A slightly skeptical view on VMware

VMware Cost Efficiency Problem

VMware was the first stable virtualization for Windows on Intel architecture, but now Xen is also adequate, and it is much better for Linux VMs. As of 2012, all three top hypervisors (Xen, vSphere, HyperV) are OK and compete on price/performance ration. I've found for Linux VMs VMware is at best an adequate product and is obscenely priced, so in the end enterprise software houses will adapt as they did to a landscape that shifted away from closed source *nix solutions like SCO AIX and HP-UX to Linux and Solaris (while it was open). Redhat is preferable as client OS largely because its market share. It looks like only enterprises with IT brass that has more money than technical knowledge standardize on VMware.

All VMware lovers (and there are a lot of them as VMware is by design "VM for dummies" ;-) should understand once and forever: if the cost of virtualization solution matches or exceeds the cost of hardware server this is not a solution for commercial environment as reliability of VMware is les then "native" OS running on "native" hardware and efficiency is just a fraction of it. Also VMware does not support paravirtualization with the exception of special 32 bit version of SLES, for which you need to pay extra. Absence of paravirtualization support dooms it from poor technical standpoint for anybody who ever programmed in assembler.

VMware is facing a serious market-place squeeze: it simply can't compete on price with other solutions and is no so much better as for stability and speed (actually paravirtualization is much better for Linux than full virtualization that VMware implements). Outside of a few neat-but-not-necessarily-used features, virtualization technology is being commoditized pretty aggressively. VMware still the best "virtualization for dummies" but enterprises that have a few good specialists in hose it is simply not cost effective. Having specialists is much better solution than paying the exorbitant license fees. Microsoft is essentially offering 'Buy Windows Server, get Hyper-V for free*', which is a pretty attractive offer for those who aren't going to go for Xen.

Unless VMware discounts their licenses their high volume customers aren't likely to stick with them, and having strong enterprise support and brand recognition isn't exactly going to save them from Microsoft (who actually has a better brand recognition).

According to Wikipedia

In 1998, VMware was founded by Diane Greene, Mendel Rosenblum, Scott Devine, Edward Wang, and Edouard Bugnion. Rosenblum and Greene, who are married, first met while at Berkeley.^[5] Edouard Bugnion remained the chief architect and CTO of VMware until 2005,^[6] and went on to found Nuova Systems (now part of Cisco).

The company has its headquarters in Palo Alto, California, United States, and established an R&D Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as well as one at the Time Warner Center in New York City, in 2005. VMware software runs on Windows and on Linux, and made its debut on Mac OS X in December, 2006. Their customers include all 100 of the Fortune 100 companies^{[citation needed]}.

VMware delivered its first product, VMware Workstation, in 1999^[7] and entered the server market in 2001 with VMware GSX Server (hosted) and VMware ESX Server (hostless). In 2003 VMware launched VMware Virtual Center, the VMotion and Virtual SMP technology. 64-bit support appeared in 2004. The company was also acquired by EMC Corporation that same year.

In August 2007, EMC Corporation released 10% of the company's shares in VMware in an initial public offering on the New York Stock Exchange. The stock debuted at 29 USD per share and closed the day at 51 USD.^[8]

On July 8, 2008, VMware co-founder, president and CEO Diane Greene was unexpectedly fired by the VMware Board of Directors and replaced by Paul Maritz, a retired 14-year Microsoft veteran who was heading EMC's cloud computing business unit.^[9] In the same news release VMware stated that 2008 revenue growth will be "modestly below the previous guidance of 50% growth over 2007." As a result, market price of VMware dropped nearly 25%. Then on September 10, 2008, Rosenblum, the company's chief scientist, resigned from VMware.

On September 16, 2008, VMware announced that they are collaborating with Cisco to provide joint data center solutions. One of the first results of this is the Cisco Nexus 1000V, a distributed virtual software switch that will be an integrated option in the VMware infrastructure.^[10]

VMware acquired Tungsten Graphics, a company with core expertise in 3D graphics driver development on November 26, 2008.^[11]

On August 10, 2009, VMware announced the acquisition of SpringSource, a leader in enterprise and web application development and management.^[12]

Core product design

VMware software provides a completely virtualized set of hardware to the guest operating system.^[13] VMware software virtualizes the hardware for a video adapter, a network adapter, and hard disk adapters. The host provides pass-through drivers for guest USB, serial, and parallel devices. In this way, VMware virtual machines become highly portable between computers, because every host looks nearly identical to the guest. In practice, a system administrator can pause operations on a virtual machine guest, move or copy that guest to another physical computer, and there resume execution exactly at the point of suspension. Alternately, for enterprise servers, a feature called VMotion allows the migration of operational guest virtual machines between similar but separate hardware hosts sharing the same storage. Each of these transitions is completely transparent to any users on the virtual machine at the time it is being migrated.

VMware Workstation, Server, and ESX take a more optimized path to running target operating systems on the host than emulators (such as Bochs) which simulate the function of each CPU instruction on the target machine one-by-one, or dynamic recompilation which compiles blocks of machine-instructions the first time they execute, and then uses the translated code directly when the code runs subsequently. (Microsoft Virtual PC for Mac OS X takes this approach.) VMware software does not emulate an instruction set for different hardware not physically present. This significantly boosts performance,^[14] but can cause problems when moving virtual machine guests between hardware hosts using different instruction-sets (such as found in 64-bit Intel and AMD CPUs), or between hardware hosts with a differing number of CPUs. Stopping the virtual-machine guest before moving it to a different CPU type generally causes no issues.

VMware's products use the CPU to run code directly whenever possible (as, for example, when running user-mode and virtual 8086 mode code on x86). When direct execution cannot operate, such as with kernel-level and real-mode code, VMware products re-write the code dynamically, a process VMware calls "binary translation" or BT. The translated code gets stored in spare memory, typically at the end of the address space, which segmentation mechanisms can protect and make invisible. For these reasons, VMware operates dramatically faster than emulators, running at more than 80% of the speed that the virtual guest operating-system would run directly on the same hardware. VMware claims an overhead as small as 3% to 6% for computationally-intensive applications.

VMware's approach avoids some of the difficulties of virtualization on x86-based platforms. Virtual machines may deal with offending instructions by replacing them, or by simply running kernel-code in user-mode. Replacing instructions runs the risk that the code may fail to find the expected content if it reads itself; one cannot protect code against reading while allowing normal execution, and replacing in-place becomes complicated. Running the code unmodified in user-mode will also fail, as most instructions which just read the machine-state do not cause an exception and will betray the real state of the program, and certain instructions silently change behavior in user-mode. One must always rewrite; performing a simulation of the current program counter in the original location when necessary and (notably) remapping hardware code breakpoints.

Although VMware virtual machines run in user-mode, VMware Workstation itself requires the installation of various drivers in the host operating-system, notably to dynamically switch the GDT and the IDT tables.

The VMware product line can also run different operating systems on a dual-boot system simultaneously by booting one partition natively while using the other as a guest within VMware Workstation.

The industry consensus is that VMware's solution is overpriced. Hogwash like VM statements:

Horschman countered the 'high pricing' claim saying "Virtualization customers should focus on cost per VM more than upfront license costs when choosing a hypervisor. VMware Infrastructure's exclusive ability to overcommit memory gives it an advantage in cost per VM the others can't match." And he adds, "Our rivals are simply trying to compensate for limitations in their products with realistic pricing."

should be ignored. No matter how much you can share the memory (and overcommitment is just a new term for what IBM VM did since 1972), you can't bypass the limitation of a single channel from CPU to memory. The more guests are running the more this channel is stressed.

But even assuming the same efficiency as multiple standalone 1U servers VMware is not cost efficient unless you can squeeze more then four guests per server. The following table demonstrate that cost efficiency at less then four guest per physical server is just non-existent. You need at least eight guest to achieve the same cost efficiency as four Xen servers running two guests each (Novell does not charge for additional guests on the same physical server).

Notes

1. Even assuming the same efficiency, there is no cost savings running 4 or less guests per VMware server.
2. Cost of blades is slightly higher then 1U servers due to the cost of the enclosure but can be assumed equal for simplicity
3. We assume that in case of two instances no SAN is needed/used (internal drives are used for each guest)
4. We assume that in case of 4 guests or more, SAN cards and SAN storage is used
5. We assume that in case of 4 or more guests Oracle virtual VM is used (which has maintenance fees)
6. For simplicity the cost of SAN storage is assumed to be fixed cost $3K per 1T per 5 years (includes SAN unit amortization, maintenance and switches, excludes SAN cards in the server itself)

Performance on high loads is not impressive as it should be for non-paravirtualized hypervisor. Here is a more realistic assessment from a rival Xen camp:

Simon Crosby, CTO of the Virtualization and Management Division at Citrix Systems, writes on his blog: "The bottom line: VMware's 'ROI analysis' offers neither an ROI comparison nor any analysis. But it does offer valuable insight into the mindset of a company that will fight tooth and nail to maintain VI3 sales at the expense of a properly thought through solution that meets end user requirements. The very fact that the VMware EULA still forbids Citrix or Microsoft or anyone in the Xen community from publishing performance comparisons against ESX is further testimony to VMware's deepest fear, that customers will become smarter about their choices, and begin to really question ROI."

