In order to get the most out of your Virtual Infrastructure you should consider enabling Jumbo Frames in your network. Jumbo Frames simplified is ethernet frames that can carry up to 9,000 bytes of payload. VMware added support for Jumbo Frames with ESX 3.5, Build 64607 (ESX 4.0 supports Jumbo Frames as well):

Build 64607 Release Note:
* Enhanced VMXNET—Enhanced VMXNET is the next version of VMware’s paravirtualized virtual networking device for guest operating systems. Enhanced VMXNET includes several new networking I/O performance improvements including support for TCP Segmentation Offload (TSO) and jumbo frames.

Below are the steps needed to get Jumbo Frames online in your network:
Read more >>

VMware released vSphere 4 today for download. The product is available in 6 flavors:

SMALL BUSINESS
* vSphere 4 Essentials
* vSphere 4 Essentials Plus

Mid-Size & Enterprise Business
* vSphere 4 Standard
* vSphere 4 Advanced
* vSphere 4 Enterprise
* vSphere 4 Enterprise Plus

For more information on vSphere and how it can change the way you look at IT, please go here.

Here is the link to VMware’s download page.

The updated benchmark scores are still being posted on VMware’s VMmark site, and when checking in on the vSphere 4.0 numbers, I came across something I found very interesting.

The Cisco “Unified Computing” Blade servers, specifically the B200-M1 model, had its results posted—it came in as the champion of the “8 Core” servers. But even more impressive than that was the fact that the Cisco B200-M1 with the new Intel Nehalem processors on ESX 4.0 scored higher than the best 16 and 24 core servers on ESX 3.5—and with only 2 sockets. Awesome!

Finally !

EMC Storage Viewer provides the user a view of the relationships between VMware virtual machines, disk files, datastores and underlying EMC storage devices including Symmetrix and CLARiiON

The Storage Viewer Plug-in has been posted to EMC Powerlink and is available for download in all the PowerLink views – customers, partners and employees at Home > Support > Product and Diagnostic Tools > Symmetrix Tools > Symmetrix Tools for VMware

Also see Chad’s blog here:

http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/virtual_geek/2009/04/where-to-get-the-emc-storage-viewer-vcenter-plugin.html

Good Citrix design in its most basic form is simple.  The number one rule is to remove all single points of failure.  This means there should be redundant servers for everything critical.  I consider the Secure Gateway, Web Interface, and XenApp servers critical.  Those are just for Citrix.  The other things to consider are redundant domain controllers, Clustered SQL servers, and a file server that is already designed for HA.  The most cost effective way of pulling this off is to use virtualization technoligies like ESX.  My typical small/medium business setup to to virtualize two XenApp servers, and two WI/CSG servers.  The WI/CSG is setup using NLB whereas the XenApp servers just use the standard Load Balancing built into Citrix.  Your SQL server should replicate the DS, there are good artilces on how to do this out there.  That’s about it, just about any design I do starts with this and is customized for the customer requirements.