell PCs with 4 MB installed. But despite this history and familiarity, it wasn’t easy to search their Web site for an 8 gig PC. Lenovo has one line, the ThinkCentre M58, which sells for about $1200. HP has none that I could find on their Web site, which is odd because when I went to Newegg’s Web site I could find more than 20 configurations, some of which were pretty capable HP machines, all for around $1000.

The other issue with running a lot of VMs besides RAM is that you want the right CPU inside your PC, one that supports the virtualization extensions called Intel-VT or AMD-V. Neither company makes it very clear which of its Dual Core Duo this or that processor actually supports these extensions. Check out this discussion here. And Ed Bott does further research and actually reports on which Intel CPUs offer the extensions in his post here.

What I do know is the aging Dell desktop that I bought three years ago doesn’t have this support. Sigh. Here is a link to a discussion forum on Anandtech that goes into more details.

So meanwhile I haven’t bought anything yet. If you have any advice, you know where to find me.

It is time once again for my annual look at what has happened and will happen in the server virtualization space. For the historical record, check out the comparison of VMware vs. Microsoft vs. Xen from 2008 and the same virtualization vendor comparison from 2007.In the past year, Microsoft has come out with Hyper-V, a free add-on to Windows Server 2008 for its 64-bit versions only. VMware has revamped its pricing and also gone through a couple of releases of various products. And Citrix, which owns Xensource, continued to expand its alliances.

Others, such as VirtualIron.com and Sun’s Virtual Box, are still hanging in there. And Cisco is starting to compete in this space with its Unified Communications platform that will run both HyperV and ESX on a new collection of hardware that integrates storage and switching.

You can read the full article in Datamation here.

The Amazon EC2 service has been an interesting way to virtualize anything inexpensively, and they now have a Web console to make it even easier to bring up a virtual machine, all for pennies a day. If you just want to test something quickly, you don’t even have to pay for persistent storage. In this video from Chris Fleck, he shows you how to get started and how to run a virtualized Xen App instance in about 15 minutes.