VMware workstation provides additional flexibility for corporate IT guess. It can run Linux as guest and for most practical uses the efficiency is OK.

But VM server is a different story. For running Linux guests it is a really overpriced solution, unless they are mostly circulating air and you can squeeze more then four guests on a single VMware server (that means they should have very modest I/O ). Five year total ownership cost of VMware is $11K ($5K for hypervisor + 5* $1.2 annual maintenance fee). And $11K using Dell prices as of June 2011 allow you to buy additional three Intel servers with quad-core CPU and 16G of RAM. Two questions arise:

• Can VMware match performance of four or five physical servers (two that can be bought for the price of bigger server that is bought to run VMware and three can be bought for the price for hypervisor and five year maintenance ).
• Can VMware match the performance of server running Xen with two Linux guests and local storage. Especially if, like is the case with Linux, you can run two guests without paying additional maintenance fees and still get support from the vendor like Novell ?

I think that the answer to both question is no. So it's unclear what we are gaining is comparison with alternatives.

Also stability suffers just because of overcomplexity of environment and that makes advantages such as ability to move application from one server to another less attractive. BTW they understand themselves that pricewise they painted themselves into a corner and it is only matter of time for their competitors to match or exceed their capabilities at lower price. See vi_pricing3 for actual retail prices.

VMware is "heavyweight" virtual machine "built" on the underlying layer of hardware and the existing operating system. The virtual machine runs on top of the existing OS and provide emulated "virtual machine devices" that might be radically different from the underling hardware. The great advantage of this is that you gat standard virtualized hardware. The disadvantage is pretty heavy performance penalty in case of large discrepancies (especially in video drivers).

VMware was the first successful product that abstracted the Intel X86 hardware layer to the extent possible for creating VMware images for different OSes running on Intel hardware as well as OSes with certain applications preinstalled (virtual appliances). The latter completely redefined the concept of the demo as many applications now became too complex to install and demo disks mostly ends in the dust bin without any real chance to be used even once.

As a side note one of the biggest mistakes on Sun's brass was that they failed to buy VMware and were unable to capitalize on the pact with Microsoft: Microsoft Virtual server does not support Solaris. VMware workstation 6 has support for Solaris 10.

What is interesting is that VMware was shockingly inept in promoting 'virtual appliances" theme. Contribution to their site are not well checked. High quality examples from VMware itself are missing in action. Relying on P2P network for downloading is a little bit amateurish: corporation that charges serious money for its server products can probably fund a decent server for downloading (checked) appliances. Much smaller companies can do this.

NEWS CONTENTS

• 20130326 : PayPal To Replace VMware With OpenStack - Slashdot ( PayPal To Replace VMware With OpenStack - Slashdot, Mar 26, 2013 )
• 20130313 : Virtualization Gains Popularity Despite Problems ( Virtualization Gains Popularity Despite Problems, Mar 13, 2013 )
• 20130313 : VMware KB Enabling VMI with SLES10 SP2 32bit virtual machines on ESX ( VMware KB Enabling VMI with SLES10 SP2 32bit virtual machines on ESX, )
• 20110605 : VMware Communities Support VMI Paravirtualization - not... ( Jul 17, 2008 )
• 20110605 : Suse Linux kernel patch boosts VMWare efficiency ( Suse Linux kernel patch boosts VMWare efficiency, Jun 05, 2011 )
• 20110520 : SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 SP1 for VMware ( NOVELL )
• 20110520 : VMware goes open source with desktop virtualization release - Network World ( VMware goes open source with desktop virtualization release - Network World, )
• 20080624 : VMwares CEO talks Microsoft, security, EMC and cloud computing by Jon Brodkin ( VMware's CEO talks Microsoft, security, EMC and cloud computing, Jun 24, 2008 )
• 20080609 : Free tool secures VMware servers ( Free tool secures VMware servers, Jun 9, 2008 )
• 20080609 : Using VMware Player ( Using VMware Player, )
• 20080320 : Everyone chimes in on VMware memory overcommitment and ROI by David Marshall ( Everyone chimes in on VMware memory overcommitment and ROI, Mar 20, 2008 )
• 20080320 : Memory Resource Management in VMware ESX Server ( Memory Resource Management in VMware ESX Server, )
• 20080320 : VMware VMware Virtual Reality Memory Overcommitment in the Real World ( VMware VMware Virtual Reality Memory Overcommitment in the Real World, )
• 20070531 : Frameworkx, VMware Workstation 6.0 Build 45731 RTM! ( Frameworkx, VMware Workstation 6.0 Build 45731 RTM!, May 31, 2007 )

Old News ;-)

[Mar 26, 2013] PayPal To Replace VMware With OpenStack - Slashdot

My God $1K for live migration for server: I would buy a good server for those money ;-)

mysidia

Re:VMware for free

No live migration, no centralized management, none of the features the competitors offer for free.

Live migration is not free, but it is cheap -- less than $1000 bucks per server for a standard license. Central management of Hyper-V requires systemcenter virtual machine manager which is not free.

At sufficient scale, the VMware licensing costs are almost non-consequential. For purchasing VMware to be the better choice, it is not necessary that the license have a lower cost. The ROI needs to be higher. As long as VMware can offer a higher ROI, through functionality, and advanced features, or through greater consolidation ratios (lower cost per virtualized application in a cloud; more workloads per server, less electricity or hardware cost per workload on average), then the organizations who can justify the use of those features will save more money by buying VMware's products and have lower costs than if they used a competitor's product with a lower per-unit license charge.

Competitors' products don't offer free comparable enterprise-quality equivalents to Transparent page sharing (TPS)/Transparent memory compression (memory overcommit), the Cisco Nexus1000V distributed virtual switch, CPU Memory HotPlugging, Virtual Serial Port concentrator, Host Profiles, Resource Pools/Distributed Resource Management, Distributed Power Management, Storage I/O Control, Vmware APIs for Array Integration, vShield Endpoint, vShield App, vShield Edge, vCloud Network and Security (VXLAN), etc.

The competitors' total available functionality is more limited.

mysidia

Re:VMware for free

They don't restrict you from using vHpervisor in a commercial capacity. However, you are not allowed rent out virtual machines, or host virtual machines commercially for third parties on a free ESXi (Nor are you allowed to do so with commercially purchased vSphere licenses; you can only legally sell or rent the usage of VMs on VMware software through their service provider program, where you are required to install a usage monitor, and you pay by powered on reserved virtual RAM per Gigabyte-Hour on a monthly basis.).

Jeremiah Cornelius

Re:Lesson: Licensing costs suck (Score:5, Interesting)

This story from Gigaom is a little more tempered than the article on Businessinsider. It quotes the Paypal director, saying they will continue to use VMware - if you read right through to the end of it.

http://gigaom.com/2013/03/25/mirantis-open-sources-its-openstack-cloud-management-tools/ [gigaom.com]

This, in any case, is not a "tipping-point" indicator.

With or without Mirantis or Fuel, Openstack is a tool kit for building your own CloudOS. Unless you can make a business based on the internal IP generated, there's no win here for most enterprise shops.

Amazon did this sucessfully - getting value from reselling access to raw infrastructure, based on development created for internal needs.

Yahoo failed at this, after more than a decade optimising their own OS layer for internet scale-out. They would have been better served to eliminate their OS engineering unit, buying common OTS Linux/Windows.

PayPal are somewhere between these poles. Having been on their own linux-based, scale-out physical architecture for more than a decade, they are well-positioned to derive value from Openstack. If you were Williams-Sonoma or Chevron? They do not want or need to become an OS developer/integrator.

BitZtream:

Good Riddens (Score:5, Insightful)

Theres something wrong with VMware that makes it think it can charge more for virtualization software than the hardware it is replacing. They need their asses handed to them for a few years to put them back in their place.

Anonymous Coward

Re: Good Riddens

The last CEO made structural changes to enhance profitability yet sacrificed the long term health of the company. For 5 years of "work" cashed in $60 million in stock grants in 3 days (Nov 2012) and was getting a $1.5M USD salary with cash bonuses.

The failed "new" licensing scheme that they tried to push thru in 2011 backfired because it was seen for what it really was, a cash grab.

The company has become extremely bureaucratic and has lost it's innovative edge. In essence it had become Microsoft. I guess that is what you get when you hire alot of management staff & executives from Microsoft.

They are responsible for their own shortcomings and present/future predicaments.

girlinatrainingbra

Re: Even for nonprofits

Being a non-profit or "not for profit" corporation does not mean that the employees and board members work for a pittance. Take a look at the salaries for Goodwill and the Red Cross and United Way in the San Diego area. Each chair makes more than $300,000.00 per year, sometimes substantially more when you include their "car allowance" and "living allowance" and "competitive allowance". A lot of their other employees are also extremely well paid. So there's no need to worry about "non-profit" behemoths like these not getting any sort of serious discount.

anne on E. mouse cow

Re: Even for nonprofits (Score:5, Informative)

Each chair makes more than $300,000.00 per year

Absolutely disgusting, taking peoples charitable donations and living like lords.

