Link: DanteDog's Virtualization Blog: High Availability for VCMS? It's Clustered!.

Recently VMware Technical Support Posted KB Article 1006803 which shows a supported method for clustering VirtualCenter Management Server 2.5 using Microsoft Clustering Service. It isn't the only way supported, and VMware Support will work with you if you are trying a clustering method that is a little different, but this is one documented method.

A detailed description and reference, along with screenshots and steps, is provided on our new VI:OPS site (which just went live) in DOC-1111.

Thanks to everyone for you hard work and contributions to our VI Toolkit Scripting contest.

Now the time has come to announce our winners!

First Prize: Our first prize, a trip to VMworld, goes to LucD for his script, which is a really cool Guest Provisioning System.

I really like Luc's application because it very easily lets you clone lots of VMs, while giving you control over a lot of the parameters that are frustratingly manual when you try to do them with other VMware tools. Not only that, but you can queue up tens or even hundreds of clone jobs and run them all with the press of a button. This is especially useful since cloning VMs can take a really long time.

Not only that, but as you can see above, this is not just some script meant to be run on a grainy old CRT terminal, it's a full fledged UI. Speaking of its really cool UI, Bruce Payette, one of the key designers of PowerShell and author of the book PowerShell in Action, had this to say about it: "This is exactly the kind of application we were thinking about when we made PowerShell able to work with WinForms."

Those of us who follow the VI Toolkit for Windows community know Luc quite well, as he has contributed countless great scripts and has really made a difference to a lot of people. So again, congratulations to Luc and we hope to see you in Vegas!

Second Prize: Second prize, a Macbook air, goes to tzamora for his script, VMware Infrastructure Power Documenter. This script makes some really nice reports about VI and outputs them as OpenXML documents that can be read in your favorite word processor or spreadsheet. Here's a sample.

Here's what Bruce had to say about this script: "Very nice report generation tool, using OpenXML with templating, Excellent use of “meta” programming with paragraph and sentence functions. Fully parameterized so it can be used from other scripts. Well documented. Both useful and reusable."

Tzamora is something of a newcomer to the VMware PowerShell world, in fact this winning entry was tzamora's first post on our forums. Congratulations to you, whoever you are!

Third Prize: And Dan Baskette is the proud owner of our third prize, an XBox 360 Elite, for his script powerVDI. Dan's script can let you create thousands of virtual desktops instantly, consuming the space of one (assuming you have the right hardware).

Here's what Lee Holmes, author of the Windows PowerShell Cookbook had to say about it: "Automates a very complex scale-out task, and combines a lot of technology (VMWare, Putty, AD, etc) into a single PowerShell task. Offers interactive use, unattended scripting. For high-scale clusters, this would be an enormous time-saver. This script really demonstrates the super-glue nature of PowerShell."

Great work Dan!

Honorable Mentions:

I wanted to make a few honorable mentions because there really was a lot of great stuff contributed. We saw a lot of scripts around reporting, including our second prize winner -- obviously this is a big concern for everyone. I wanted to point out my personal favorite reporting script, Alan Renouf's "Report into MS Word". While Bruce mentioned that Power Reporter was a great example of meta-programming (I'm taking his word on it), I loved Alan's script because it produces a report with lots of pretty charts and graphs. This is one script everyone should check out.

Hal Rottenberg also nominated slx86's CloneVDI. As Hal mentions, this script really demonstrates the full power of the VMware Web Services API.

Each honorable mentionee will receive a VMware shirt and a VMware coffee mug.

Congratulations to all our winners, and thanks again to everyone for all your great contributions!

Link: VMworld.com: Veeam Expert Session.

Considerations and Solutions for VMware Backup & Recovery

September 1-12, 2008

		Watch a flash video presentation, view related documents and ask questions in a discussion with Doug Hazelman, Director of Global Systems Engineering, Veeam.
Join this Expert Session

Come tour the new virtual pavilion and see the booth layout and navigation. Visit virtual exhibitor booths, online services and engage with other community members. Find hidden areas in the virtual pavilion to discover prize codes to use online or to bring by the Communities and Bloggers Lounge for a free community T-shirt.

They'll be rolling out new features throughout the next two weeks...

