VMTN Blog

Here are a few posts found recently on Planet VMware -- blogging here at VMware seems to be accelerating!

VMware Fusion 1.1.2 Launches: Enhanced MacBook Air, Time Machine Support. Adds Simplified Chinese Localization. from Team Fusion

The VMware Fusion team would like to announce the general availability of VMware Fusion 1.1.2, a free update for all VMware Fusion users.  You can download this newest version here.

VMware Fusion 1.1.2 now provides better support for the MacBook Air, enables Time Machine backup of virtual machines, adds support for Windows XP SP3 Boot Camp partitions, and is now available in Simplified Chinese.

VMware Earnings and the Value for Partners from Mike DiPetrillo

Today (April 22) VMware announced 1st quarter earnings. The company did quite well and surpassed analyst expectations. Overall the company did $438 million in revenue for the quarter. What really gets me excited about this is the opportunity for the 14,000 partners out there selling VMware solutions. Every day I go to customers with partners or go to partner sites to do training. Whenever I'm with a partner they always want to know what's in it for them. Why should they be selling VMware when they're also Citrix and Microsoft partners and both of those companies have virtualization solutions. Here's my take....

Using the VMware Visual Studio plugin from Workstation Zealot

Last year for Workstation 6.0, one of the features we added was a plugin for Visual Studio 2005 that allows developers to debug a project (native and managed C/C++, C#, or Visual Basic) inside of a Windows virtual machine (specifically Windows 98, Windows 2000, and later). All of you Windows developers know how much of a pain it is to support multiple versions of Windows, but this tool is designed to make that process much, much easier.  The Visual Studio Integrated Debugger (VSID in short) plugin utilizes Visual Studio remote debugging technology to allow you to debug a project inside of a VM as if you were debugging on your host computer with the click of one button.

New and Updated VMware Security Advisories for ESX and VC from VMware Security Blog

Recently ESX and VirtualCenter (VC) patches were released which - among others - fix several security issues. These issues are detailed in a new advisory, VMSA-2008-0007, and in the updated advisories VMSA-2008-0002.1, 0003.1, 0004.1, 0006.1. Please take some time out of your busy schedule to review your deployments and update where appropriate.

You can manage VMware Server with PowerShell too. from VI Powershell Blog

Blogger John Tuffin has made an entry about his experiments managing VMware Server 2.0 Beta with PowerShell. To summarize, you can manage VMware Server with PowerShell, in much the same way you manage VMware ESX.

Free Downloadable Version of VMware Server 1.0 Training Now Available from VMware PhD

The downloadable version of the VMware Server 1.0 training currently posted on the VMware eLearning YouTube and Blip.TV channels is now available!

Register Today for VMware Technology Exchange!

Register Now for VMware Technology Exchange and receive a free developer license for VMware Infrastructure and VMware Workstation products at the event.

Attend VMware Technology Exchange (May 13-14, 2008, San Jose, CA) and meet VMware engineers, product managers and business personnel—and ask questions about product roadmaps, integration points, or about jointly monetizing the virtualization opportunity.

• VMware roadmaps, products and technology directions
• Integrating with VMware products (APIs and toolkits)
• Best practices for developing and running applications in a virtual environment
• Partner benefits, programs and joint marketing opportunities

If you are a developer, product manager, product planner, architect, alliance manager or marketing manager, VMware Technology Exchange is a must-attend event. Tailored to our partners' unique needs, we are pleased to offer nearly 50 cutting-edge sessions spanning over five tracks. For further information, please visit our website at www.vmwaretechnologyexchange.com.

Don't miss the Networking Reception on Tuesday evening. This casual event will provide an exclusive opportunity to meet and network with VMware engineers, product managers, alliances managers, and other partners.

The special discount rate for staying at the Marriott expires on April 22nd, so be sure to make your reservations before it's too late. Register today!

Use registration code: VMsj08

Link: Four key takeaways from VMworld Europe: OEMs, Security, Automation, Virtual Desktops - The Console.

Posted by Réza Malekzadeh
Sr. Director, Product Marketing & Alliances

It is now just over a month since the very first VMworld Europe and now that the dust has settled it's a good time for us to share some of our thoughts on the show. There were a few key announcements at the event around new technologies we've been working on, all of which demonstrate just how far virtualization has come in terms of being accepted as a mainstream approach to computing.