I decided to check your facts, the president of red cross US gets $1million a year!! Some people have no shame.

tlhIngan:

Re:Good Riddens

Theres something wrong with VMware that makes it think it can charge more for virtualization software than the hardware it is replacing. They need their asses handed to them for a few years to put them back in their place.

It's name. VMWare was the first to virtualize the x86, and thus people bought into them by name alone. Sort of like how people used to buy IBM, or Microsoft. Now they buy VMWare.

And I know many a sysadmin who for their home system, refuse to run anything but the home versions of VMWare (notably on Mac, VMWare Fusion). They wouldn't even consider Parallels (nevermind VirtualBox).

VMWare has name recognition primarily. You'll never go wrong buying VMWare. Hyper-V is only done because it's Microsoft.

[Mar 13, 2013] Virtualization Gains Popularity Despite Problems

VMware KB Enabling VMI with SLES10 SP2 32bit virtual machines on ESX

Note: VMI can only be enabled on the 32bit version of SLES10 SP2. To enable VMI, the virtual machine must have an Internet connection to Novell's software update servers.

[Jun 05, 2011] VMware Communities Support VMI Paravirtualization - not...

Jul 17, 2008

Re: Support VMI Paravirtualization - not working on RC1 azmir wrote:Ed, Just specific Linux distros - I believe just Ubuntu 7.10 and 8.04 support paravirt. None of the Windows OS are supported

Yep, Ubuntu 7.10, and 8.04, and SLES10 SP2 (i.e. SuSE Enterprise Linux 10 SP2). All 32-bit only. Turns out there's no point for VMI for 64-bit Linux guests since it doesn't provide much of a performance boost due to a fortunate confluence of factors.

[Jun 05, 2011] Suse Linux kernel patch boosts VMWare efficiency

The first working release is SLES 11 SP1. They change $600 per year just for patches. See VMware Online Store - Buy VMware SUSE Support, Linux Phone Support

Suse Linux kernel patch boosts VMWare efficiency Novell offers better interoperablity for virtual machines By John Fontana | Published: 10:17 GMT, 17 June 08

Related Content News Acer to cut 300 jobs in European operation Google claims phishers stole emails from politicians, activist Oracle gives Apache the OpenOffice.org codebase Features How is your ERP? Channelling the White Stuff Barclays partners with IBM for private cloud project Opinion and Debate CIO view: Is the cloud just marketing hype? The emperor's new clothes and other stories Cutting through the cloud The missing link in data quality Novell has released updates to its Suse Linux kernel designed to make the operating system more efficient when running on top of VMware environments.

The upgrade to the Suse Linux Enterprise kernel lets it take advantage of paravirtualisation techniques so it runs more efficiently as a guest operating system.

Novell has built in support for VMware's Virtual Machine Interface (VMI). "The patch to the kernel provides increased performance and better interoperability," said Carlos Montero-Luque, vice president of product management for open platform solutions at Novell.

The kernel patch is available in Suse Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 10 Service Pack 2, which can be downloaded.

In a paravirtualised environment the guest operating system is modified to work more closely with the underlying hardware and not just with the virtualised environment. It is one of a handful of variants for designing virtual machine environments.

In order to take advantage of paravirtualisation, however, an operating system must be specifically ported to run on top of a host system. Novell and VMware have been working on the Suse upgrades for the past nine months.

Novell also has a kernel patch to support paravirtualisation of SLES on the Xen hypervisor that SLES uses when it is serving as a host environment.

Login | Register Subscribe to our newslettersRegistration is free, and gives you full access to our extensive white paper library, case studies & analysis, downloads & speciality areas, and more.Sign up to our newsletters and get up to date articles directly to your inbox. Get the latest, breaking IT news, our most read articles, expert insight and latest white papers. In addition, Novell has been working with Microsoft in a lab the two opened last September to ensure SLES runs in a paravirtualised mode on top of Windows Hyper-V, which is slated to ship later this summer. The two are also ensuring Windows Server 2008 runs in enlightened mode on top of Novell's Xen hypervisor. Enlightened mode is a Microsoft technology that allows the server to recognise when it is running on top of a hypervisor and then automatically take different avenues to access memory management and IO.

"Regardless of the different environments - VMware or Hyper-V - we want SLES to be the best supported, best performing guest operating system," Montero-Luque says."We expect to see mixed environments in the future for a number of reasons and interoperability has been a key part of our strategy."

[May 20, 2011] SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 SP1 for VMware

In other words standard distribution SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 SP1 includes VMware friendly kernel and the installer is able to recognize the installation under VMware and use this kernel.

NOVELL

IMPORTANT: SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 SP1 for VMware is intended for use by customers running VMware vSphere and its subscriptions and support are sold only by VMware and its partners.
For more information visit http://www.vmware.com/go/slesforvmware.

If you have obtained a subscription for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server from Novell, that subscription does not provide the right to use SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for VMware, nor does it provide access to patches, maintenance, or support for SLES for VMware.

If you are a Novell customer, please download the standard SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 SP1 from http://download.novell.com.

VMware goes open source with desktop virtualization release - Network World

VMware has released open source desktop virtualization software designed to let its business partners optimize thin clients for the delivery of personalized virtual desktops.

VMware View Open Client, available for download on the Google Code site since Monday night, helps further VMware's strategy both for desktop virtualization and open source. VMware CEO Paul Maritz said last September that the company had considered open sourcing ESX, its server hypervisor and flagship product.

This week's news doesn't go that far, but it does introduce an open source component into what is expected to be a fast growing market for virtual desktops. VMware cited Gartner research that predicts 50 million user licenses for hosted virtual desktops will be purchased by 2013.

"We are sharing our source code in VMware View Open Client so vendors can easily optimize devices to create the best virtual desktop solutions," VMware desktop vice president Jocelyn Goldfein says in a news release. "This … brings us closer to our Universal Client vision, where users can securely and efficiently access rich personalized desktop environments, from any device at any time."

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The open source software is complementary to the commercial product VMware View, and will let partners optimize thin clients and other devices for that product, the company said.

VMware View Open Client lets Linux machines connect to remote Windows desktops, but the project Web site says those Windows desktops must be virtualized with the commercial version of VMware View.

Open Client features include two factor authentication and the ability to create a secure tunnel using SSL. The initial release does not support multiple desktop sessions. The open source software is compatible with VMware Virtual Desktop Manager (VDM) 2.0, 2.1, and VMware View Manager 3.0.

[Jun 24, 2008] VMware's CEO talks Microsoft, security, EMC and cloud computing by Jon Brodkin

06/24/2008 | Network World

Diane Greene is the president, CEO and co-founder of VMware, a pioneer of x86 server virtualization and one of the most innovative companies to hit the IT world in the past decade. Greene was in Boston last week with her VMware team, briefing analysts on new technologies that haven't been made public yet. She took some time out to speak with Network World's Jon Brodkin about a range of topics.

Microsoft is entering the market with Hyper-V. How are you preparing for that?

We've got our hypervisor, which is the world's best, the most reliable, the most secure, the most functional, the smallest footprint. Then we have this broad portfolio of 21 products that make this hypervisor powerful. We've been expecting competition for years. We got ready for it. We knew what they would do, they would come in and say 'the hypervisor is free.' And we have shifted our revenue, we have shifted our value to the software that makes that hypervisor so valuable.

VMware does charge a lot more than its competitors. Are you feeling any pressure to lower your prices?

We're the only company with a price point for every kind of use of virtualization starting with just the hypervisor. ESXi is available from our Web site for $495. We have a free VMware Server that is very actively used, if you look at the discussion groups.

The portfolio of software for managing and automating the applications for running virtual machines, giving them quality of service, is where we increasingly charge, but that's completely separate from the base platform, the hypervisor layer.

What really differentiates the VMware hypervisor from Microsoft and Xen server virtualization software? (Compare server products.)

VMware's hypervisor is incredibly robust. We have a [big pharmaceuticals] customer that has run one with no reboots for over four years. No restarts. It's the only hypervisor that has no dependence on an operating system. It can be much more secure because a hypervisor is only as secure as its weakest link. We have this architecture that can be embedded in the hardware with this small, very secure footprint [under 32MB]. And the functionality our hypervisor supports, such as memory overcommit and so forth is the broadest. Not to mention that it's in use in production by over 100,000 customers.

IBM virtualized the mainframe several decades ago. How is VMware's technology modeled after mainframe virtualization?

VMware was founded with the notion that if you revisited this concept of virtualization that IBM had done and modernized it, and brought it to industry-standard systems, that where hardware had come in terms of fast CPUs, and cheap memory and cheap disk and networking support was going to make it phenomenally valuable. We had taken it to a much broader applicability than was originally done on the mainframe, but the concept of virtualization and a lot of the value proposition that IBM saw in the late '60s hasn't changed at all.

There were some rumors about EMC selling VMware, which seem to have fizzled out. How much attention do you pay to that kind of thing?

As CEO of VMware my job is to keep the company executing and fulfilling our potential, and that's really what I focus on and lead the company to focus on.

Any idea why these rumors crop up from time to time, though?

The situation VMware is in, where we're 86% [owned by EMC] and a partial spinout [on the stock market] is an unusual situation and has some instability associated with it. Naturally people are watching that closely. If you looked at data on companies that get partially spun out, generally something happens afterwards, you know it evolves one way or another.

