I think Workstation is 25% off with the same code as well.

Link: VMware: Team Fusion: One Day VMware Fusion Madness: 50% off VMware Fusion. Combine with Competitive Rebate.

From 12:01 AM Pacific Time (well, I think it actually might be live right now) on December 1st, 2008 through 11:59 PM, 24 hours later, VMware Fusion will be on sale for 50% off, worldwide.

That’s right.  Using the coupon code “CyberMondayDeal” at checkout, you can buy VMware Fusion at half off its typical list price.

What’s more, in the United States and Canada, this deal combines with our $30 competitive rebate for Parallels and Virtual PC for Mac users. On top of getting Fusion for half off, you can get $30 back when you prove ownership of a competing product.

So yes, you heard that right.

People interested in running Windows on the Mac, can do so with Fusion for half price, all day tomorrow.

And people interested in switching from Parallels and Virtual PC to VMware Fusion can do so for as little as $9.99.

View original post|Add to del.icio.us | Share

The VMware E-store team wanted to do something a little crazy to celebrate Cyber Monday—the first Monday after the great annual shopping holiday known as “Black Friday.”

So they decided to go whole hog. 

From 12:01 AM Pacific Time (well, I think it actually might be live right now) on December 1st, 2008 through 11:59 PM, 24 hours later, VMware Fusion will be on sale for 50% off, worldwide.

That’s right.  Using the coupon code “CyberMondayDeal” at checkout, you can buy VMware Fusion at half off its typical list price.

What’s more, in the United States and Canada, this deal combines with our $30 competitive rebate for Parallels and Virtual PC for Mac users. On top of getting Fusion for half off, you can get $30 back when you prove ownership of a competing product.

So yes, you heard that right.

People interested in running Windows on the Mac, can do so with Fusion for half price, all day tomorrow.

And people interested in switching from Parallels and Virtual PC to VMware Fusion can do so for as little as $9.99.

How’s that for the holidays come early?

View original post|Add to del.icio.us | Share

Re our post yesterday on ESXi, Duncan dives deeper into one of the tools that VMware is creating so that you don't have to pop the hood -- VMware Infrastructure Management Assistant (VIMA).

Link: VMotioning your Service Console?! » Yellow Bricks.

Some of you might have looked into VIMA already. Those of you that didn’t please check it out because I expect this to be the way that VMware is heading. Note, I don’t know if it really is the way VMware is heading, but a Service Console with VMotion capabilities sounds like a winner to me. A little birdie also just told me that APC, the UPS Company, is finishing their VIMA Compatible UPS software agent!

The cool thing about VIMA is that it includes the RCLI commands, the Perl toolkit and a logger daemon named vilogd. The last one will be the topic for this blog. So what does this logger daemon include? The vilogd daemon collects all the logs that are available through the DiagnosticManager VI API:

View original post|Add to del.icio.us | Share

ESXi is not your father's ESX. There is no Service Console, so trying to fit it into the exact same processes that you're used to with ESX isn't recommended. I know, I know, you have all those scripts you're used to running in the console. VMware is building tools to manage and administer your ESXi from outside the box, and while they're not quite feature complete, they're well on their way. So don't pop the hood; it's welded shut for a reason.

Link: Keep your VMware ESXi warranty: Don't break the security shell.

Working with VMware ESXi can be frustrating; you're not supposed to enable the Dropbear SSH client or use its technical support mode without the assistance of a VMware support representative. System administrators, however, may be tempted to use tech support mode (or enable Dropbear) to fix problems or manage connections on the fly. Cracking this security shell, however, can void the VMware ESXi warranty and break support contracts. In this tip, I'll explain alternatives that allow you to manage your ESXi virtual machines without compromising its security -- and possibly breaking a support contract.

View original post|Add to del.icio.us | Share

Database workloads are very diverse. While most database servers are lightly loaded, larger database
workloads can be resource-intensive, exhibiting high I/O rates or consuming large amounts of memory. With improvements in virtualization technology and hardware, even servers running large database workloads run well in virtual machines. Servers running Microsoft's SQL Server, among the top database server platforms in the industry today, are no exception.

An important consideration in SQL Server consolidation scenarios is application performance when packing multiple virtual machines on a single hardware platform. Application performance in virtual machines should continue to meet or exceed required service levels. That is to say, the virtual platform should:

• Be scalable.
• Ensure that all virtual machines get resources in proportion to their load levels up to specified resource limits.
• Provide performance isolation for each virtual machine running on a host.
• Ensure that the overall load of a host will have minimal impact on the performance of applications running in individual virtual machines on that host.

