Articles on BeyondVM

How To: ThinApp Firefox 29 and Plugins for vCloud Director 5.1.x

Mon, 04 Aug 2014 00:00:00 +0000

In response to this article about Firefox 30 and vCloud 5.1.x and this article about Java updates breaking everything I decided to throw together a quick How-to on using ThinApp to create a sandboxed version of Firefox and Java that solves both of these problems pretty well.

This ThinApp setup includes a legacy version of Java (7u25) which is super old but it should help with accessing the following (not exhaustive list, just things I have run into, please help expand list):

UCS Manager 2.1.x
vCloud Director 5.1.x Uploads
HP iLO 2.x
Legacy DRAC
vCloud VPN
EMC Unisphere

Onward, but first an important caveat:

This process creates an insecure browser installation, DO NOT browse the internet with this configuration…ever.

You have been warned.

Note: I am not a ThinApp expert (and I usually avoid windows, hah!) so there may be a more elegant way to do this, if anyone has tips let me know!

First, collect the correct tools, I attached the versions that I used at the end of the post:

Firefox 29.0.1 Link
Java 7u25 (32 bit) Link
Flash Installer (for correct OS, I used Win8.1) Link
VMRC Installer for 5.1.x from your instance (or mine from 5.1.x below)
VMware ThinApp 5.x Trial
Clean Windows 7 or 8 Capture VM (Base install without security software is best)

After Windows is installed, the following are steps to take to create the package:

Take snapshot of base VM
Install ThinApp 5.x
Take snapshot (this is a theme, I have found a successful ThinApp capture is snapshot heavy)
Start “ThinApp Setup Capture” utility, Click Next

Click Prescan
Install Firefox
1. Choose Custom
2. De-select “Maintenance Service”
Install Flash (Latest version is fine)
Install Java
1. Choose “Change Destination Location”
2. Install to “c:\java”
Install VMRC Plugin
Launch Firefox, perform the following tasks
1. Navigate to about:config in Firefox, Click “I’ll be careful, I promise!”
2. Change the following settings
  1. app.update.auto – false
  2. app.update.enabled – false
  3. app.update.silent – false
  4. app.update.mode – 2
  5. extensions.update.autoUpdateDefault – false
  6. extensions.update.enabled – false
  7. (optional, disables login remembering) signon.rememberSignons – false
  8. (optional, enables pop-ups since vCD uses these) dom.disable_open_during_load – false
3. Verify plugin updating is disabled:
  1. Navigate to Menu -> Addons
  2. Click Plugins
  3. Click the gear icon and make sure this option is not selected
1. Perform the following tasks to verify that Java is installed
  1. Navigate to this Link
  2. Click “Activate”
```
3. **Click** to “Allow and Remember”






4. **Check** the “Don’t Ask Again…” Checkbox and **Click** Later






5. **Click** the Run button at the prompt to verify the Java applet loads
```
Take Snapshot (just in case)
Back to the ThinApp Capture Utility, click Postscan

Click OK

This will take some time, so grab some coffee.
De-select all entry points other than Firefox, click Next

Click Next

Click Next

Select “Restricted write access”, click Next.

Select “Same Directory…”, click Next.

Select No (unless you want to share), click next

Click next (I don’t use the ThinDirect feature because it only works with IE)

Update inventory name to “Firefox 29.0.1″ to differentiate it.

Select “Use one of the entry points” then pick “Mozilla Firefox.exe”, Check “Compress virtual package”, Click:

Click OK

Ignore warnings (like a boss) and click Next

Click “Edit Package.ini”

In Package.ini, Locate the block “[Mozilla Firefox.exe]” and perform the following changes to the block
1. Add “StatusbarDisplayName=BeyondVM Firefox 29.0.1 Build “
2. Add “CommandLine=%ProgramFilesDir%\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe -no-remote”
3. Rename block from [Mozilla Firefox.exe] to [Mozilla Firefox 29.0.1.exe]
Save Package.ini
Click Build

Wait, this will also take some time, more coffee!

Click Finish

At this point you will have a functioning ThinApp package file all bundled up in the single exe file in the bin directory. You might notice that this package is quite large, I performed the following additional steps to my package to get it down to about 350MB from over 800.

Edit Package.ini and perform the following modifications
1. Add the following section below the compression type
```
[FileList]
ExcludePattern=.bak,.msi,.mst,.cab,*.msp
```
2. Delete all entry points other than [Mozilla Firefox 29.0.1.exe]
3. Delete the following directories from the package (note: I have not exhaustively tested this, some of these may be required but it worked for me)
  - %drive_C%\Users\All Users\Microsoft\Windows Defender
  - %ProgramFilesDir(x64)%
  - %SystemRoot%\WinSxS
  - %SystemRoot%\assembly
  - %SystemRoot%\Installer
  - %SystemRoot%\Logs
4. Run build.bat as an Administrator

After that the package is pretty snappy and should be good to go. It will create a profile directory next to the EXE to save settings in, this will include popup allowing and certificate exceptions. The first time I logged into my vCloud instance I had to tell it to run the JRE again, I was unable to figure out how to get it to never ask during the build process but it wasn’t that bad to just do it the first time.

These are all of the files required to do this as well as the package I created following these directions. My pre-built package will expire in about 60d unless I can get VMware to give me a community license (hint hint).

Please leave a comment if there is anything I can improve!

Lastly, the caveat we started with:

This process creates an insecure browser installation, DO NOT browse the internet with this configuration…ever.

You have been warned.

Goodnight and Good Luck.