Did you know that VMware is now offering email patch notifications for all of its products? From that page:

With this service, you will immediately be sent an email alert as soon as a patch or maintenance release becomes available on the VMware products you’ve purchased.

How does this work?  You can initiate this activity by selecting the Receive Patch/Maintenance Alerts link from our Support home page, providing your email address, and then, after verifying that we’ve got the right contact, you can select the product/s you would like notification on by selecting “Confirm Subscription” from within the email confirmation we will send you.

So click on the Receive Patch/Maintenance Alerts link. From there, you put in your email address. You'll soon get an email from vmwareteam@connect.vmware.com sent to your email where you click through to a form. There you can select different VMware products like so:

Note that you won't get announcements about major releases, only about patch releases and maintenance releases. (We send out major release announcements to large swaths of our ecosystem. Let me know if it would be convenient to get major release announcements coming out through these patch mailing lists as well.)

Anyway, when there is a patch release, you'll get another nice email from vmwareteam like this:

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Subject: ESX Server 2.5.4/ 2.5.5 New Patches Available
Release Date: 01/31/08
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

New patches are available for ESX Server 2.5.4 and 2.5.5. Please 
follow the instructions on the appropriate patch download page.

VMware ESX Server 2.5.4 Patch Download Page 
[http://www.vmware.com/download/esx/esx2_patches.html?elq=xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]

Upgrade Patch 15 (Security): fixes an issue with Samba, Python and 
the aacraid SCSI Driver. Fixes an issue with the reporting of the 
sysObjectId value by SNMP agents

VMware ESX Server 2.5.5 Patch Download Page 
[http://www.vmware.com/download/esx/esx2_patches.html?elq=xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]

Upgrade Patch 4 (Security): fixes an issue with Samba, Python and 
the aacraid SCSI Driver. Fixes an issue with the reporting of the 
sysObjectId value by SNMP agents

We expect the next patch release in late February 2008. If you have 
any questions, please contact support at 877-4-VMWARE.

Regards,
The VMware Team

More later on Communities Email Notifications and VMware marketing email subscription management.

Kenon Owens over at the new VMware: Virtual Reality blog takes on check box marketing. If you call something a "resource pool" if it's really just a bulk configuration option? Is an initial placement of a VM the same as DRS? Or for that matter, is quick migration really the same as VMotion?

Link: Can I have the Check, Please? | VMware: Virtual Reality.

So as you can see, they are trying to marginalize our advances by saying their minimal features are equivalent to our feature rich and fully baked products. Take a look at the table below and see if their capabilities warrant a check.

	Citrix XenServer Enterprise	Microsoft Hyper-V	VMware Infrastructure 3
Continuous Optimization - Across Physical Host Machines	-	-	√
Optimized Initial Placement of Virtual Environments on Power On	√	√	√
Distributed Power Management	-	-	√
Aggregate Collections of Hardware Resources for	-	-	√
Create Child Pools for dynamic resource distribution	-	-	√
Multi-VM Resource Guarantees	-	-	√
Live Migration of Virtual Environments	√	-	√

To be honest, though, check marks aren't enough. If we were simply selling "Speeds and Feeds" you would see that we blow the competition away, but at VMware, we aren't creating features, we are providing solutions. We are helping customers  solve their real world problems that go way beyond server consolidation.

Today we're pleased to announce the acquisition of Thinstall and its agentless application virtualization technology. Here is VMware's Warren Ponder on the significance on his Virtual Desktop Blog:

Where VMware VDI enables organizations to break the bind between the Desktop OS and physical desktops systems. Thinstall allows organizations to break the bind of the Desktop OS and the Applications. Combined organizations will be able to start delivering dynamic desktop environments and better manage desktop computing across the enterprise. With the ThinStall VOS - Virtual Operating System, organizations can easily package and deploy the most complex applicaitons without worrying about application conflicts or costly and challenging application sequencing operations.

For a deep dive, there is an hour-long video, podcasts, white papers, and some downloadable trials on the VMware site: VMware to Acquire Thinstall.

Brian Madden, noted desktop computing expert, calls it "a brilliant move": VMware buys Thinstall! What does it mean?