We recently published a white paper, "SQL Server Workload Consolidation," that demonstrates the ability of VMware® ESX 3.5 to scale while guaranteeing fairness and isolation under a demanding SQL Server load.

View original post|Add to del.icio.us | Share

Blogs are a great way learning more about virtualization, getting the best technical tips, and keeping up with the news. (See my last post on Virtualization Alltop.)  One of the nice developments of this year is that we're seeing more VMware employees blogging.

One of our newest blogs is from Dave Lawrence, a VMware senior systems engineer. He asked for advice as he was starting his blog, and both Mike and I both told him that people come back if you provide value -- writing about what you know, so it's interesting, and posting every day, so there's something to come back for.

Well, Dave evidently took our advice to heart, because the result is his new blog The VMguy, "Virtualization for the little guy." Dave's focus is SMB, and I hope he keeps going in that direction, because there's a dearth of virtualization resources for small business out there, but really the topics so far will be of interest to everybody. Some recent posts:

Which storage protocol is best?

This question is definitely one of the most common that I receive. "We’re thinking of building a new infrastructure for our virtual machines, which storage protocol should we use?"  There are two things to remember for this decision.  Performance and functionality.

HCL Update Recap for the week (btw, new feeds will be coming in that area)

Notable KB Articles from the week

What does 80-cores mean to you?

When you're running 32-cores in a server how many apps will utilize that hardware?  Virtualization is the only one.  AMD and Intel’s "arms race" of processors has left the average software application in the dust. Most applications in customer’s environments don’t even remotely push the CPU capacity in the datacenter.  One of the few remaining ways to utilize these types of processors is virtualization.  If you have not virtualized as much as you can, keep working towards it.  Remember that the 4 or 6 core CPU you purchased this year will be end-of-life in 3-5 years.  Perhaps the replacement machine might just have one of the 80-core powerhouses in it.  Then you will be able to migrate all of your virtual machines to it, without having to modify a thing inside them.

VMware Converter 4.0 now in beta White Paper: RVI Performance

Redmondmag.com Reader’s Choice Awards announced

What is Enhanced vMotion Compatibility anyway?

One important factor to note.  In order to enable EVC for a cluster, you cannot have any virtual machines running on that cluster.  All of the virtual machines must be powered down (or a clean cluster with no VMs.)  This protects the stability of the existing VMs.  If you had a VM running on a host and it changed it’s CPUID while a VM was running, it would appear to the OS and app that the CPU changed while the VM was running, thus adding instability just like our original problem above. Once EVC is enabled for a cluster, there are no more VM outages required to add additional hosts to that cluster.  ...

Another thing to be aware of: the FlexMigration (Intel) and Extended Migration (AMD) features do not block the actual instructions themselves.  They only mask what the CPUID instruction reports.  Back in the 486 days, application programmers would figure out what CPU they were on by trying different instructions.  Intel formally added the CPUID instruction in the first Pentium processors in the early 1990’s. They also recommended that developers use this standard method going forward to determine CPU functionality.  This is a much better method as it is much more consistent and reliable.  The point is that it is possible that there could be code in use today, from the early 1990’s, that has not been upgraded and does not use the standard CPU checking with CPUID and tries to determine CPU capability by "trying functions."

Should I buy blades or standalones for my virtualization platform?

VirtualCenter, run it on physical or virtual?

Dave already has it down -- a mix of news, tech tips, commentary, and discussion, all inspired by his day job interacting with hundreds of small businesses -- and his blog is very worth keeping up with. Please welcome Dave to the virtualization blogosphere.

g

View original post|Add to del.icio.us | Share

You should already be aware of Planet VMware and Planet V12n for all your virtualization blog needs -- technical tips, industry news, commentary.

But now there's a new way to scan the best virtualization blogs -- virtualization.alltop.com. The Planets present a "river of news" linear reverse chronological aggregation, which is a great way for getting a sense of the last week's zeitgeist or catching the day's breaking news, but if your favorite blogger hasn't updated in the last few days their latest post may get lost in the noise.

Alltop takes a different strategy -- their sites give you a grid of blogs and the latest 5 post titles from each. That makes it a good way to check out what's going on with a particular news source, and since it just includes titles, you can scan pretty quickly. Hover over a topic to get an excerpt.