Intel Avoton: The Perfect Home Lab Host?

Fri, 31 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

In the ever present search for the “ultimate home lab box,” I ran across a new contender, the new Intel Avoton. This is a really interesting SoC (System on a Chip) that has some promise for home lab. The Avoton C2000 series SoCs are based on the new 22nm manufacturing process that came with haswell which is a drastic improvement on the previous models.

One of the most interesting things about it is that it now allows for out of order pipeline execution. This is one of the things that made previous Atom CPUs/SoCs so much slower. Another thing that is really intriguing about it is that it now supports both VT and is a 64bit CPU, so it can run both 64 bit and 32 bit guests as well as having 8 cores (there is a 4 core model available as well). Also, this architecture has a maximum memory of 64GB which puts it right in the sweet spot for home lab nodes, though it is more likely that these boards will see 32GB (4x8gb) until the price of 16GB dimms/sodimms comes down. And, the best part is that this SoC has a TDP of 20w – crazy!

The first motherboard I found to really support this CPU was the Asrock C2750D4I, I picked one up to do a little testing to see what it really could do. Here is what the layout looks like, courtesy of the Asrock website:

This motherboard is pretty slick! It has a dedicated IPMI port with a simple web interface as well as dual on board NICs and 4 full size DIMM slots. This particular board also features 12 SATA (mix of 3gb and 6gb) ports which would also make this a great home NAS base.

Note: To get ESXi 5.5 running on this board you will have to manually add the Intel igb driver to your ISO. I used esxi customizer for this because I am a lazy admin, but you can also do it with image builder. The driver was present in 5.1, and I am not sure why VMware removed it from 5.5. The driver can be found here: ESXi5X-INTEL-igb-4017

SuperMicro has also come out with a few boards but they were not widely available when I started testing. The most interesting ones are A1SAi-2750F. This board has a Marvell Alaska 88E1543 transceiver on it that allows it to have 4x 1GBe NICs. I am not sure how that will play with ESX but I plan on ordering one to test! It also has an onboard USB header which is always handy. However, it does have fewer SATA ports, but that isn’t a huge deal for an ESXi node. SuperMicro has a few uATX boards with an extra PCIe slot on it that look pretty cool as well, but those are a little big for me.

Now, by far the coolest use of this SOC is the HP Moonshot blade system. I mean, just look at this thing (image from hp.com):

This thing is nuts! As you can see in the picture there are 45 small blades mounted vertically in a 4.5U chassis. This also includes a switched backplane that they all connect to. The blade that uses the Avoton is the m300 (image from hp.com):

I would love to get one of these chassis to play around with. It would be perfect for a lab of servers or mass scale small nodes. I wonder what the cost per VM would look like when using these blades for a farm of small VMs like a VDI environment, where each VM has about 2-4GB of memory, which would get you about 15-25 VMs on each node. Interestingly, these blades don’t seem to support 64GB of ram. I wonder if that is a misprint or if HP does not have 16GB SODIMM modules available.

Testing

As a simple test of what kind of performance a CPU can give me, I like to set up two VMs and run a netperf test since this type of traffic involves mostly a CPU activity. My test setup is pretty simple: I have two Ubuntu VMs, each with 2x vCPU and 4gb memory and a single VMXNET3 adapter.

For this test the VMs were connected to the same port group and assigned IP addresses, then iPerf was run with the following options:


# Client:
iperf -t 30 -c  -P 25
# Server:
iperf -s

This gives us a 30 second test with 25 connections, which should be enough to saturate any link.

This is a table of my results for this test. I had a few other servers with different CPU architectures sitting around, so I included those too. Also, where possible I measured the power draw with a killawatt device for curiosity or took the power reading out of the management software.

NetPerf Results

CPU	Avg. Speed	Power Idle	Power Load
Avoton C2750	8.21 Gbits/sec	25w	26w
Intel i7 920	17.0 Gbits/sec\|	60w	160w
Intel E5540	16.9 Gbits/sec	175w	175w
AMD Opteron 2385	6.8 Gbits/s	Unknown	Unknown

I know that this is not a very exhaustive test, but with only one board I can’t yet run something like vmmark. I plan to run something like that in the future when I have a more full blown lab based on these boards set up. It is enough to convince me to pick a few more up for more investigating! Also, I am going to add to this chart as I run across different CPU types to test.

Nested Virtualization

In the comments someone asked if this board supported nested virtualization, the details were sort of un-clear from Intel. On the Intel ARK page it says that this CPU supports Intel VT but that isn’t the only requirement anymore. Well, following William’s guide, I checked the mob for the property ‘nestedHVSupported’ which was true but in order to be thorough I also tested a virtual ESXi host (5.5 inside 5.5) and was able to boot both 32 bit and 64 bit nested guests and they performed pretty well so it looks like this is a definite yes, awesome!

Conclusion

The thing I found most interesting from these tests is that most of the Intel CPUs get about the same throughput (17GB/s) no matter the age or generation and the AMD CPUs were always substantially slower. I am not sure if this is always true throughout the history of the two architectures, but I have noticed that Intel CPUs seem to feel faster in the past, even with similar clock speeds.

I think that this little motherboard (and others like it) is a real contender for the home lab where speed isn’t as large as a concern as is power savings. I plan to load two or three of these up for my BeyondVM lab in the near future – a small and silent ESX farm is really appealing. I will post updates as I get other performance statistics in the future. Leave a comment below for any test suggestions!

Update (2/3/14): Added a section on nested virtualization to answer some questions in the comments.