VMworld Virtual Pavilion

going to be announced later today. But since I have your attention, I wanted to mention two blogs that any PowerShell enthusiast should be subscribed to:

First is PeetersOnline.nl by Hugo Peeters. Hugo's been running a "Helpful Script of the day" feature for a while now, and there's a lot of really useful stuff there, such as:

• Finding where your VMDKs are hiding.
• Keeping VM names in sync with their guest names.
• Changing the behavior of the power off button do always do a soft shutdown rather than a hard powerdown.

And Hugo also talks about our VMware Update Manager cmdlets along with an example that will help you figure out which updates your ESX host is lacking.

Next is Virtu-Al by Alan Renouf. Alan has a really amazing script that will generate a VI report in MS Word, which he entered into our contest. The results are really incredible. In addition to that, Alan has a lot of other PowerShell tips and tricks collected from all over, such as an automated way to change DNS and WINS all over the place.

Anyway, stay tuned for our contest winner announcement!

Some users had reported slowness when using the Get-VM cmdlet. The reason turned out to be an odd quirk in querying some types of network adapters, so many people weren't affected at all. On the other hand, if you were affected, it was pretty annoying. To address this we've released Update 1 of our toolkit. If you've had trouble with Get-VM, download it things will go a lot smoother. One user reported that his queries went from more than 5 minutes to just over 10 seconds -- a world of difference!

This is the only change we made to the toolkit, so don't expect lots of new functionality when you download, you'll have to wait a bit longer for that. If you haven't had any trouble with 1.0 it's perfectly fine to keep using it until the next release.

Also, many of you are probably eagerly anticipating the results of our scripting contest. I want to thank everyone for participating and point out that the entries are now open to the public. Check it out, there's a lot of really great stuff in there.

Jason Wiley tries out the Virtual Appliance Import feature in VirtualCenter. OVF really takes the virtual appliance concept to a new (and better) level.

Link: VirtuallyCrazy: Importing OVF File From the Internet in VirtualCenter.

Once this process is complete you have a virtual machine configured with the manufacturer reccomended specifications with almost no effort. I'm really impressed with this process.   Hopefully application vendors will embrace this format as the new way to deploy test machines.   If this is embraced widely in the consumer level virtualization products, this will be a boon for IT people studying for certification exams at home as well.

Today on the VMware Communities Roundtable, we had an Ask The Experts session with live callers. As is typical of these kinds of things, the discussion was wide-ranging but lively. I'd like to thank both the roundtable panel as well as the two dozen or so folks who joined us live on the call.

To listen, click on the right or download the mp3. (1:04) Feeds: RSS, iTunes

Next week, same bat-time, same bat-channel. The topic is VMworld, VMworld predictions, and anything else that comes up.

Show notes:

• Announcing VI:OPS, a community for operationalizing VI
  
  • site: http://viops.vmware.com/
  • RSS feed
  • Oracle RAC on ESX from Tim Hall
• Preventing VM sprawl on IT Knowledge Exchange
• A new generation of management tools?
  • Google knows everything — even virtualization
  • VKernel Releases SearchMyVM, Free 'Google-Like' Search Utility for VMware ESX Server Environments
  • BlueBear and Kodiak
  • Introducing Hyper9
  • Search engine for virtual sprawl - vmware app for splunk
• NFS vs VMFS
  • VMFS vs. NFS for VMware Infrastructure? VMware Storage Blog
  • Openfiler
  • Create an NFS Share on Windows 2003 for ESX from VMware eLearning. Part 2. Part 3.
  • Using Windows-based NFS in VI3
  • Communities thread on Windows NFS and ESX 3.5
  • Setting up Windows Services For UNIX (SFU) NFS
  • Storage VMotion and 10Gb Ethernet support for iSCSI SAN's
• Storage VMotion and Plug-ins
  • Storage VMotion plug-in
  • vmpmotion.pl
  • official VMware VC plug-in documentation
• VI Toolkit (for Windows) PowerShell scripting contest entries
  • New startup integrates PowerShell in VMware VirtualCenter Client
• VMware and SVVP
  