They also had the good taste to steal liberally from the blogroll at Planet V12n, which shows they have taste. I do think they probably aren't virtualization experts, because they are definitely missing some feeds. (Like Alessandro at virtualization.info -- probably the best-known of all the virtualization blogs...)

Guy Kawasaki was one of the founders of the company, which they liken to a "magazine rack." I thought it was a stupid idea when I saw the first set of topics, but they're growing on me. The range of Alltop sites are quite wide, but since you're reading this you might also be interested in the sites covering enterprise and cloud computing.

View original post|Add to del.icio.us | Share

Virtual appliances are bringing a sea-change in the paradigm of how software is developed, distributed, deployed, and managed. Since its inception, various definitions for virtual appliances have emerged in the market. The definition that we propose at VMware is "A Virtual Appliance is a pre-built software solution, consisting of one or more virtual machines that is managed, maintained and updated as a unit".

Most of the Virtual Appliances out there on the Virtual Appliances Marketplace are packaged into single VMs. These appliances contain applications that reside on top of a guest operating system. VMware also announce vApp at VMworld 2008. vApp is a new model for defining and managing applications. These vApps contain one or more VMs and provide enhanced user experience and guaranteed service levels at the deployment site. vApps provide a much more general notion of virtual applications that get built by ISVs, SI/VARs, in-house developers and IT Admins at Enterprises and SMB. Virtual Appliances are a kind of vApp built by ISVs.

We are committed to expanding on a VMware Ready ecosystem where appliances that have been validated, provide a better user experience on VMware Infrastructure. The virtual appliance value chain is typically composed of 5 steps: Authoring, distribution, installation/deployment, runtime platform and management. On Sept 15th 2008, we launched a solution suite and a well-defined strategy for all the above steps of the value chain. Under Authoring, we enable the VMware Ready ecosystem through our partners. While VMware provides VMware Studio , we enable our partners like rPath, JumpBox, VirtualAppliances.net, cohesiveFT, SuSE Studio to build VMware Ready appliances. The distribution channel that we provide is the world's largest repository of virtual appliances, namely the Virtual Appliances Marketplace which has over 900 listed appliances. We also provide opportunities for OEMing VMware Software and bundling opportunities. We have built in virtual appliance deployment and installation capabilities through Studio and easy deployment of OVF template through VI client. Update management functionality for virtual appliances is provided by a close VMware Infrastructure Integration. VMware is thus well-positioned to lead in all aspects of virtual appliance life-cycle.



View original post|Add to del.icio.us | Share

Fusion's view of the world is very low-level - when you run a virtual machine, Fusion sees machine-level instructions like "add registers A and B" or "write the contents of C to memory address X". Based on just this information, we might be able to tell you're generating network traffic and there's some video updating going on, but we would not be able to tell what program you're running to do this, or even what guest operating system you're running. Knowing what guest OS is being used in a virtual machine is important because some of them have quirks - one might not like video RAM above a certain size, while another might panic if it sees too many PCI slots, and a third might be unforgiving about how long I/O can take. There might be certain shortcuts that can safely be taken for certain guests. When you create a virtual machine, Fusion needs to know the intended guest OS to correct for the quirks and enable optimizations.

If you ever change the guest OS in a virtual machine (say you upgrade from Windows 95 to XP), you can (and should) use the Virtual Machine Library to change the guest OS that Fusion thinks resides within. Knowing which guest OS is being used is also important for things like Tools install - Fusion automatically picks the correct Tools image to use based on which guest OS you've told Fusion is being used in the virtual machine.

View original post|Add to del.icio.us | Share

One user has suggested we rename the VI Toolkit forum the "Ask Luc Forum", referring to Luc Deken's continuous help and support to other toolkit users. Here's a few recent highlights from the forum, with Luc making quite a few appearances.

A previous post on this blog shows how to modify VMX file settings, but some VMX file setting can't be changed in this way. Changing a VM's boot delay is a good example. If you need to configure VM boot settings, Luc shows a way this can be done, using an API specifically designed for VM boot settings.

If you're accustomed to logging into ESX and using the esxcfg-mpath command, but are looking for something that works at the VirtualCenter level, across all your ESX hosts, Hal has some code that makes it really easy to make storage path reports across all your ESX server.

Hugo shows how you can use the -expand switch of PowerShell's Select-Object cmdlet to easily display a VM's available and used disk space (assuming the VM is running VMware Tools).