The key differentiator between Thinstall and the other products is that Thinstall is "agentless." It doesn't require any software agent to be pre-installed on a workstation before Thinstall-packaged applications can run.  ...

The most obvious place for Thinstall in VMware's solution stack is for use with their Windows XP and Windows Vista desktop delivery products, including their VDI solutions for server-based computing scenarios and VMware ACE for local computing scenarios. Thinstall is great here because the more apps you package with Thinstall, the less you have to build into your base Windows disk image that your desktop users will use.

Last September I wrote an article about the importance of a "stateless" desktop disk (which is important regardless of whether your users are running the desktop locally or remotely). Owning an application virtualization capability allows VMware to offer a more complete desktop delivery solution. ...

The bottom line is that it's no secret I think this is a brilliant move on VMware's part. (In fact I wrote "they might as well buy someone like ThinStall" in an article last October about whether VMware should focus more on applications.) What a great day in our industry!

Alessandro Perilli at virtualization.info: VMware Acquires Thinstall

Given the strong focus of Thinstall on Microsoft platforms, the acquisition seems to validate an important point, often emerging in surveys: large majority of virtual machines contain Windows guest OSes.

At the same time this acquition validates once and forever the fact that application virtualization is considered one the next mainstream technology for most major players ...

Do you have a blog or website and use Workstation or Fusion? We're starting a small pilot for a referral program and have a few slots left. You earn money for every online sale you drive. Drop me a line (jtroyer at vmware) if you're interested. Sorry, but you must be in the US to participate for now.

I'm working on my Facebook account last night (look for more VMware-related activity there; come on by!) when I hear "virtualization" and "data center" on the TV. That's unusual enough that my ears perk up and I reach for the Tivo remote to get the whole thing. Turns out PG&E has launched a new site, wecandothis.com, about energy efficiency. Part of the effort is in promoting their virtualization rebates for data centers that reduce their hardware footprint. Unfortunately, it's a crappy Flash site, so I can't point you directly to the virtualization video, but go there and click on the computer that labels itself "Server Virtualization" when your mouse hovers over it. The spot has some nice visuals and ends with a lonely rack in the data center you see to your right. Good stuff.

On a similar green theme, our campus was featured in today's San Jose Mercury News. Link: San Jose Mercury News - New VMWare campus is green, open and inviting.

Most companies want to foster collaboration among workers, but VMWare* also wants to make the most of the hilly Palo Alto site, where hundreds of trees already were growing. Kevin Burke, a partner with William McDonough, said that Greene was clear that VMWare's campus should enhance connections between people and with nature.

"We placed a great deal of emphasis on integration of the building with the landscape," he said, noting that 80 foot-tall redwoods and eucalyptus trees were saved, and even a heritage oak was boxed for two years during construction and then replanted. It is thriving. ...

As far as Greene is concerned, it's worth every penny. She wanted the campus to be as sustainable as possible, down to the cafeteria floor composed of recycled beer bottles and hardwood floors elsewhere on the campus that were saved from a Wisconsin barn once owned by Thomas Edison.

Among her favorite features, however, are the bridges, which allow employees to walk from building to building. She said she got the idea for bridges from one of Apple's Cupertino campuses.

"It's the feature that has gotten the most feedback as to why people enjoy it," Burke said. "People can get up from their desk and go for a walk. It's a marvelous stroll. Plus, there's something fun about walking across a bridge."

Windows, too, were given high priority, not only for their ability to let in light, but also fresh air. At VMWare, 750 windows open and close.

Love the new campus, the bridges, and our windows that actually open. Ah, fresh air. It can get pretty bright, so I'm seeing umbrellas, tarps, and other light-blocking strategies crop up.

The interior layout is also good, but a little twisty when you're trying to give directions. Although there's a lobby for visitors with a cool waterfall, the rest of the place has no 'front' and no long corridors or other thoroughfares through the buildings. Every building mixes engineering with other groups, so there's a great mix of people as you zig-zag across the campus.

*p.s. VMware, not VMWare, please. Doesn't the SJ Mercury News have copy editors?

Spooky, scary virtualization videos for your Halloween pleasure. For more technical and industry news, check out Planet V12n -- never a shortage of good stuff.