You've discussed in the past how it was important to keep the operations of VMware separate from EMC, even though EMC owns VMware. Who do you report to? Is there any interference from on high?

VMware is now a separate public company from EMC. As CEO I report to the VMware board.

Which is composed mostly of EMC executives?

The VMware board is mostly EMC, either directors or officers of EMC. What we're focused on at VMware is our partnering, that's very key to how we go to market, how we integrate, and executing on our strategy.

Do you ever feel friction or have strategic disagreements with EMC?

I find that it's important to be very articulate about how in order for VMware to realize its full potential -- and we're in an amazing position right now -- the importance of our partners and our ability to execute in an unfettered way.

You co-founded VMware with your husband. What is his current involvement with the company and what's your business relationship like?

VMware had five co-founders and Mendel Rosenblum, who is my husband, is our chief scientist. He's also a professor of computer science in the systems space at Stanford University where he continues to be a full-time professor. But he is also very involved at VMware one day a week and on an ongoing basis.

Is there a next wave of virtualization we don't know about?

What we're doing with computers is getting more complex. The sophistication with which we handle delivering applications with the top quality of service and security. The next wave is using virtualization to provide a complete simplification of how you do that -- being able to build, develop, deploy, maintain and update applications, where an application can be a composite application of multiple virtual machines, and delivering that from any place over any set of hardware resources, be it on-premise or off-premise in a cloud, if you will.

How does cloud computing play into virtualization?

Virtualization is really the key building block to being able to do cloud computing, because the notion of a cloud is that all the resources are kind of aggregated, sort of magically, and you just run services from the quote cloud. It's very important you be able to separate the software from the hardware and move it around without any service interruption. And be able to have the application take with it the quality of service it wants. So what customers want is complete freedom of choice. They want to take their application and run it anywhere in any cloud. The only way to do that is with virtualization.

Amazon uses virtualization in its EC2 cloud. Are they using VMware?

I can't comment on that, but I think the model that Amazon is doing is helping people to understand what's possible.

What's the biggest challenge for VMware this year?

If I had to identify one thing, we've definitely stepped up our communication this year. Part of that is being a public company. Part of that is explaining, as the noise has increased due to our expected arrival of competitors coming into the market, explaining the different category of value proposition we have.

What are the most innovative VMware customers doing with virtualization?

There are great innovations going on in the desktop and in the data center and even in the cloud. The desktop is used heavily in the health industry and the hospitals. There's Huntsville hospital [in Alabama], which uses thin clients on wheeled carts with the desktop hosted on a centralized server. They're using virtualized desktops so they can have wireless thin clients running around on hospital carts.

The U.S. Marine Corps consolidated 300 data centers down to 30, and 100 mobile platforms, a data center in a box, that can go on a tank or what have you. With [virtual desktop software] VMware ACE, they can carry [desktops] on their thumb drives and deploy on any PC.

The National Security Agency, of course, has used it to provide different security levels on the same physical machine. They've been a customer of ours since 1999. They started out really early, we gave them our source code right away, they did a full audit of it. One of the first things they used it for was to isolate what people are doing because a single individual that has top security clearance needs to do different things at different security levels. [Previously], they had to have a different PC depending on how secure the data was. They were able to consolidate that onto a single machine made up of multiple virtual machines. Each virtual machine was encrypted and so forth and had a different security clearance level.

The VMsafe program you announced in February essentially opened your hypervisor to security vendors. Has anything innovative come out of that yet? (Compare security products.)

You'll see products over the next 18 to 24 months out of that. Once that comes out you'll see a new level of security, because instead of being either inside the operating system or out on the network, you're on a special very secure virtual machine that can aggregate what's going on in all the memory and CPU and operating system and network. Also, people won't need to install antivirus in the software anymore because you'll be able to put it in the container [the virtual server running the software]. In other words, you can control what goes in and out of a virtual machine. If there's a new virus you can update right there, you don't have to update the operating system or the application.

Do you think a virtual server today is more secure or less secure than a physical server?

I would say it's certainly as secure and in some ways more secure simply because the hypervisor is so small, so you can really secure the hypervisor. And a virtual machine container is as secure as the hardware.

Are there any problems people run into that are unique to virtual servers?

With products like ACE, where you can actually put security policies around the virtual machine, that actually takes it to a stronger level. You can have a desktop virtual machine not allowed to send anything to a printer or have to check in with a central server to make sure it's still valid and properly updated before you can operate it. You can add security policies around that in a way you wouldn't be able to do with a physical machine.

Another problem is virtual server sprawl. How does that compare to physical server sprawl?

A virtual machine when it's inactive uses no power. A virtual machine doesn't require physical space other than the disk the virtual machine file sits on. So if you have excellent monitoring and management tools around a virtual machine you're going to be in a much better position than if you had to bring out a new physical machine every time you want to run another workload. It is interesting, oftentimes when people bring in our capacity planner tool, they'll discover machines and nobody knows what they're used for.

VMware is doing application virtualization now, with the acquisition of Thinstall. Are there any other types of virtualization you haven't done yet that you might get into?

Virtualization can be a very broad, all-encompassing term. People apply virtualization to social networks, even. But we virtualize comprehensively all the hardware resources: servers, storage, network, memory, CPU, disk, I/O. We do that within ESX.

That lets you separate the software from the hardware. Then we let you virtualize the application from the operating system so you can seamlessly install an application on any version of the operating system.

In a way we're virtualizing how you do management and automation because we're simplifying it.

... ... ...

[Jun 9, 2008] Free tool secures VMware servers

June 9, 2008 | Network World

Enterprise IT managers dealing with a proliferation of virtual servers might want to check out a free tool that promises to ensure virtual servers are configured for optimal security.

ConfigCheck is a free utility that downloads to a desktop and compares active virtual server configurations against best practices guidelines development by VMware Inc. The tool was jointly released Wednesday by VMware and configuration management software maker Tripwire Inc.

"This is a free application that automates the process of checking systems for configuration errors that could cause security and compliance issues in customer environments," said Mark Gaydos, vice president of marketing at Tripwire.

ConfigCheck downloads to a desktop and IT managers point it at ESX servers to compare actual configurations against the best practice guidelines laid out by VMware. Tripwire scaled back its Tripwire Enterprise product, which is designed to perform configuration and compliance audits of large environments. (Compare network configuration management tools.)

ConfigCheck is equipped with VMware-specific configuration information to enable IT managers to more quickly -- and with less manual effort -- determine if ESX servers in their environment are configured properly for security, compliance and performance.

[PDF] Using VMware Player

[Mar 20, 2008] Everyone chimes in on VMware memory overcommitment and ROI by David Marshall

Other things equal Solaris zones are a better deal that virtual machines that VMware provides but in general in many cases both are redundant and just reflect laziness of putting several applications on a single server (or more correctly fears that application will not play nicely with each other). "Memory commitment is little more than a Virtual Memory Manager that the hosted OS's use, except done in a Virtual Machine and having VM awareness."

Everyone chimes in on VMware memory overcommitment and ROI

These past few days, we've seen some back and forth postings taking place on various corporate blogs around the topics of virtualization ROI and a unique feature found in VMware ESX Server called memory overcommitment.

VMware's Eric Horschman posted an interesting blog post on VMware's Virtual Reality Blog site answering remarks made by many in the industry that VMware's solution is overpriced. Many have said that with companies giving away platforms built on top of Xen, and Microsoft planning on charging $28 for their yet to be released Hyper-V hypervisor, it seems as though VMware's price tag could be a little steep and might have to come down to a price that is more "reasonable".

Horschman countered the 'high pricing' claim saying "Virtualization customers should focus on cost per VM more than upfront license costs when choosing a hypervisor. VMware Infrastructure's exclusive ability to overcommit memory gives it an advantage in cost per VM the others can't match." And he adds, "Our rivals are simply trying to compensate for limitations in their products with realistic pricing."

To back his claims up, Horschman lays out an elaborate presentation and example of how to calculate this cost per VM, and attempts to show readers how a free hypervisor ends up costing more money per VM than that of the more expensive ESX Server product because of the memory overcommitment feature currently exclusive to VMware.

Roger Klorese, Senior Director on the Product Marketing team for Citrix XenServer, answers Horschman's post with a blog posting of his own. As a side note, in addition to now working at Citrix on the XenServer product, Klorese was, in another life, an early member of the VMware family and so he draws on some of his past experience with the ESX Server product.

"The test he uses to support the claim is very impressive - if what you want to do is to power on virtual machines. If you're going to look at their screensavers all day while you do your work with a pencil and paper and abacus, power-on statistics are meaningful. And the moment you power on is the time you get the most out of page-sharing: nearly all pages are either operating system and services code pages (which are identical from guest to guest in many cases) or all-zero (which are all initially mapped to the same physical page)."

He continues, "What do you think happens when those pages start to un-share, as people start doing real work? How big do you need to expand those balloons, and how much do you have to starve those guests, to keep your 5:1 memory allocation? And if you can't balloon 5:1, how much do you further degrade it when you start using the hypervisor swap file?"