If you have VMs with multiple adapters that are members of multiple port groups, Luc has some tips that make it really easy to report on which VMs are connected to which port groups.

Finally, if you're writing reports and want the results emailed to you, Luc shows an easy PowerShell script to generate email.

View original post|Add to del.icio.us | Share

Duncan over at Yellow Bricks has some words of wisdom for your BCDR project.

SRM, it’s just too easy » Yellow Bricks. There a whole bunch of SRM projects going on globally where VMware PSO, the department I work for, is assisting. These projects typically have a duration of 3 to 9 months, while it seems that with the ease of VMware Site Recovery Manager this should be a matter of days.

People tend to forget that the most important thing about Distaster Recovery / Business Continuity is the business. You need to know the organisation and IT environment very well before you can even start ...

The fact that SRM is so easy to setup makes it really hard to actually explain to a customer why a BCDR project will take much longer then he expected.

View original post|Add to del.icio.us | Share

Now that you're familiar with sparse, preallocated, split, and monolithic virtual disks, you might be wondering how to switch from one format to another. In Fusion 2.0, this can be done through the virtual machine's Hard Disk settings pane - select the options you want, then press Apply. Fusion will convert the disk's format to the one you specified.

As usual, you can do this only if you don't have any snapshots, and you will potentially need as much free space as the maximum size of the virtual disk.

View original post|Add to del.icio.us | Share

There are a few sets of instructions floating around the Internet on how to run ESX or ESXi inside Workstation 6.5. (Let me Google that for you or just go to xtravirt) Lots of reasons you'd want to do this -- for training, testing, lab work, demos, POCs, or even just as a parlor trick to impress your friends. You'll need recent hardware. Now David Davis has published a nice 14 minute video tutorial on the topic at Petri IT Knowledgebase. Link: Running VMware ESX 3.5 and ESXi in Workstation on your desktop PC.

Site Recovery Manager can be hard to evaluate -- you need some shared storage that is going to be replicated and then set up SRM to do all the tricky failover workflow bits. Tomas Ten Dam has laid out a process to set that up in Workstation as well using the NetApp ONTAP simulator: SRM in a Box final release (the complete setup) « Ten Dam. (Looks like you need to be a current NetApp customer to get your hands on it. You should also be able to do this with the EMC Celerra simulator, same conditions apply. Looks like you can do SRM with Lefthand VSA as well, and you can at least do that with a 30-day trial. Has anybody set this up with a free or open source, albeit unsupported, tool? How about a set of virtual appliances?)

Completely new to SRM? Check out this new video (parts 2 and 3 coming soon).

[Update: from Chad Sakac in the comments, the Celerra simulator is available to everybody.]

View original post|Add to del.icio.us | Share

Drop by the Communities Roundtable Podcast tomorrow. It's an open topic day, meaning we'll talk about whatever we feel like. We'll talk about whatever you feel like as well. Listen in and join the conversation.

Some interesting things went on this week. Let's go over to Planet V12n and see...

View original post|Add to del.icio.us | Share

Rob Randell, one of our security specialists here at VMware, is guest-posting over at Mike D's blog. (Guys, you're welcome over here as well.)

Link: Mike D's Virtualization Blog: Virtualization Team vs. Security Team: It is important to remove the “vs.”!.

Unfortunately, very often this situation is the exception and not the rule. Many of the customers that I talk to are only talking to me because they have started a widescale deployment of VMware VI and the security team gets wind of it once it is well underway or worse some sort of audit is initiated (PCI, Sarbox, HIPAA, etc…). At this point the entire architecture needs to be reviewed and very often rearchitected to meet the necessary security and audit requirements. See the following article for a great example of this.

(Emphasis mine.) Sounds like a nightmare, so my guess is that you don't want that to happen to you. Always consult your friendly neighborhood security team first.

View original post|Add to del.icio.us | Share

Save 10% on select VMware products!

We're pleased to announce a new VMware Referral Program that gives you rewards when you recommend VMware products to others. You can participate even without a blog or website, as we give you the tools to send custom emails or bug your friends on social networks, or if you do have a blog, you can get a spiffy widget like you see on the right, and you can customize what it says. (All rewards through this particular widget go to the Red Cross, by the way.) You're also giving out a special "friends & family" offer, which at this point is a 10% discount.