The Night of the Bleeping Pager

The horror of an unvirtualized datacenter! The relief of VMware Infrastructure 3!

Virtualization nightmares!

VMware technology as anti-anxiety prescription?

OK, the "Hi, I'm a Mac" parodies are reaching their 'sell by' date, but this one is amusing. Not part of the video contest and I have no idea who did it.

Notice anything different around here? We've put up some new curtains and rearranged the furniture. The VMware website has been completely renovated. We hope you like it and find it useful.

Along with the new paint, notice that we've reorganized. The five main tabs along the top of the page now contain the major sections of the site.

VMware. This is the main section, with information on  VMware, our products and services, and our partners. Here you can also learn more about virtualization in general.

Communities. This section gathers together the VMware Technology Network discussion forums as well as other communities where VMware, our customers, and our partners can all interact. Blogs are also in this section, both from VMware as well as the greater virtualization blogosphere.

Virtual Appliances Marketplace. The VAM finally gets its own tab. Learn more about virtual appliances, and then download any of the over 550 virtual appliances, including production-ready appliances for your virtual infrastructure.

Store. Purchase products and support as well as manage your account, licenses, and contracts.

Support. Everything you need to successfully deploy and manage your virtualization infrastructure, including documentation, the knowledge base, and tools to interact with our support organization.

Everything that was here should still be here, so please poke around a bit if we've moved a side table or lamp. If you notice problems or can't find something, please use this website feedback form. That's the most direct way of reaching the web team. Feel free to leave general comments, both positive and negative, here on this blog post.

Led by the web team, an entire swath of VMware has worked to make this happen, including corporate marketing, sales operations, IT applications, IT operations, and QA. We're proud of the new site and we hope whatever you need is both easier to find and easier to use -- and looks better as well.

-- John on behalf of the team

p.s. If I can get her to stand still, next week I'll try to get Sindy Braun, senior director of web marketing, to say a few words here on the blog about the design philosophies and motivations that went into the redesign.

Robert Scoble interviews VMware co-founder and chief scientist Mendel Rosenblum:

An interesting 30 minute interview from PodTech's ScobleShow that starts with an overview of what VMware does and goes on from there about solving challenges in the data center, how virtualization on the desktop helped VMware move into the data center, virtual appliances, and how virtualization can help security. Link: A talk with VMWare's lead geek | PodTech.net.

In a companion piece, Mendel and VMware engineer Min Xu give a demo of Record/Replay, and then show a brand new demo: first they record a run of program with a bug, hit the bug, and then they re-run those same machine instructions, but this time running through an assert-enabled version of exactly the same code. This time the patched-in asserts in the code catch the bug, and they can then start their debugger and see exactly what happened. Yow. Is this the end of the heisenbug?

Link: Demo of VMWare's latest virtualization technology | PodTech.net.

Everyone has a great story to tell. Why not tell us yours?

Virtualization is helping businesses simplify how they manage their IT infrastructure, more effectively leverage their existing computing investments and respond faster to changing business demands. Here is your chance to tell the world how virtualization has changed your life or the great things you are doing with VMware products.

Capture the excitement and buzz around virtualization as a 1-2 minute video and enter it in the VMware Video Contest for your chance to win great prizes!

Link: Video Contest for Virtualization Stories - VMware.

A full day of virtualization in your city: Please click to enlarge or register Atlanta June 12, 2007 Chicago May 31, 2007 Dallas June 19, 2007 Toronto June 14, 2007 Washington D.C. June 06, 2007 » Register Now

Welcome to  VMware Symposia 2007

Discover why over 20,000 IT organizations use VMware virtualization products to address business objectives such as consolidating servers, optimizing IT resources, reducing power and cooling costs, enabling cost-effective disaster recovery and reducing desktop management costs.

VMware is bringing together virtualization experts, customers, partners and industry analysts to provide you with a one-day virtualization event including educational tracks, networking opportunities and live demos.

The full day will ensure you can:

• DISCOVER how virtualization increases utilization rates for x86 servers from your current 5% to over 60%. Provision new applications in seconds, not days;
• CONNECT with virtualization experts, customers, partners and industry analysts. See live demos of virtualization solutions; and
• VIRTUALIZE your IT department and  create a more flexible and dynamic IT environment.