Simon Crosby, CTO of the Virtualization and Management Division at Citrix Systems, writes on his blog: "The bottom line: VMware's 'ROI analysis' offers neither an ROI comparison nor any analysis. But it does offer valuable insight into the mindset of a company that will fight tooth and nail to maintain VI3 sales at the expense of a properly thought through solution that meets end user requirements. The very fact that the VMware EULA still forbids Citrix or Microsoft or anyone in the Xen community from publishing performance comparisons against ESX is further testimony to VMware's deepest fear, that customers will become smarter about their choices, and begin to really question ROI."

Citrix wasn't alone in answering Horschman's blog post. Microsoft blogger James O'Neill didn't agree with the numbers either. On his blog, he wrote, "They were able to start 40 instances of Windows XP to achieve the 40 VMs, with 512MB of memory on a machine with only 4GB of RAM - a 5 times over commitment ratio. Of course they didn't actually run anything in them, because if you and I fired up Outlook, and IE (with our own mail boxes and choice of pages) you open word and I open PowerPoint very few memory pages will be sharable (I've got 47 pages open in IE right now, and it's using over 300MB of RAM, almost all for data). That means a lot of paging will have to happen in the virtualization stack. Brace yourself for really poor performance."

Where to begin? All of these blogs are starting to get wonderful responses. And the battle over memory overcommitment and product pricing continues.

What's interesting to note is that it sounds like Citrix may already have the memory overcommitment capability in the Xen product. But they haven't gone further down that road because of performance issues. Microsoft is also supposedly planning on adding this very feature into the next version of Hyper-V according to a recent interview done with Bob Muglia.

All of this discussion around memory ballooning, paging and memory overcommitment made me remember something I heard in a break-out session back at VMworld 2006. The memory overcommitment feature was described to me as an automobile airbag. It's one of those features you are glad to have in case of an emergency, but you certainly don't use it on an everyday basis.

From the responses that many of these blog postings are receiving, it sounds like a mix bag review of the feature. Some say it works great for them in their environment - and they do get a bump in consolidation densities. Others are saying that it drags down performance of their virtual machines. Again, sounds like a case by case issue. And the battle... er, discussion, rages on.

===

Memory commitment is little more than a Virtual Memory Manager that the hosted OS's use, except done in a Virtual Machine and having VM awareness.

Anyone who knows anything about Virtual Memory knows that it's a technical kluge. You want it because it allows the system to run in situations where, without it, the system could not run at all. You can elaborate on that by saying that machine performance is allowed to degrade in a stepwise fashion, as memory is overcommited, rather than halting abruptly.

None of this addresses the fact that Virtual Machines, as a method of server consolidation, invited the hardware inefficiencies of partitioned memory in the first place. Why was this acceptable? Because it was better than having one full physical computer per application!

One application per logical computer--since when was this a good idea? It mainly comes about because customers don't believe that applications can play nice together, on a single OS instance. Address that and you obviate much of the need for Virtual Machines.

Posted by: Brian at March 20, 2008 06:22 PM

===

Memory overcommit can be very helpful in many situations. Particularly when you have a mix of VMs where some are active at one given time while others are idle. We mix VDI and production where our VDI is used heavily at night and production heavy during the day. It affords us some awesome use of the memory management that VMware offers.

And of course Citrix and Microsoft are going to bash VMware. It is in their nature. Personally, the Citrix folks should worry less about what VMware is doing and do a better job of catching up. Like having multiple VLANs per NIC and NIC teaming. How can someone think of virtualization and NOT have NIC teaming and VLANs??????

Posted by: Steve H at March 21, 2008 09:25 AM

===

I don't know if Citrix and Microsoft really think that memory overcommitment isn't important. In fact, as I said, I believe this capability exists in Citrix, and Microsoft is working toward supporting it in the next version of Hyper-V. The argument may be centered more about the claims that VMware's employee was making.

I agree, memory overcommitment is useful. However, my own personal experiences haven't proven to me that on every use case, every scenario, this is the right thing to do. If you have a server of virtual machines that are all clones from a single template image, this probably does wonders. If you have servers filled with virtual machines that are very different from one another... then maybe not so much. And for the many implementations that are somewhere between these two extremes, it really is case by case whether the performance of said virtual machines remain high enough.

What have you seen in your real world experiences? Did they look and act like the example? I'd love to hear about your environment and your density ratio and performance.

Thanks for sharing.

Posted by: David Marshall at March 29, 2008 07:10 PM

Memory Resource Management in VMware ESX Server

Publisher:
VMware

Latest Revision:
Dec 8, 2002

Download:
http://www.vmware.com/pdf/usenix_resource_mgmt.pdf

Description

This paper introduces several novel ESX Server mechanisms and policies for managing memory. A ballooning technique reclaims the pages considered least valuable by the operating system running in a virtual machine. An idle memory tax achieves efficient memory utilization while maintaining performance isolation guarantees. Content-based page sharing
and hot I/O page remapping exploit transparent page remapping to eliminate redundancy and reduce copying overheads. These techniques are combined to efficiently support virtual machine workloads that overcommit memory

VMware VMware Virtual Reality Memory Overcommitment in the Real World

Memory overcommit is only the act of oversubscribing memory. There are several features that are in play to allow for memory overcommitment. Transparent page sharing, memory ballooning, and paging are all components that allow for memory overcommit. First of all not all hypervisors have memory ballooning. The Xen Open Source hypervisor is the only one with memory ballooning today and it's not even picked up by any of the commercial distributions that use Xen (Citrix, Red Hat, Novell, etc). That aside, memory ballooning only kicks in when there's pressure on the memory resources which happens *after* transparent page sharing (a VMware exclusive) has freed up a lot of memory. I should also mention that just because a guest isn't using memory doesn't mean it hasn't been assigned. Only transparent page sharing will allow for free and like memory pages to be consolidated and truly allow for high performing VMs while oversubscribing host memory.

So really there is no "memory overcommit" piece of technology - it's just a feature that's made possible by transparent page sharing, memory ballooning, and paging. There's a really good academic paper from the patent holder for these features here: http://www.vmware.com/resources/techresources/531.

===

KVM has transparent page sharing, memory ballooning, swapping, paging, processor overcommit, paravirtualization drivers for block and network devices, live migration, support for tons of third party drivers/devices, dynamic load balancing, distributed file system and alot more.

BUT! KVM does not have any good centralized management GUI for the enterprise. As far as I know, it does not even exist one.

Previous post I talked about "memory overcommit" like a standalone feature. My bad. English is not my main language.

===

Blinkiz,

Currently VMware is the only one to implement the features you describe. KVM does have a lot of this on their roadmap which can be found here: http://kvm.qumranet.com/kvmwiki/Roadmap. Most other hypervisors (Microsoft and Xen) also have some of these features on their roadmap for 2 - 3 years from now. All of this further validates the value of these features.

It will be interesting to see how the other hypervisors implement the technologies since VMware currently holds 4 patents around memory technologies which don't start to expire until 2017.

P.S. Don't worry about the English as a second language. I wish I spoke more languages. Indeed a lot of these posts to talk about memory overcommit as a feature like it alone is a piece of technology. I guess you could call it a feature but it's made possible by other underlying technologies.

Posted by: Mike DiPetrillo | April 15, 2008 at 01:47 AM

===

Hi their Mike
The roadmap is outdated. All features under the memory section is already implemented.

Still, KVM is a new product/solution that has not been tested as much as vmware vi3. Currently I cannot recommend any company to run kvm. But watch out in the future for KVM! The solution to have the linux kernel as virtualization engine is very effective. KVM = Kernel-based Virtual Machine

[May 31, 2007] Frameworkx, VMware Workstation 6.0 Build 45731 RTM!

VMware Workstation 6.0 Build 45731 RTM!

This release provides experimental support for the following operating systems:

• 32-bit and 64-bit Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.5 (Beta, formerly called 4.0 Update 5) as host and guest operating systems
• 32-bit and 64-bit SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 SP4 (Beta) as host and guest operating systems
• 32-bit and 64-bit Ubuntu Linux 7.04 as a guest operating system

This release provides full support for the following operating systems:

• 32-bit and 64-bit Windows Vista as host and guest operating systems
• 32-bit and 64-bit Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.0 as host and guest operating systems
• 32-bit and 64-bit Ubuntu Linux 6.10 as host and guest operating systems
• 32-bit and 64-bit Mandriva Linux 2007 as host and guest operating systems
• 32-bit and 64-bit Solaris 10 Update 3 as guest operating system
• 32-bit Novell Netware 6.5 SP5 as guest operating system