You get $10 credit (which can go straight to your PayPal account or to a gift card or charity) every time two VMware Store purchases are made from your referrals. (That $10 number tells me that we expect to moving more copies of Fusion and Workstation than VI Enterprise through this referral, but go crazy selling ESX if that's what you're into.) In any case, it's a great way to spread the word about the solutions you use every day that make your life easier and got you your last promotion.

So sign up now -- it takes 3 minutes to get started.

Thank you very much, and I hope you make a bunch of dough.

View original post|Add to del.icio.us | Share

Calling all bloggers going to VMworld Europe 2009. We really appreciate folks blogging from our conferences.

• It helps to spread news and announcements.
• It gets a lot of technical detail up on the public web so Google can find it.
• It helps people who aren't on site feel more like they are there -- and hopefully come next time! It really is a very good tech conference for both beginners and experienced virtualizers.
• It helps others create successful strategies for navigating the event, and it gives feedback to the conference team.
• It helps continue to cement this global community of virtualization enthusiasts and VMware experts we are building.

Check out the coverage of VMworld 2008 if you weren't there, and you can see some past sessions on vmworld.com as well.

If you're going to show up in Cannes on February 24, please drop me a line (jtroyer @ vmware). Although we're going to reach out to folks we know in Europe, if you're outside of Europe but planning on coming or if you don't blog primarily in English, we might not know to ask, so please speak up.

I'm not making any promises, but last year the folks who were regularly blogging were treated very well by Richard, including custom shirts, a nice place with power and connectivity and refreshments to blog, press passes, and room to shoot video or do interviews. I highly recommend getting on Richard's list.

And if you aren't a current blogger, I don't think we can get you a press pass, but it's a fine time to start a blog. Remember you can always start a free one at vmworld.com/blogs or communities.vmware.com/blogs.

View original post|Add to del.icio.us | Share

In addition to the sparse and preallocated virtual disks, there's another, orthogonal set of options: split and monolithic. You can have a sparse/split virtual disk (the default in Fusion 2.0), a sparse/monolithic virtual disk (the default in Fusion 1.x), a preallocated/split virtual disk, or a preallocated/monolithic virtual disk.

While sparse vs. preallocated affects how the data inside the guest is stored in the .vmdk file, split vs. monolithic affects how the .vmdk file is stored on the host. In a monolithic virtual disk, everything in a virtual disk is kept in one file - this includes metadata about the virtual disk (e.g. size, geometry, parent disk, and so on). Note: You might still have multiple vmdk files in a virtual machine (either because you have multiple disks or because you have snapshots). The previous posts about sparse and preallocated virtual disks showed monolithic disks.

In contrast, a split virtual disk is, well, split into multiple files. There's a small, plaintext metadata file, and a number of slice files. If you have a preallocated/split virtual disk, each slice (except possibly the last) will be 2 GB. If you have a sparse/split virtual disk, each slice can be up to 2 GB, depending on how much data falls into that slice. Preallocated/split virtual disks have a -f### suffix (where ### is a number), while sparse/split virtual disks use a -s### suffix.

So why choose one over the other? Split disks are critical in some cases - for example, some filesystems (such as FAT) can't deal with files larger than a certain size. By splitting virtual disks to be below this limit (typically 4 GB), you can keep a virtual machine on such a filesystem without losing data. Another advantage of split disks is that you don't need as much space to consolidate snapshots or shrink virtual disks. We try hard not to lose data, so rather than doing these operations in place (where something could go wrong if the power fails), we make a copy and only replace it when we're sure it succeeded. Because of this, if you use a monolithic disk, you might need as much free space as the virtual disk occupies to complete such an operation. On the other hand, with a split virtual disk, you only need 2 GB (or less, if you have a sparse slice that's smaller) since each slice can be done individually.

On the other hand, monolithic disks have some advantages too. In addition to more obvious limited computing resources such as CPU or disk space, one of the not as well known ones is something called file handles. OSes need to keep track of which files are being used, and has a limited number of file handles to do this with. If the OS runs out of file handles, no more files can be opened. Remember that you're using a lot more files than just the documents you're working on - programs need to open files to read resources, for temporary use, and lots of other not immediately obvious things. With a monolithic virtual disk, you use only one file handle per virtual disk. With a sparse virtual disk, you use one file handle per slice, which can quickly add up if you've got a large virtual disk with a lot of snapshots.