  • VMware ESX is the Industry’s First Hypervisor to be Validated by Microsoft, Offers Customers Expanded Support Options for Microsoft Applications - VMware
  • chriswolf.com
  • I should clarify what we said on the podcast about apps vs OSes. There were two parts to the recent announcements. The first part was about support on validated hypervisors. Although 31 applications are now be included in the SVVP, the support offered by this program from the beginning covered the operating systems (see here). The second part was about transfering application licenses. This included 41 applications that can now transfer their licenses during a VMotion, but server operating system licenses are not included. See Chris Wolf's blog for a better explanation: Interpreting Microsoft's Revised Virtualization Licensing Policy
• RCLI
  • ESX vs ESXi kb: http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1006543
  • RCLI documentation
• VI Client Open Console Attempt Fails
  • The most likely possibility was this: The OS on which the VIC resides must be able to resolve not only the VC server but also each ESX Server. If they can not resolve via name the ESX servers you get this message. This is regardless of whether VC can resolve the name. However, proxying fixes this problem. Another fix is to add the information to the static hosts file.
  • However, a guest on the call had the same problem, and fixed it by  disconnecting the ESX server from VC cluster, restarting the agent on ESX server, and then reconnecting.
• Hmm, looking at the chat transcript, I see we missed at least two questions: ESX and deduplication and in regard to the previous problem if there is a good DNS healthcheck tool. We'll save those for later, I guess.

Thanks everybody! It was a great call.

With Desktop Virtualization and Unity, it really doesn't matter what operating system your applications want to run on. Case in point: the new Google Chrome browser, which is only Windows-flavored for the moment. Link: VMware: Team Fusion: Google Chrome for Mac: It’s Already Here, and It’s Smoking Fast.

Safari 3.1.2:

Firefox for Mac 3.0.1:

Google Chrome Beta on VMware Fusion:

What’s even cooler, is that if you wanted to, using VMware Fusion 2’s Application Sharing features (you can watch a demo video here) means that you could make Google Chrome your default browser for *all* web links you click on in your Mac.

There was a lot of chatter yesterday about Google’s new web browser, called “Chrome” and its potential impact on the workings of the Web.  Almost equally loud was some of the chatter amongst Mac users osut there about how Chrome is only shipping for installation on Windows right now.

As we’ve noted in the past, like with Photosynth for the Mac and Worldwide Telescope for the Mac, these apps already run on the Mac, with the help of VMware Fusion.

But people still have this misconception that running in a virtual machine will mean that an application won’t run quickly.  This is why we’ve spent so much time making sure that VMware Fusion runs fast and light on your Mac.

How does this relate to Chrome?  Well, I got to play around with it yesterday on my demo MacBook Air, installing it in a Windows XP virtual machine with 512 MB of RAM assigned, running on VMware Fusion 2 Release Candidate 1. 

And based on some of the blog posts that were flying around today about JavaScript rendering speeds—which is supposed to be one of the big innovations of Chrome—I thought I’d compare the results of Google Chrome for Windows, Safari 3.1.2 for Mac , and Firefox 3.0.1 for Mac on the widely used “SunSpider” Javascript rendering benchmark.

Now, keep in mind that this is only one type of benchmark, and browser performance depends a lot on what sites you visit, and what you’re doing.  However, it was still pretty neat to see how smoking fast Chrome was, running on that XP VM in VMware Fusion 2.

The results, from slowest to fastest to run through all the tests: Safari for Mac, then Firefox for Mac, then Chrome for Windows, running in the VMware Fusion 2 RC1 VM.s

Safari 3.1.2:

Firefox for Mac 3.0.1:

Google Chrome Beta on VMware Fusion:

What’s even cooler, is that if you wanted to, using VMware Fusion 2’s Application Sharing features (you can watch a demo video here) means that you could make Google Chrome your default browser for *all* web links you click on in your Mac.  That is, if you wanted to do some immersion testing yourself.

Pretty neat stuff!

Good answer to a frequently asked question on the new VMware Storage Blog. Click through for a nice quick read.

Link: VMware: VMware Storage Blog: VMFS vs. NFS for VMware Infrastructure?.

The dynamic, flexible environment that we call VMware Infrastructure requires shared, coordinated storage between ESX servers. There are two families of storage technologies that can meet this requirement today, SAN-based block storage (e.g. Fibrechannel or iSCSI) and NAS. VMware supports both forms of storage access for our customers. ...

So which to use? The first criteria is to continue to use the type of storage infrastructure you are familiar with. If your organization uses block based storage – use VMFS.  If NAS is in use, it may make more sense to deploy VMware Infrastructure with NFS. Other aspects of storage management, such as the basic virtualization of storage on behalf of the VM or the internal structure of the virtual disk files (VMDK) are handled independently of this choice.  You get the same high level VI functionality regardless.

For new deployments, there are the traditional storage tradeoffs. ...