New Features in Version 6

• Support for High-Speed USB 2.0 Devices
• Multiple Monitor Support - At the click of a button, the guest can now span monitors and also reflect the monitor topology - meaning that applications, task bars, and so on inside the guest appear as you would expect them to on a multi-monitor system. You can specify how many monitors a virtual machine can detect, regardless of how many monitors are attached to the host. This feature is especially useful if you plan to deploy the virtual machine to a different host after you create it. You can also specify what screen resolution to use.
• Integrated Virtual Debuggers - With the new Workstation IDE (integrated development environment) plug-ins, software developers are provided with menu items and toolbar buttons in Visual Studio (Windows only) or Eclipse (Windows or Linux) to easily develop and debug programs in virtual machines. Documentation for the virtual debuggers is now included in the Workstation User's Manual.
• Run Virtual Machines in the Background - You can now leave virtual machines and teams running in the background when you exit Workstation. On the host, a system tray icon indicates how many virtual machines are running in the background. Click the icon to open a virtual machine.
• Increased RAM Support - The previous limit of 4GB total RAM that could be used for all virtual machines combined has been removed. The amount of memory used by all virtual machines combined is now limited only by the amount of the host computer's RAM and page file size. The maximum amount of memory that can be allocated per virtual machine has been raised from 3.6GB to 8GB.
• Virtual Machines Can Act as VNC Servers - You can set a virtual machine to act as a VNC server without having to install any specialized VNC software in the guest.
• Record/Replay of Virtual Machine Activity (Experimental) - This feature lets you record all of a Workstation 6 virtual machine's activity over a period of time. Unlike Workstation's movie-capture feature, the record/replay feature lets you exactly duplicate the operations and state of the virtual machine throughout the time of the recording. At any time during playback of a recording, you can click a button to "go live" from that point of execution.
• Easy Upgrade or Downgrade of VMware Virtual Machines - A new Change Version wizard steps you through the process of upgrading or downgrading virtual machines between Workstation versions 4, 5, and 6. The wizard helps you determine which virtual hardware version to use for various VMware products. You have the choice of either changing the version of the original virtual machine or creating a full clone.
• Automation Via Expanded VIX 1.1 API - The VIX API (formerly known as the Programming API) is now compatible with Workstation 6. This API allows you to write scripts and programs to automate virtual machine operations. This release of the API is available in the C language. There are additional language bindings for Perl, COM, and shell scripts (vmrun). li>
• Physical-to-Virtual Conversion and Enhanced Import Functionality (Windows Hosts Only) - Included in this release is the Converter Import wizard from the VMware Converter product. Using this wizard enables you to convert a physical Windows machine into a virtual machine, convert a virtual machine from one VMware virtual machine format to another, and convert virtual machines or system images from popular third-party vendors.
• Automatic Upgrade to the Latest Version of VMware Tools - You can now set VMware Tools to automatically upgrade itself when a Windows or Linux virtual machine is powered on.
• Appliance View for Virtual Appliances - Rather than having users see a console view for an appliance, you can now configure the new appliance view. It gives you a brief description of the type of server or appliance and provides a link that opens the browser on the guest system and connects to the correct port for the server console.
• Enhanced File Sharing and Copy and Paste Functionality - You can now use shared folders on a Solaris guest. You can copy and paste text and files between Linux and Windows hosts and Linux, Windows, and Solaris guests.
• Performance Improvements for Shared Folders with Linux Guests - Depending on usage, exchanging files between a host and Linux guest is now up to 40 percent faster when using shared folders.
• Cross-Platform Drag-and-Drop Functionality - You can now drag and drop files and directories from a Linux or Windows host to a Linux, Solaris, or Windows guest, and vice versa.
• New Online Help System - The help system includes full-text search, bookmarking ability, index, and table of contents.
• Battery Information Is Now Reported in the Guest - If you use a laptop to run a guest in full screen mode, you will now be able to see status information about the host's battery.
• Support for Paravirtualized Linux Kernels - If you have a VMware VMI (Virtual Machine Interface) 3.0 enabled kernel in a Linux guest operating system, you can now enable paravirtual support in the virtual machine.
• User Interface for Mapping a Virtual Disk to a Drive Letter on the Windows Host
• Improved 64-bit Guest Support - Intel EM64T VT-capable processors are now fully supported.
• New 64-bit Sound Driver
• Virtual Machine Communication Interface (Experimental) - VMCI provides a faster means of communication among applications running on the host and in virtual machines. The VMCI infrastructure comprises an SDK and drivers for host and guest. This experimental feature is especially suited for users who want to write client-server applications. For more information, see the README file. On Linux hosts, the README file is located in the directory /usr/share/doc/vmware/vmware-vmci/samples. On Windows hosts, it is in the VMCI folder in VMware Workstation installation directory; for example, C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware Workstation\VMCI.
• Enhanced virtual keyboard on Windows hosts - Now when you press Ctrl-Alt-Delete, the Windows guest system only, rather than both guest and host, will act on the command. The new virtual keyboard provides better handling of international keyboards and keyboards with extra keys. This feature also offers security improvements, as it processes raw keyboard input as soon as possible, bypassing Windows keystroke processing and any malware that's not already at a lower layer. This feature is currently available for all 32-bit Windows guests except Windows Vista guests.
• VMware Player 2.0 - The new Player Welcome page gives you the option of browsing to a virtual machine file or downloading a virtual appliance from the Virtual Appliance Marketplace at vam.vmware.com. You can then use Player's new appliance view when running a virtual appliance. For more information about standalone VMware Player 2.0, see the VMware Player Documentation page.

Fixed Bugs

The following bugs were reported as known issues in Workstation 5.5.3 and were fixed for the Workstation 6.0 release.

• On Linux guests that have SELinux enabled, accessing shared folders (/mnt/hgfs) fails with kernel oops error messages (bug 131213).
• In guests running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.0 or Ubuntu Linux 6.10 (or any Linux guests that use Xorg X Windows system versions 7.1 or higher) the Workstation 5.5.x VMware Tools installer does not install drivers for X Windows, and consequently the mouse does not perform correctly (bug 124689). The version of VMware Tools included with Workstation 6.0 does install the correct drivers.
• Workstation 5.5.3 does not support USB for Solaris guests. Workstation 6.0 does support USB for Solaris guests.

Known Issues

• When you install Workstation on a Windows Vista host, be sure to enter the serial number at installation time. This is necessary so that when you enter the serial number, you will have the required permission settings. If you enter the serial number later, as a different user, you might not have the correct permissions.
• If you run the Workstation installer on a Windows Vista host in order to use the Change option, you need to first turn off UAC (user account control). Otherwise, the wizard immediately displays the Finish dialog box and you receive an error message.
• On Windows Vista hosts, if you uninstall Workstation from the Control Panel, you might see a UAC (user account control) prompt that warns you about an unidentified program wanting to access your computer. You can safely click Allow.
• On Windows Vista hosts, if you start Workstation without administrative privileges, power on a virtual machine, exit Workstation with the virtual machine running in the background, and then start Workstation with administrative privileges, you cannot access the virtual machine.
  Workaround: Either always run Workstation with administrative privileges or always without.
• On Windows Vista hosts, you might not be able to view or select physical disk partitions when creating a virtual machine.
• On Windows Vista hosts, you need to run the Virtual Network Editor as an Administrator. You need to be logged in as a member of the Administrators group and either disable UAC (user account control) or start the Virtual Network Editor by right-clicking it in the Start menu and choosing Run as Administrator.
• On Windows Vista guests, to open the VMware Tools control panel, you need to be logged in as an Administrator user.
• If you are using multiple monitors and manually configure the display resolution in the guest to a combined size that is larger than the guest VRAM supports, you might get a blue screen or crash the guest.
  Workaround: Avoid manually setting the guest display resolution from within the guest to very large sizes across multiple monitors.
• For Windows 95 virtual machines created with Workstation 4.5 or ACE 1.0, upgrades of VMware Tools are sometimes incomplete.
  Workaround: First, uninstall VMware Tools. (For example, on Windows guests, go to Start > Control Panel > Add or Remove Programs, and remove the VMware Tools program). Next, use Workstation 6 to install VMware Tools again.
• If you install Workstation on a Windows 2003 Server host, Workstation help does not display correctly until you enable JavaScript. This is because, on Windows 2003 Server, JavaScript is disabled by default in Internet Explorer.
  Workaround: In Internet Explorer, choose Tools > Options > Internet > Custom Level > Scripting > Active Scripting, and choose Enable.
• Avoid attempting to exit Workstation and run a virtual machine in the background while recording activity on that virtual machine, using the record/replay feature. Doing so might cause the virtual machine to crash. Always stop recording before sending a virtual machine to run in the background.
• On Linux hosts, the Favorites list might get erased if you exit Workstation and manually choose to run some virtual machines in the background.
  Workarounds: If you want to run virtual machines in the background, from the Workstation menu bar, choose Preferences > Workspace > Virtual Machines, and select the "Run powered on virtual machines in background after close" option. Alternatively, always close virtual machines individually and run them in the backgroun before exiting Workstation.
• Do not attempt to play recordings of virtual machine activity that you made with an earlier, pre-release version of Workstation. On Linux hosts, doing so might cause Workstation to exit unexpectedly.
• When the virtual floppy drive is connected to the physical floppy drive on the host, the guest might not recognize floppy disk changes.
  Workaround: Connect the virtual floppy drive to the physical floppy drive while a floppy disk is in the physical drive.
• Workstation fails to install on 64-bit Linux hosts unless 32-bit compatibility libraries are installed in host. Some 64-bit Linux host operating systems don't install 32-bit compatibility libraries by default. Workstation runs on 64-bit systems, but needs the 32-bit compatibility libraries installed. When you try to install Workstation on a 64-bit Linux host without the 32-bit compatibility libraries, an error message similar to the following may appear:
  /usr/bin/ldd: line 171: /lib/ld-linux.so.2: No such file or directory
  Workaround: Install a 32-bit compatibility package for your Linux distribution. The name of the 32-bit compatibility package varies across distributions. For example, for Ubuntu you should install the ia32-libs and ia32-libs-gtk packages. See your distribution's documentation or Web site to determine the 32-bit compatibility package for your distribution.
• On Mandrake 10.0 guests, dragging and dropping files from guest to host does not work.
• If you share a folder between a Linux host and a Windows guest, symbolic links will not be accessible by the Windows guest. Symbolic links appear as regular files on Windows guests, but the links are not followed when you attempt to open them.
• On Windows hosts, if you want to create and run applications with the VMCI SDK, you need to rename vmci.dll to crosstalk.dll. You can find the vmci.dll file in the VMCI installation directory (for example, C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware Workstation\VMCI.
• On Windows Vista hosts, if you want to use File > Import to create a virtual machine from a physical machine, you need to start Workstation by right-clicking the desktop icon and choosing "Run as administrator."
• Occasionally, when you use File > Import to convert a Symantec backup or Norton Ghost image (.sv2i files) with volume resizing, the operation hangs.
  Workarounds: First, try again. If the problem persists, try again without volume resizing.
• If you use File > Import to convert a virtual machine, some of the configuration properties from the source might be lost. For example, a generic SCSI device or shared folder might be removed.
• On hosts that use a Windows 2000 Professional SP4 operating system, occasionally, you won't be able to use File > Import to create a virtual machine from a physical machine. The following error message appears: Unable to determine guest operating system. This error occurs when the msdos.sys file is either not present or not accessible.
• The File > Open and File > Import commands have several limitations for StorageCraft ShadowStore images (.spi files) and Symantec Backup Exec System Recovery images (.sv2i files). The limitations are:
• 1. No support for dynamic disks.
  2. Images relating to the backup of the same machine should be in the same folder, with no other images placed there.
  3. All the volumes in the disk up to the active and system volumes must be backed up. (For example, say there are 4 partitions (1-4) on a disk, and partition 2 is the active volume and partition 3 is the system volume. Volumes 1-3 must be backed up.)
  4. If it is an incremental image, up to 16 incremental backups are supported.
  In addition, for StorageCraft images, there is no support for systems with logical drives if the logical drive is also a system/active volume.
• Visual Studio 2005 allows multiple projects to be debugged simultaneously when Start is chosen. However, the Visual Studio Integrated Virtual Debugger currently supports only one project and one configuration for debugging at any given time. If you select multiple projects as debugging targets, the Visual Studio Integrated Virtual Debugger only chooses the first one on the list.