View original post|Add to del.icio.us | Share

In addition to the sparse and preallocated virtual disks, there's another, orthogonal set of options: split and monolithic. You can have a sparse/split virtual disk (the default in Fusion 2.0), a sparse/monolithic virtual disk (the default in Fusion 1.x), a preallocated/split virtual disk, or a preallocated/monolithic virtual disk.

While sparse vs. preallocated affects how the data inside the guest is stored in the .vmdk file, split vs. monolithic affects how the .vmdk file is stored on the host. In a monolithic virtual disk, everything in a virtual disk is kept in one file - this includes metadata about the virtual disk (e.g. size, geometry, parent disk, and so on). Note: You might still have multiple vmdk files in a virtual machine (either because you have multiple disks or because you have snapshots). The previous posts about sparse and preallocated virtual disks showed monolithic disks.

In contrast, a split virtual disk is, well, split into multiple files. There's a small, plaintext metadata file, and a number of slice files. If you have a preallocated/split virtual disk, each slice (except possibly the last) will be 2 GB. If you have a sparse/split virtual disk, each slice can be up to 2 GB, depending on how much data falls into that slice. Preallocated/split virtual disks have a -f### suffix (where ### is a number), while sparse/split virtual disks use a -s### suffix.

So why choose one over the other? Split disks are critical in some cases - for example, some filesystems (such as FAT) can't deal with files larger than a certain size. By splitting virtual disks to be below this limit (typically 4 GB), you can keep a virtual machine on such a filesystem without losing data. Another advantage of split disks is that you don't need as much space to consolidate snapshots or shrink virtual disks. We try hard not to lose data, so rather than doing these operations in place (where something could go wrong if the power fails), we make a copy and only replace it when we're sure it succeeded. Because of this, if you use a monolithic disk, you might need as much free space as the virtual disk occupies to complete such an operation. On the other hand, with a split virtual disk, you only need 2 GB (or less, if you have a sparse slice that's smaller) since each slice can be done individually.

On the other hand, monolithic disks have some advantages too. In addition to more obvious limited computing resources such as CPU or disk space, one of the not as well known ones is something called file handles. OSes need to keep track of which files are being used, and has a limited number of file handles to do this with. If the OS runs out of file handles, no more files can be opened. Remember that you're using a lot more files than just the documents you're working on - programs need to open files to read resources, for temporary use, and lots of other not immediately obvious things. With a monolithic virtual disk, you use only one file handle per virtual disk. With a sparse virtual disk, you use one file handle per slice, which can quickly add up if you've got a large virtual disk with a lot of snapshots.

View original post|Add to del.icio.us | Share

Unlike OS X, most other operating systems require the use of multibutton mice. Most Mac users know you can ctrl-click to simulate a right click, and you can do that in Fusion as well. But what if you actually want to ctrl-click in the guest - say, to select multiple items in Explorer?

In Fusion's Preferences, go to the Keyboard & Mouse tab, Mouse Shortcuts. Uncheck the secondary button shortcut (or map it to something else) - now you can ctrl-click in the guest.

If you still need to right click and don't want to remap to a different shortcut, there may be other options. For laptop users, you can enable two-finger right clicks in System Preferences > Keyboard & Mouse > Trackpad. If you have a Mighty Mouse, you can enable right click in System Preferences > Keyboard & Mouse > Mouse. And of course, since OS X has always supported multibutton mice, you can always plug in your favorite multibutton mouse.

View original post|Add to del.icio.us | Share

Happy Friday everyone!

This is a quick note to let you know that VMware Fusion 2.01 is now available, a free maintenance update to VMware Fusion 2. 

You can download the new bits here.

VMware Fusion 2.0.1 features enhancements and fixes in follow up to the release of VMware Fusion 2 and the Apple notebook refresh.

You can read all about it in the release notes, but some quick things of interest:

• One of my favorites: AutoProtect postpones taking a snapshot when the user is interacting with the virtual machine. Watch a video demo of AutoProtect, here.
• Now shows application badge instead of generic document icons when assigning Windows applications to Mac documents.
• Greatly reduced initial pause when opening mirrored or shared folders.
• No longer disables certain shared folders and mirrored folders that were nested folders. The potential data loss issue with nested shared folders has been resolved.
• No longer publishes Windows guest applications to Mac if ???Allow the virtual machine to open applications on your Mac??? is unchecked in virtual machine Settings > Sharing.
• Brings back the Enable Hints menu item in Help menu.