Leave the day with free software to jump start your plans to virtualize your IT infrastructure.

Don't miss the regional virtualization event of  the year!

Register today.

[If you attend the symposia and blog about it, feel free to drop me a line or leave a comment and I'll try to link to you. Apologies in advance to everyone on the west coast and outside the US. --jtroyer at vmware]

[Updated with more reviews below.]

Scott Lowe and Bob Roudebush and give us two views on the beta of The Product Codenamed VMware Fusion on the Mac:

Scott Lowe liked the performance:

I had a fully functional installation of Windows XP Professional up and running in less than 15 minutes.  (I kid you not.)  The installation was faster than any physical/non-virtual installation I’d performed.  I was astounded.  While Windows XP was installing, I flipped over and surfed the web, checked e-mail, helped my wife with some font designs, and checked my RSS subscriptions—all without any noticeable performance impact.  (In fact, the Windows XP virtual machine is still running right now as I post this blog entry.)

Bob also liked the product. It was able to handle everything he threw at it -- Windows XP, SUSE Linux 10, a downloaded virtual appliance -- and he liked the attention to detail. He did wonder if the product was too simplified:

From what I have seen with “Fusion”, it’s this use case that the VMware development team has focused on in building the product. Instead of building a very complicated, console-looking application with lots of knobs, levers and switches, they opted for a very “Mac” feel. “Fusion” has a very simple UI (screenshot to left) that removes much of the complexity of VM management. The creation of a new virtual machine is achieved through a very simple wizard which guides the user through configuring the virtual machine and setting options such as memory usage, processor count, disk size, etc. ...

I wonder, though, that for a lot of potential users of “Fusion” that the interface doesn’t provide enough access to the product’s functionality. I know many IT administrators and developers that have “made the switch” to Mac, for example. They will want to run Windows and other OSes on OS X using products like Fusion. They will also want to be able to leverage some of the more advanced capabilities of the product without resorting to editing configuration files. When I downloaded a virtual appliance from VMTN, for example, it required some modification of the Ubuntu virtual machine’s VMX configuration file to make the ethernet connection work properly.

We've been keeping quiet on purpose until now, but now that we're in a private beta, feel free to link to any other reviews that are out there in the comments of this post. Substantive comments from beta testers on the products should probably be left in the appropriate newsgroup to ensure the product team sees them. You can register for future beta phases here.

Update: Powerpedia likes the feature set:

Drag and drop between guest and host was also awesome looking.  Parallels has nothing like that. The VMware product also appears to have better USB support. Using the iSight camera in the VM was nifty but with iChat and Skype on the Mac natively i don't know what i would use it for. Well maybe the Cisco video conferencing software with Call Manager so it might be worth it. If i can get my Treo 700P to sync to the VM on my Mac with Fusion i will be completely sold. I cannot get Parallels to do that even with the latest build.

I will say that i am a bit biased for the VMware product (just because of the interoperability with their other products), so unless Fusion really sucks i will be using it. That doesn't mean that i won't be critical of it if i have issues with it!

Diane Greene will be speaking at Tuesday morning's keynote at VMworld. A few weeks back, here's what SKMurphy took home from Diane's talk at TiE. At VMworld, she'll be speaking about virtualization, but TiE is an entrepreneurial association, and so her remarks were more on building VMware the company (which, by the way, is a great place to work):

 

• Users evangelize users, at several key points in its history, VMware has seen it’s growth hit a new take-off point because its users cared enough to make it happen. 6,000 users have signed up for VMworld.
• Open communication keeps everyone on the same page (and moving forward): every Wednesday the company would buy lunch and have an open communication forum to cover recent events, plans, and allow employees to air concerns and issues.
  
• If your technology isn’t evolving fast enough, give it away. In particular when you are in a deathmatch market with Microsoft, neutralize one of their common tactics of giving away technology by giving away your products that are not moving fast enough.
  
• Continually invest in high quality IT infrastructure: it’s the basis for communication, coordination, and collaboration in any high technology firm.
  
• Server Virtualization (consolidating many applications onto one server by leveraging virtualization technology) is more about cutting power consumption and saving floorspace than saving hardware cost. Power has  become the single largest component of the total cost of ownership of hardware.