VMTN Blog

Are you a Workstation Zealot? Rob Baesman writes on the new blog. Link: And now for something completely different...

Us "old-school" folks at VMware are finally getting into the 21st century and starting a up what we hope will be a great new source of news, information and amusement for the millions of Workstation faithful out there.  From time to time, you'll see postings from various developers in the team on interesting technical topics, thoughts on industry developments, highlighted use cases, beta announcements, insights into life in the Workstation trenches, and more.

How will this blog be different from other assorted VMware blogs? Well, if you're someone who cares enough about Workstation to read a blog about it, you can probably consider yourself officially "hard-core" :-)  So we'll do our best to keep things lively with the sort of info that takes your clearly superior intelligence into account.  If we're lucky, even I'll be befuddled by some of what our development team will have to say, so stay tuned!

And to go with the new blog, a brand-new shiny public beta of Workstation 6.5, together with a newly-designed beta community.

What's New in VMware Workstation 6.5:

• Use Unity to integrate your guest apps with your host
• More Powerful VM Record and Replay
• Support for Smart Cards & Smart Card Readers
• Enhanced ACE Authoring
• Link State Propagation Networking
• Improved 3D graphics Support

Enjoy. There is also an ACE 2.5 beta portal as well -- more on that later.

Warren Ponder announces the availability of the Pocket Ace Guide.

Pocket ACE enables an ACE Administrator to deploy ACE instances using portable media devices such as USB keys (flash memory drives), Apple iPod mobile digital devices, or portable hard drives. When an ACE instance is deployed, you can attach the portable device to any x86-based host computer to run the ACE instance. When you finish using an ACE instance, you can shut down, detach the media, take it with you, and restart your session by attaching the portable media device to another host. ...

Along with the technical details, this tech note spends about a page discussing some interesting use cases:

• providing secure remote access for users working remotely using untrusted hosts
• increasing the security and mobility of mobile users
• providing temporary access to contract workers using untrusted hosts
• providing access to offshore outsource partners
• providing disaster recovery
• distributing beta or trial software

The ACE 2 public beta started this week. Although much of the attention was focused on Pocket ACE, there's actually quite a bit of new functionality in this long-awaited release. Warren Ponder from the VMware desktop team gives his perspective:

I wanted to take a few seconds and mention the ACE 2.0 Beta is now live. Everyone has been hard at work getting this release ready. All the hard work and feedback from customers is really starting to payoff.

Existing customers and potential new customers have a ton of new features and enhancements to look forward too. Here are my top three favorites.

• ACE Management Server Appliance – The ACE Management server appliance is a true virtual appliance. It comes packaged as a virtual machine, with the OS and management server pre-installed and ready to go. This approach greatly reduces the time to deployment in your environment. No OS or applications to install. Simply power on, configure through the web based management interface and your done.

• Pocket ACE – With Pocket ACE you can now deploy ACE’s to a USB flash stick using a simple wizard. Once distributed, an ACE user simply plugs their USB stick into any available system to access their ACE instance.

• ACE Management Server Help Desk – The new Help Desk feature allows users to submit problems for common issues such as lost passwords and expired ACE instances. Using this allows an administrator or help desk to quickly respond to an issue a user might be having that is preventing them from working.

There are a lot of other new features a well, including expanded Linux distributions supported as guests, and Linux being supported as a host. There is also the ability now to join Windows clients to a domain remotely over a secure VPN connecting and much, much more.

We also wanted to thank the customers that have been testing the beta already and providing us extremely valuable feedback so far.  We would like to invite everyone interested to come join the beta, participate in the ACE 2.0 beta forums, and give your feedback and suggestions.

Warren Ponder
Senior Technical Marketing Engineer
Enterprise Desktop Products and Solutions
VMware

Techworld's Manek Dubah on VMworld, covering new features in Workstation, ACE, and Mendel Rosenblum's keynote: VMware reveals new product features.

The new version [of ACE] was created, according to VMware, because users asked for greater control over the VMs, especially when, for instance, large numbers of remote users need to attach to the enterprise network. Other areas due for improvement include security and integration with enterprise management tools. ...

Central control is achieved by means of a new product, ACE Management Server, which provides a central view of and control over ACE VMs. The VMs have to check into the server at admin-defined intervals, which allows them to control attributes such as expiry date f the VM, and what it can attach to.

ACE VMs will also be able to run from a USB flash drive, providing amore convenient mechanism for their distribution.