There are more enhancements and bug fixes 100% broken out the release notes, here.

In the meantime, go get the bits!

View original post|Add to del.icio.us | Share

Happy Friday everyone!

This is a quick note to let you know that VMware Fusion 2.01 is now available, a free maintenance update to VMware Fusion 2. 

You can download the new bits here.

VMware Fusion 2.0.1 features enhancements and fixes in follow up to the release of VMware Fusion 2 and the Apple notebook refresh.

You can read all about it in the release notes, but some quick things of interest:

• One of my favorites: AutoProtect postpones taking a snapshot when the user is interacting with the virtual machine. Watch a video demo of AutoProtect, here.
• Now shows application badge instead of generic document icons when assigning Windows applications to Mac documents.
• Greatly reduced initial pause when opening mirrored or shared folders.
• No longer disables certain shared folders and mirrored folders that were nested folders. The potential data loss issue with nested shared folders has been resolved.
• No longer publishes Windows guest applications to Mac if “Allow the virtual machine to open applications on your Mac” is unchecked in virtual machine Settings > Sharing.
• Brings back the Enable Hints menu item in Help menu.

There are more enhancements and bug fixes 100% broken out the release notes, here.

In the meantime, go get the bits!

View original post|Add to del.icio.us | Share

Richard Garsthagen, evangelist extraordinaire, giving the VMware overview at Microsoft TechEd EMEA. It's a good short overview that gets past the "my hypervisor is better than yours" argument to talk about the entire suite of infrastructure and management software that we offer. Also, make sure you watch to the very end. Richard can be very, very sneaky.

(click for the video)

Richard is also coordinating the bloggers (and many other things) at VMworld Europe 2009. If you have a blog and are going to be in Cannes this February, drop me a line (jtroyer @ vmware).

View original post|Add to del.icio.us | Share

Most people don't know I'm actually a trained scientist. (I said a trained scientist, not necessarily a good one or a successful one, which is why I'm making my living hanging out with bloggers.) My scientific training usually comes out in overly-long emails where I detail every assumption and caveat and mitigating factor about some conclusion, which is how you'd write a scientific paper. My marketing training then usually kicks in and I edit out most of it, but I still suspect I lose a lot of people in my more epic missives.

So I am officially a Doctor, I've done some statistics tutoring in the past, and this Fall I really got into the political polling geekery at FiveThirtyEight. As a result, I've developed a great respect for a well-made survey -- knowing what to ask, who to ask, and how to analyze the results are not trivial matters That's the main reason I'm not pointing to Alessandro's platform survey over at virtualization.info. It's not a scientifically valid survey of the global virtualization community, just a web poll, but I will be interested in the results. We'll "win" in any case, but I'm more interested in the results if I don't skew it by sending over hordes of VMware users from this blog.

(And I also recognize that just because you print a number doesn't make it true.)

However, there are some polls and surveys where we so clearly deserve to win on the merits that I don't mind calling your attention to them. Workstation wins lots of awards, because it remains the gold standard for desktop virtualization and is insanely useful to working developers and sysadmins. So for your voting pleasure I will direct your attention to the developer.com Product of the Year survey. VMware Workstation 6.5 is up for Development Tool of the Year. Feel free to vote your conscience, as long as you do it before December 15.

View original post|Add to del.icio.us | Share

Link: VMware: VMware Networking Blog: 10GigE Networking Performance with ESX 3.5.

1. Improving managability by reducing the cable and NIC sprawl. 2x 10GigE links versus 6, 8, 10 or more 1 GigE can simplify your infrastructure
2. Convergence of Fibre Channel and Network traffic using FCoE (Fibre
   Channel over Ethernet). The ability to do away with Fibre Channel HBAs
   and converge the FC SAN traffic with the ethernet network traffic is
   the TCO tipping point for some customers. ...

But, ...how does 10GigE perform on ESX 3.5? Our performance team published a paper this week on that very theme.   

View original post|Add to del.icio.us | Share

The topic today was VMware AppSpeed, which began life as B-hive Conductor. From the website: "The product "provides virtual infrastructure groups visibility into the multi-tier applications (performance, usage and dependencies) running across both virtual and physical infrastructure." I think it's another example of how you can do something better virtually by sitting outside the VM -- something that would be either impractical, much harder, or hopelessly tied to the OS if you were doing it with an agent inside a physical machine.

