Hello, Is there anybody out there????
Mike and I have both recently joined the VMware Workstation product management team and want to intorduce ourselves, revitalize this blog and get in touch with our fellow zealots!
We are both very excited to be working on the Workstation product. We have been using this application on Linux and Windows for many years and have personally used it for software development, QA, customer support, training and product demos as well as a few other things that we probably shouldn’t mention.
Workstation is an exceptionally cool product that wins awards like Infoworld’s 2009 best product of the year !!! (We would like to take credit for this, but the development team did all the work before either of us joined.) It also has a very caffeinated and loyal user community who find interesting ways to push the envelope with VMs like trying the early versions of Windows 7, Replay Debugging nasty problems and protecting internet users everywhere (including our moms)
We plan to make frequent posts to this blog (the Fusion team is making us look bad…) with product usage tips, links to other “creative” works and occasionally we may slip up and share a little bit of insider information on what we are thinking or new features that we are considering….
In addition to this blog, Mike and I are becoming active in the Workstation communities. If you have product suggestions, want to brag about something unparalleled that you have done, or show off your encyclopedic knowledge of everything virtual… we look forward to hearing from you!
Jason Joel and Mike Paiko
Posted by Jason Joel on March 13, 2009 | Permalink |
Oh i'm sure there's lots of workstation geeks out there.
Everyone uses workstation for testing, development, etc and in my ICT course I use it for the computer security class we get given an image of some OS and then we hack into it and do things you'd never want to do on a real machine.
But i've found a better use for it which is largely overlooked on the desktop - making my system more reliable. In only 2 years a laptop a poor student can afford goes from being barely capaible of running vista to more powerful than the server at my former employer (core 2, 8Gb ram). For my classes I create a team suitable for whatever the class is on for example in web programming I have a server VM running ubuntu server and a client machine running vista. But there's a 3rd VM in the picture which I leave always running in the background. I run this as a file server and domain controller and all work from the other VMs is saved to it as well as from the host.
The missing peice of the pizzle is i'd like to be able to start up this 3rd VM at boot time so the host can be a domain member. Normally one would use VMware server for this. But server cannot report battery information to the guests, which I need. On a laptop client members of a team need to shut down first, then server members of the team, the main server image and finally the host machine when the battery goes flat.
While you guys recommend suspending VMs before suspending the host i've found sleep in windows vista works perfectly fine without doing so, the caveat with this is the VMs eaither need to have time syncronization turned on or be running the descheduled time accounting service. If there is active directory involved the different VMs having a different idea of what the time is, everything stops working.
If anyone knows how to load and run a particular VM at boot in the background, i'd love to know!
Posted by: Maria Welborn | March 13, 2009 at 10:40 PM
Your design makes me uncomfortable. http://www.conrey.org/?p=258
Posted by: Theron Conrey | March 20, 2009 at 03:14 PM