     The dynamic, flexible environment that we call VMware Infrastructure requires shared, coordinated storage between ESX servers. There are two families of storage technologies that can meet this requirement today, SAN-based block storage (e.g. Fibrechannel or iSCSI) and NAS. VMware supports both forms of storage access for our customers.

    VMFS is VMware’s technology for managing block storage. It is a clustered file system used by multiple ESX Servers to coordinate and share access to the underlying block storage. It was explicitly designed to enhance the performance and reduce the complexity of block storage as it relates to virtual infrastructure. VMFS is responsible for two broad functions in the ESX storage subsystem.

1. Structured data layout – VMFS defines the structure and layout of data on the block devices. VMFS is optimized for virtual disk storage, but as is common to most file systems, VMFS brings a file and directory structure to the on-disk data. Most importantly, VMFS handles the layout of individual vmdk files (these are the virtual disks that are eventually presented to the VMs). VMFS also has some basic layout or volume management functions – presenting and managing combinations of multiple block storage devices (LUNs) as a single VMFS volume.
2. Clustering - The second and vitally important feature of VMFS is support for sharing or clustering. VMFS is responsible for the coordination of multiple independent ESX servers safely reading and writing to the same block device. It is VMFS which handles the basic safe transfer of ownership of data from server to server during high level VI activities such as vmotion, DRS, storage vmotion, HA, etc.

    NFS is a NAS (Network Attached Storage) or file based protocol and is used to establish a client-server relationship between the ESX hosts and the NAS device. As opposed to block storage, a NAS system itself is responsible for managing the  layout and structure of the files and directories on the physical storage.  It also handles some of the aspects of shared access and provides primitives that can be used for coordinated access from multiple servers. ESX uses these primitives to provide similar shared access for VMware Infrastructure as is provided by VMFS in the block storage case.

    So which to use? The first criteria is to continue to use the type of storage infrastructure you are familiar with. If your organization uses block based storage – use VMFS.  If NAS is in use, it may make more sense to deploy VMware Infrastructure with NFS. Other aspects of storage management, such as the basic virtualization of storage on behalf of the VM or the internal structure of the virtual disk files (VMDK) are handled independently of this choice.  You get the same high level VI functionality regardless.

    For new deployments, there are the traditional storage tradeoffs. SAN or block based storage is a well understood infrastructure choice, has a great deal of existing physical management tools and may offer optimal performance. NAS-based storage has a reputation for less complexity and is in many ways easier to manage and setup than block based storage. And for some VM workloads, the performance of NAS is comparable to SAN.  Individual NAS and SAN products may offer advanced data management features that become even more valuable with Virtual Infrastructure such as data de-duplication and thin provisioning.

As with many of VMware's virtualization features, we place a great deal of emphasis on the encapsulated VM abstraction. Consistent with this philosophy, the virtual disks that are presented to virtual machines are an idealized and highly portable view of storage which is independent of the backing storage implementation. ESX handles both storage technologies in a fashion that continues to maintain this portability of the VM. With ESX and VMware Infrastructure, one can move VMs between storage technologies quite easily and now with Storage Vmotion, that portability even applies to live running workloads, offering customers the freedom to readily switch between NAS or block storage as they see fit.

________________________________________

Link: VMware ESX is the Industry’s First Hypervisor to be Validated by Microsoft, Offers Customers Expanded Support Options for Microsoft Applications - VMware.

PALO ALTO, Calif. – Sept 3, 2008 -- VMware, Inc. (NYSE: VMW), the global leader in virtualization solutions from the desktop to the datacenter, today announced it has qualified its industry-leading VMware ESX hypervisor under the Microsoft Server Virtualization Validation Program (SVVP). VMware ESX 3.5 update 2 (ESX 3.5u2) is the first hypervisor to be listed under the program, providing VMware customers who run Windows Server and Microsoft applications with access to cooperative support from Microsoft and VMware. ...

Microsoft’s Server Virtualization Validation Program enables VMware and other software providers to test and validate their virtualization software to run Windows Server 2008 and previous versions of Windows Server. Under this program, Microsoft offers cooperative technical support to customers running Windows Server on validated, non-Microsoft server virtualization software, such as VMware ESX 3.5 update 2. Customers with support policies in place, and running Windows Server-based applications on VMware ESX 3.5u2, can receive cooperative technical support from Microsoft. VMware also offers an extra layer of protection for customers, outside of Microsoft’s Server Virtualization Validation Program, who work directly with VMware for support. The additional protection is a part of the VMware Premier Support contract with Microsoft that enables VMware to escalate application issues rapidly and work directly with Microsoft engineers to expedite resolution.