VMware will now support what it calls para-virtualised Linux, and the Solaris x86 operating system in future releases of all its core products.

The news follows its earlier announcement to open its code with the aim of promoting open virtualisation standards. Techworld examines the issues behind that move here.

Para-virtualised Linux is an OS that's been specifically modified to run in a virtual environment. The technique involves modifying the guest OS slightly to run on an architecture similar to the host machine while omitting the parts that are hard to virtualise. It's particularly important on x86 platforms because that architecture has many features that are complex and inefficient to virtualise. The benefit is said to be decreases in the performance overhead of virtualisation - down from some 20 per cent to two per cent, according to some sources.

VMware said it would add support for such Linuxes "as they become adopted in commercial operating system distributions". This gives customers the choice of running both unmodified and para-virtualised operating systems, with or without assistance from underlying processor technologies, concurrently on the same virtualisation platform.

VMware is also adding support for Solaris x86 across its virtual infrastructure products. It said the advantage is that enterprises with mixed environments can deploy and manage any combination of Linux, NetWare, Solaris x86 and Windows and instances across the same VMware virtualisation platform.

According to VMware, its support for these additional operating systems means IT admins can use its management software VirtualCenter with VMotion technology - which allows live servers to be moved from one virtual machine host to another.

Comment
"VMware's support for para-virtualised Linux and Solaris x86 operating systems and our experience with enabling virtual operating environments for more than 10,000 enterprise server customers is consistent with our continued commitment to give customers greater choice," said VMware marketing VP Jeffrey Engelmann. "With more options available, customers can transition a larger portion of their data centre workloads to a virtual infrastructure and thereby benefit from the proven ROI of a virtual operating environment."

"Using VMware virtual infrastructure on a large scale since 2002 has brought us multiple benefits," said Tony Adams, technology analyst for J.R. Simplot. "VMware's support of a wide variety of operating systems gives us the flexibility to run key applications on multiple operating systems in test, development, staging and production, and manage them with one set of tools. We plan to leverage their support of para-virtualised operating systems to continue to strengthen our infrastructure."

IBM locks in VMware through 2007 The Register

>By Ashlee Vance in Chicago Published Wednesday 19th May 2004 Shocking as it may seem, IBM and EMC have agreed on a three-year technology sharing pact. Well, not exactly.

IBM has reupped its partnership with virtualization software maker VMware through 2007. The deal between the two companies has and will continue to have VMware's software be the main partitioning option for IBM's x86 (Intel and AMD) server customers. Extending this relationship through 2007 proves IBM was not put off by EMC's $635m acquisition of VMware late last year.

"Being able to virtualize computing and manage systems remotely is a critical aspect of on demand computing," said Leo Suarez, vice president of IBM's xSeries servers. "Our partnership with VMware complements the IBM on demand strategy by bringing partitioning to the xSeries and Intel-based BladeCenter product lines. Combined with IBM Virtualization Engine, VMware extends IBM's virtualization capability across the entire xSeries and Intel-based BladeCenter servers."

IBM has long been VMware's biggest cheerleader. Big Blue has been reselling and sharing engineering efforts around VMware's ESX Server product for years. The latest agreement also sees IBM getting behind VMware's VMotion, VirtualCenter and Virtual SMP products - all of which help administrators manage applications on partitioned servers.

There had been some speculation that IBM might cool on the VMware relationship after bitter storage rival EMC bought the firm. VMware's products do play a fairly central role in IBM's future server plans by letting administrators run Linux and Windows together on the same system and by letting them consolidate applications. On its higher end Unix and mainframe systems, IBM uses in-house technology for these types of tasks.

VMware, however, appears to have convinced IBM of its independence. To its credit, EMC saw the need to keep VMware neutral moving forward, as it has attracted attention from HP, Dell and a host of other server/software makers on top of IBM.

VMware currently claims 5,500 customers and 2.5 million users of its products.

Q&A Ed Bugnion, VMware co-founder, on the EMC acquisition - Computerworld

Q&A: Ed Bugnion, VMware co-founder, on the EMC acquisition
VMware will remain independent, he says
APRIL 30, 2004 (COMPUTERWORLD) - VMware's ability to run multiple operating systems on a single physical server was a technology sought after by the top echelon of IT vendors, including IBM, which was rumored to be a contender for buying the company. But VMware went to EMC Corp. (see story), which closed on its acquisition of the company in January. This week, VMware Inc. co-founder and chief architect Ed Bugnion talked with Computerworld about that acquisition and where the integration with EMC technology is today.

Why did you pick EMC to acquire you? The surprise was that IBM didn't buy you. We were on track with deliberate plans to put forth an IPO, at which point we got interest from multiple offers. The criteria we were looking for was a partner that ... would allow us to increase our growth by effectively eliminating what was the biggest sales detractor, which was some uncertainty about VMware's future as an independent company and who we'd be acquired by. We obviously found EMC to be ideal along that criteria, because it is a key brand within the most mission-critical parts of the data center. It's something customers relate to. And it's something that really eliminates every doubt about the viability of VMware as a unit of a company the size of EMC, with a $30 billion market cap.

The second criteria we thought was important for the technology to be successful was for it to remain independent of server platform. From a value perspective, an acquisition player that remains neutral with respect to server distribution was attractive. Otherwise we would have effectively been limiting ourselves to the market share of that vendor.

What was the value proposition of VMware, and how has that changed? Historically, and I mean two years ago, it was primarily centered around server consolidation. Server consolidation is about taking a reasonably large server and splitting it up so you can run lots of smaller servers inside that machine. That was the first and second generation [of our product]. What we have right now is a product set designed to run on a clustered environment ... in a farm of physical servers and manage that server farm from a single location and as a single pool of physical resources. That is basically to say [VMware products] manage compute bandwidth, memory bandwidth and I/O bandwidth.

It's very similar in value proposition to the kind of value that EMC provides with the ability to migrate certain storage across arrays.

Where's does integration with EMC's products stand right now? VMware remains an independent, wholly owned subsidiary. So VMware is an EMC company as opposed to an EMC division, which means we maintain all our corporate functions, maintain our legal function, maintain our sales force and -- associated with the sales force -- we've maintained all our own distribution network, all sets of resellers and strategic partnerships, including Windows server vendors.

Do you ever see that changing, where you're more tightly integrated with EMC? At this time there are no plans to change the model. I think there's huge value in maintaining independence. I think that maintaining independence doesn't mean it's void of synergy for EMC customers. I don't think those two things are mutually exclusive. There is, for example, a lot of value in interoperability and joint solutions that show how independent products work together to solve a problem and [how] a solution worked out from an end-to-end basis, but to keep the products independent of each other. VMware will remain independent.