Asaf Wexler, former CTO of B-hive and now Sr Director of R&D here at VMware, joined us over an unfortunately poor telephone connection from Israel. Click on the big green play button or download the mp3. (51:00). Podcast info.

Links:

• http://www.bhive.net/ old B-hive site; still has product & technical info.
• AppSpeed at VMworld 2008 keynote (more notes on that keynote)
• AppSpeed video at VMworld 2008 keynote day 2
• More AppSpeed video at VMworld 2008 keynote day 1
• Commentary from Roger Howorth at ZDNet.co.uk
  

  As one attendee put it, this was really exciting because it would provide a quick way to find out where the problem was if users started complaining. Without this kind of technology, it could take hours to get enough insight into the application to enable further debugging. Also, the various departments responsible for the different elements in an application have a habit of denying responsibility and pointing the finger elsewhere.

  The kind of diagnostic information produced by AppSpeed makes this kind of behaviour easier to challenge, because administrators would have real data to back them up. For example, they could say, “Look, queries to your database are taking five seconds, while the rest of the transactions total 200 milliseconds.”

Next week, open topic roundtable with the panel. Drop by -- same bat time, same bat channel (noon Pacific time on Wednesday).

View original post|Add to del.icio.us | Share

A few recent conversations with customers have quickly gravitated to the topic of 10 GigE. Some customers are making firms plans for deploying 10GigE in their ESX servers. The reasons vary, but top amongst these customers are:

1. Improving managability by reducing the cable and NIC sprawl. 2x 10GigE links versus 6, 8, 10 or more 1 GigE can simplify your infrastructure
2. Convergence of Fibre Channel and Network traffic using FCoE (Fibre Channel over Ethernet). The ability to do away with Fibre Channel HBAs and converge the FC SAN traffic with the ethernet network traffic is the TCO tipping point for some customers.

As you may be aware, FCoE is supported in ESX 3.5u2. Emulex and Qlogic 10 GigE FCoE CNAs (Channel Network Adapters) were qualified and added to our HCL just prior to VMworld in September. 

But, ...how does 10GigE perform on ESX 3.5? Our performance team published a paper this week on that very theme.   

View original post|Add to del.icio.us | Share

If you're like me, and I know I am, you spend an hour or two a day reading through RSS feeds. In fact, I found out about this really cool new script from Hal Rottenberg through my RSS reader, courtesy of Alan Renouf, even though Hal emailed me to tell me about it (I get so much mail from Hal I usually just ignore it.)

The beauty of RSS (in case you've been living under a technological rock for the past few years) is that everything comes to you, rather than the other way around. How many times a day do you really want to log into your VI to figure out what's going on anyway? In VI you can get email notifications, but this is only for alarms, in addition to being a bad idea in general. If you look through Hal's feed you can see that this tells you about everything, including things like an ominous warning from VMware Update Manager that it only has about 500 megabytes of space left. Just add it to your RSS aggregator of choice and suddenly you know everything that's going on with your VI with minimal effort.

Hal hasn't made his script public, it seems he's using it as a teaser for his upcoming book. Let's hope he hurries up, so drop him a note and tell him to stop goofing off all the time.

View original post|Add to del.icio.us | Share

We recently posted the results of some experiments running VMmark across a 4-server cluster using DRS (here and here) that demonstrate the power and flexibility of VMware Infrastructure. We have used the same methodology and the same hardware to measure the performance impact of DPM (there wasn't any) as well as the power savings (it was substantial). One of our marketing guys put together a pretty neat video. If you haven't seen it yet, check it out. And yes, I too wish my 8-hour workday only lasted 2.5 minutes.

View original post|Add to del.icio.us | Share

I am fascinated studying the ripple effects seen in overall system performance caused by tuning a subset of workloads in a virtualized environment. Our partners at Sun have provided a textbook case by publishing two VMmark 1.1 results on the Sun Fire X4240 last month. The scores were 7.92 @ 6 tiles and 8.07 @ 6 tiles, roughly a 2% difference. The higher result was run using large pages for the javaserver workload while the lower result did not have large pages enabled. (Look here for instructions on how to allow large page usage on Windows 2003.) Using large pages allows the six VMmark javaserver workloads in the benchmark test to consume significantly fewer CPU resources while achieving their desired performance. This CPU savings frees additional resources to be shared by the other thirty workloads, resulting in a higher overall score. Thanks to our partners at Sun for sharing the data.

View original post|Add to del.icio.us | Share