A ESXi trifecta from Eric Siebert:

1. Link: Installing and configuring VMware ESXi. A good place to get started.
2. Link: Two ways to patch VMware ESXi Installable.
3. Bonus links: http://vmware-land.com/Vmware_Links.html#ESXi
   • Here's a good one. Comparison of ESX and ESXi: http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1006543

(If you are a blogger or even just making up a newsletter for the office, please don't steal Eric's links wholesale without credit. He spends a great deal of time on the VMware Communities and in the blogs finding these links, organizing them, culling the old ones, etc. So respect, ok?)

We're trying something a little different on tomorrow's VMware Community Roundtable podcast. In the spirit of VMworlds past and session PO1861 from VMworld 2008, we are having an "Ask the VMTN Experts" session. Our roundtable panel is more-or-less the same people that will be on the panel at VMworld, all user moderators from the VMware Communities -- and they pretty much know when you're about to shoot yourself in the foot, because they've seen the bullet holes in many shoes.

So now's a great time to ask them a question  -- design, troubleshooting, or even just to talk about a recent thread or blog post. It'll also give you a good excuse to say hi at VMworld.

Other ways to ask a question:

• Go here while the call is going on, and click to join the call (you can do it as a guest). You'll get a chat window with a streaming audio. Listen to the audio, ask via the chat.
• Email me before the call (jtroyer @ vmware)
• PM any of the panel members/user modeators before the call: I'm not sure who is going to be there, but the usual suspects are: Texiwill, esiebert7625, jasonboche, sbeaver, juchestyle, Dave.Mishchenko, and sometimes tom howarth, Ken.Cline, and kix1979.

Hope to see you on the call.

"On-Time & On-Budget SAP Upgrade at EFI Using VMware Infrastructure"
VMware customer EFI provides a detailed look at how VMware virtualization allowed it to run double the number of test cycles during an SAP upgrade, helping to keep the project on budget and enabling it to be completed in four months instead of the planned six.
(Date: Wednesay 9/10, 5:15 pm)

See you in Las Vegas,

Christoph Reisbeck
Director SAP Alliance
VMware

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Have I mentioned how VMware tends to slip more features into its products during the beta cycle? It's like Christmas every day around here. You think you've poked and shaken all the boxes in your parents' closet and know what's coming, and then the shiny new bike shows up in front of the tree. Today's shiny bike is a free year of virus protection for your XP or Vista VMs that you can invoke from the Fusion toolbar. There are other new features in the  RC, which you can read about here: VMware: Team Fusion: VMware Fusion 2 Goes Release Candidate: Embedded Antivirus Software, Enhanced Localization, and More.

VMware Fusion 2 Release Candidate 1 is now freely available for download.

Just like VMware Fusion 2 Beta 1 and VMware Fusion 2 Beta 2, the RC is free to download.  VMware Fusion 2 will be a free, downloadable upgrade for all VMware Fusion 1.x customers, when released.

Building on great features like Multiple Snapshots and AutoProtect automatic, timed snapshots that keep your Windows-on-Mac experience as safe as possible, VMware Fusion 2 RC also includes an embedded complimentary 12-month subscription to McAfee VirusScan Plus to make sure your Windows XP and Vista stay squeaky clean.

You can install VirusScan Plus right from the VMware Fusion menu bar, from the moment you create a new virtual machine, meaning you’re always protected.

Record Replay, the technology that allows you to reproduce what's going on in a virtual machine with machine-level instructions, has been shown off at VMworlds past, but is just now coming into its own. You could experiment with it a bit in Workstation 6.0, but it is now available in a useful way in VMware Workstation 6.5, (in beta but has a new Release Candidate). Let's let E Lewis introduce it in his new blog. Link: Better Software Development with Replay Debugging: VMware Workstation 6.5: Reverse and Replay Debugging is Here!.

I'm proud to announce that VMware Workstation 6.5 includes new experimental features that provide replay debugging for C/C++ developers using Microsoft Visual Studio. Replay debugging allows developers to debug recordings of programs running in virtual machines, and it is valuable for finding, diagnosing, and fixing bugs that are not easily reproduced, a particularly challenging class of bugs. Once the manifestation of a bug has been recorded, it can be replayed (and debugged) over and over again, and it is guaranteed to have instruction-by-instruction identical behavior each time. In addition, Workstation includes a feature that simulates reverse execution of the program, making it easier to pin point the origin of a bug.

Aside from being insanely cool and perhaps the end of the heisenbug, I think this shows how VMware's 10 years of experience manifests itself in innovation. Virtualization is about more than server consolidation, and once you are virtualized, the really interesting things can start to happen.

Here's E demonstrating how this works. I think the UI has changed a bit since we filmed this. We're running Visual Studio on the host, outside the VM, and attaching to a process inside the VM and putting in triggers and whatnot in the debugger as it replays until we track down the bug we're looking for. If we go too far, we can always hit rewind.

Oh, and there's a Lenovo laptop to be won: VMware Record and Replay Challenge

EMC's Chad Sakac goes into SRM failback (essentially running SRM back from the Recovery Site to your original site), but in the midst of this talks about the value proposition of SRM when, after all, many of the required steps can just be scripted, right?

Link: Virtual Geek: A Few Technical Threads - Part 3: SRM Failback.

1. SRM exactly automates those steps.    Automation in a DR situation is everything.   Buildings will be burning or sprinklers running, and cellphones will be ringing.  It's not the time for complex manual operations.
2. Could it be manually scripted?   Sure.   Who will maintain that script?    Traditionally - DR was reserved generally for mainframes and other things deemed "mission critical" enough for expensive Disaster Recovery.   In those cases, the environments are VERY static - so the idea of creating a DR plan, refreshing it and testing it once a year at a multi-million dollar cost was reasonable.   VMware is different, and SRM brings DR to a whole new use case.   This same week, I talked to a customer who is adding 100 VMs a week on their infrastructure.   Heck, even if you're doing 1 a week, will you update that script constantly?
3. They tested a single VM booting.  Yeah!   They have 400 VMs today.   First of all, who's going to manually register all those VMs.   More importantly - what is are the DEPENDENCIES between the VMs?   There is a specific start sequence needed, or your entire DR plan will not work. I'm always interested in IT how projects needing cross-domain expertise are hard, because everyone trivializes everyone else's work or complexity.   AD and DNS, then Exchange/SQL Server, then Sharepoint - and somewhere in their, your hundreds of other VMs - in a specific start sequence.   Who will figure out the specific start dependencies the first time, and how will that be maintained in this uber-script?   SRM help, and come to AD3500 at VMworld to find out what EMC is doing to make this easy.
4. The tested booting the VM on an isolated vswitch.   The IP addressing scheme at the remote site was totally different.   What will update all the IPs?   Update DNS?   Do any hosts hardcode IPs rather than use DNS names... anywhere?
5. The test (including the one they did) is a useless test unless it is an END-TO-END test.   Otherwise, you have told your management that you are ready, and the unthinkable happens and you have failed them, you've failed your business, and you've failed yourself.  In other words, a successful "pseudo test" which leads to "we have it figured out" unless you REALLY test - GUARANTEES FAILURE.

VMware Fusion 2 Release Candidate 1 is now freely available for download.

Just like VMware Fusion 2 Beta 1 and VMware Fusion 2 Beta 2, the RC is free to download.  VMware Fusion 2 will be a free, downloadable upgrade for all VMware Fusion 1.x customers, when released.

Keep those bugs away!

Building on great features like Multiple Snapshots and AutoProtect automatic, timed snapshots that keep your Windows-on-Mac experience as safe as  possible, VMware Fusion 2 RC also includes an embedded complimentary 12-month subscription to McAfee VirusScan Plus to make sure your Windows XP and Vista stay squeaky clean.

You can install VirusScan Plus right from the VMware Fusion menu bar, from the moment you create a new virtual machine, meaning you’re always protected.

Jet Setting VMware Fusion 2: Add Spanish and Italian

VMware Fusion 1.x ships in English, French, German, Japanese, and Simplified  Chinese.  VMware Fusion 2 RC adds Italian and Spanish to that list, making sure the VMware Fusion team will be welcomed with open arms on our next team offsite to Cancun, Barcelona, and Rome.

3D performance keeps getting stronger and more polished, as seen recently in the launch of Microsoft’s new Photosynth 3d photo visualization product. 

Lots of Mac users were disappointed to see that Photosynth shipped without native Mac support.  The good news is, it runs just fine in VMware Fusion 2 RC.  You can read our blog post here about Photosynth for Mac.

And for you Mac web developers out there who enjoy using Mac-based web development editors like Panic Software’s Coda or Bare Bones’ BBEdit, but need to verify your creations on Windows-based browsers too, VMware Fusion 2 RC modifies the way it treats Windows-based web browsers shared using VMware Fusion 2’s application sharing.

Now you can you can launch your web page projects right into any Windows browser you like, not just the Windows-default browser, directly from the development environment.  Windows-based Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, and even Safari for Windows, all on the same virtual machine, all accessible from your development editor!

As always, you can read about all the new additions, bug fixes, and more in the Release Notes.

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I got asked this today, because this post is now out of date and the location of Andrew Kutz's VC plug-ins have moved from his original site lostcreations. I'm throwing this up here so Google can lead others to the right place. Specfically, he's got the Console, Invoke, and SVMotion plug-ins up there. His guide to his back-door plug-in methodology (which remember is unsupported and is being superceded by official mechanisms) is on his publications page.

Link: Can’t find my VMware utilities? « akutz’s blog.

You can access all of my VMware utilities at http://code.google.com/p/akutz/. There have been several requests for these utilities, and I simply do not have the time right now to create binaries for all of them. I am also waiting to see what will happen at VMworld and how it affects the plug-in architecture. Once that is more definitively known then I will resume my work on plug-ins.

The virtualization world keeps growing, and in an attempt to keep up with our little corner of it, we've added some great new blogs to Planet V12n.

• Virtualization Security from the good folks at Tripwire
• Virtualization Frontier from our friends at the Dell Tech Center
• ChrisWolf.com from Chris Wolf
• Virtually Speaking from Dan Kusnetzky & Paula Rooney
• Virtual Troll from Heino Skov
• VMwareInfo from Carlo Costanzo
• Conrey.org from Theron Conrey
• Virtualization Information from Shannon Snowden
• virtuallycrazy from Jason Wiley
• Malaysia VMware Communities
• Blogs from VirtualizationAdmin
• Blogs from Virtualization Review
• Blogs from BrianMadden.com
• and Better Software Development with Replay Debugging from VMware's own E Lewis

It's been a while since we've had an update, so I had to hunt through my inbox and bookmarks to make sure I hadn't forgotten anybody, and I'm sure I have. If you've contacted VMware or me about being included here and you still aren't, drop me a line (jtroyer@ ...). Here are some ground rules, though:

• I'm looking for material that is "bloglike" -- either commentary/opinion or technical content. I haven't included great news/feature sites like virtualization.com and Virtual Strategy Magazine, but I'll be pulling the existing news feeds out into a separate section soon and these kinds of sites can all go there. In the meantime check out Eric Siebert's Top 10 news and information websites that VMware administrators must visit.

• You should be creating original content, not just excerpting other blog articles, press releases, or kb articles. (And in no case should you be reprinting entire pieces of content if you don't have permission. Read about Fair Use if you're not familiar with the concept.)

• You should update regularly and have a track record of consistent activity on your blog. Wait a month or two to see if job duties or kids or simply inclination interferes with you keeping your blog going.

• Official corporate blogs are OK, but the blog should be of general interest and not just devoted to your commercial activities. Two new corporate blogs I've added are from partners Tripwire and Dell, but if you take a look you'll see that they talking about more than just their products.

• The content should be primarily about virtualization. It can absolutely mention non-VMware virtualization, but VMware should be in there somewhere because that's what our readers are interested in. If you talk about general technical topics or non-technical topics, please create a feed that contains only your virtualization or VMware category. I'm actually very interested in your fishing trip or even your tips on setting up a firewall, but the amount of content is overwhelming as it is, so we have to stay focused. If a little non-virtualization stuff creeps in, well, no worries. We are talking about blogs, after all.

• Linking to you and aggregating your content implies no endorsement of you or your company by VMware, and only the editorial judgment of one human who is trying to create an interesting resource for virtualization practitioners. I reserve the right to remove you at any time for any reason, and I promise I will remove you promptly if you ask.

And I'd like to give a special shout-out to our friends in Redmond for the brand spankin' new VirtualizationFeed.com, which aggregates virtualization feeds (obviously with a little more emphasis on the Hyper-V side of the scale). Aside from having a nicer URL than we do, this is also a place to view what's going on over at Twitter. And Patrick linked to us, which was nice. I'm going to have to step up my game here now that there's competition in town!