How long will it take to integrate your software with EMC's so that business applications and associated storage can be moved together without disrupting operations? I think we're too early into the integration process to be able to talk about the type of solution that requires new releases on either our part or EMC's part. Right now we're working on really just a level of documentation and writing up how joint solutions look and work together.

VMware Workstation 4.5 focuses on enterprise

Companies can test applications on several platforms, including Linux, Windows and NetWare on the same physical server. Enhancements to 4.5 include:

• Support for pre-boot execution environments (PXE);
• Support and performance boosts for guest OSes using the 2.6 Linux kernel;
• Increased memory limits up to 3.6 GB per virtual machine;
• Automatic update checks;
• Integration with Windows Performance Monitor.

Directions on Microsoft lead analyst Michael Cherry said interest in workstation and desktop virtualization software is rising now, as companies test software for server consolidation projects. Directions on Microsoft, based in Kirkland, Wa., provides independent analysis of Microsoft products and happenings.

"Another proof point that this is a big market right now is that the two big [virtualization] players were recently acquired; VMware by EMC and Connectix by Microsoft," Cherry said. "I think that shows enough interest in the space that they want to play there."

VMware product manager Pete Giordano said enterprise demand for VMware Workstation arose from its GSX and ESX server customers.

"Enterprises want to manage the software lifecycle by developing and testing applications on virtual machines before rolling them out departmentally or to the data center," Giordano said.

VMware Workstation 4.5 supports many different Linux guest OSes including Red Hat Enterprise Linux 2.1 and 3.0, SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 7 and 8, Red Hat Linux, Red Hat Linux Advanced Server, SuSE Linux, Turbolinux and Mandrake Linux.

"For organizations that want to evaluate Linux, this gives them a way to do that without large investments in new hardware," Cherry said.

Workstation 4.5 is VMware's second release since the EMC acquisition was finalized in January. Last month it released GSX Server 3, and update to its mid-tier virtualization server. That release also targets application-testing groups inside the enterprise.

"There are three places VMware stands out," Cherry said. "The product works very well and it's very stable. They also support both the workstation and the server where Microsoft has yet to release its server implementation yet. Finally they support a large number of guest OSes."

Analyst Reaction to EMC's VMware Bid Mixed

Analyst Reaction to EMC's VMware Bid Mixed>
December 30, 2003
By Clint Boulton

When EMC (Quote, Chart) announced its intent to purchase VMware two weeks ago, many technology analysts greeted the news with praise while their Wall Street counterparts balked, citing a lack of synergy between server virtualization and EMC's core competency, storage.

Count Susquehanna Financial Group among the doubters of EMC's $635 million bid, which it says is expensive considering VMware's 2003 sales.

While encouraged by EMC's earlier purchases of Legato Systems and Documentum to bolster the company's information lifecycle management (ILM) strategy, Susquehanna views EMC's interest in VMware as largely impractical.

"VMware provides little synergy with storage, whereas Legato and Documentum are building on EMC's Information Lifecycle Management strategy," a Susquehanna report said. "VMware, which makes server provisioning software for Windows and Linux environments, is in a different space altogether."

Susquehanna analysts Kaushik Roy and Phillip Rowe also voiced concern that VMware's revenues are from a low price-point software product with limited growth potential.

VMware offers a number of products, but most revenue comes from software licenses of VMotion, ESX server, and GSX server. VMotion helps customers consolidate servers by migrating applications from smaller servers to new, higher-end servers with no downtime for the applications.

"Although this is a valuable tool, we believe these migrations are relatively infrequent (perhaps several times a year)," Roy and Rowe said in their report.

The ESX and GSX server products allow users to partition their Intel servers for the usage of multiple operating systems and applications simultaneously.

"With already about 2 million users and less than $50 million in revenue last year, we can conclude that these products have a low price point," Roy and Rowe said.

But Mark Stahlman, who covers EMC for American Technology Research, feels VMware could prove very valuable for EMC.

He sees what other analysts from companies such as Sageza Research or Gartner see: a company undergoing a metamorphosis as a leading purveyor of storage hardware to a software provider of so-called on-demand, or utility, computing.

Stahlman dismisses the term utility computing as unclear marketing hype, preferring the phrase "virtual computing" to describe a software-driven strategy that configures and reconfigures computing and storage systems with no downtime.

Stahlman told internetnews.com EMC's recent purchases are evidence that the company is trying to improve its position in storage at the same time it is building a broader strategy in virtual computing.

The increased interest in virtualization as a viable computing platform technology is paving the way for an expansion into servers and networks, Stahlman said. IBM (Quote, Chart), and HP (Quote, Chart) already have placement in this arena.

"EMC's benefit from the deal is likely to be an opportunity to integrate its own R&D with the products of VMware as well as gain access to the new company's considerable x86 expertise - crucial now that the Intel architecture is the largest volume for EMC and now that the 64-bit versions of x86 are getting ready to expand rapidly," Stahlman said.

While he wouldn't make any predictions outright, Stahlman said EMC repeatedly referenced network virtualization in a conference call, which he said could be an area EMC is targeting while it digests VMware.

Among the players in the networking virtualization is Inkra Networks. The Fremont, Calif.-based company integrates multiple services, such as firewall, VPN, intrusion detection, SSL, and load balancing in hardware platforms.

Meanwhile, Gartner analysts believe an application monitoring and management or server provisioning company is on tap for EMC. And Sageza Research Director Charles King recently told internetnews.com he expects EMC to acquire database and directory components.

While no one seems to agree on what EMC may buy next, EMC CEO and President Joe Tucci has said his company wasn't actively looking to acquire after VMware. Of course, he said the same thing after announcing the Documentum bid in October.

LinuxTicker: Emulating a complete PC with VMware(Jan 24, 2000)

"VMware is not just an emulator. It is complete virtual machine "built" on the underlying layer of hardware and the existing operating system. It doesn't take control of your keyboard, mouse and video -- you can run it in full screen mode as well as in a window. This, however, requires some modifications to get everything to act as usual. The virtual machine runs on top of the existing OS, using its devices to access the underlying hardware. The great advantage of this is that you can, for example, have up to four virtual network adapters on your virtual machine, and have them all bound to the network which uses the hosting OS as gateway."

Q: What is your target market for the product?

A: There are many market targets that we find suitable for VMware: people who need Windows Productivity Applications on Linux (Office, Mail, Browsers) because they can run Windows programs without the need to reboot the computer; developers who write and test software as well as people who provide tech support, because they can have multiple platforms to work on and test various configurations at the same time; people who develop web content and web sites, because they can use different browsers on different platforms to preview the content they're working on.

Q: Do you believe your product will change the way people think about operating systems?

A: Yes, we would like to think that VMware will change the way people think about their PC and operating system. Today, there is a 1 to 1 mapping between your hardware, the OS you run and the applications you can run: For example, on a PC running a Windows Operating System, you can run only Windows NT and/or Windows 9x compatible applications, on a Linux PC you can run only Linux compatible applications, etc. And there's no way to concurrently run applications for Windows NT and Linux on the same PC, natively.

As a result, you are limited in what you can do:

• Software testing, installs, and upgrades are onerous
• Operating system or application crash have a high impact and bring down the PC
• There is a limit in the applications you can run

These are basically arbitrary rules preventing innovation.

With VMware, you can now do much more:

• Install software or test upgrades in a safe environment without impact on your working world.
• A crash within a Virtual Machine is limited to that environment and will not affect the rest of the PC.
• Run the applications you need, regardless of the OS requirement

Q: Do you plan to port VMware on other platforms?

A: Not at this point. VMware technology is tightly linked to the Intel x86 Architecture.

Q: After unveiling some secrets about Transmeta CPU, do you think that VMware and Transmeta share some points of view? If you were making decision to choose best things from virtual machines philosophy and new CPU "idea", what are the things you would take from both worlds?

A: It is a little too early for us to speak on that subject. Transmeta has not completely unveiled their technology at this point. We are anxious to see the Crusoe launch on January 19.

Q: How would you compare Bochs and Wine projects with VMware?

A: Wine allows some unmodified Windows 3.1, Windows 9x and Windows NT binaries to run on Intel PCs under Linux and other x86 UNIX-like operating systems. Wine is an implementation of the Windows 3.x and Win32 APIs on top of X and Unix. One advantage of Wine is that it does not require a separate Microsoft operating system to run applications. Wine also provides relatively good performance as application code runs natively on the underlying hardware. Individual Windows applications may or may not be supported by Wine. Wine is an alternative implementation of the Win32 API while VMware is a virtual machine monitor. VMware allows multiple operating systems to run by multiplexing them onto the underlying hardware. VMware requires a Microsoft operating system to run Windows applications and provides very high levels of application compatibility. VMware also provides advanced capabilities such as isolation and encapsulation that Wine does not provide.

Bochs is an emulator: Bochs runs entirely at user level and emulates all of the different devices and CPU instructions. As I stated before, VMware is a Virtual Machine monitor (not an emulator or simulator) and as such will take advantage of the underlying hardware to execute instructions and have much better performance. Also, Bochs is not feature complete at this point. Last I checked, networking and some other features where not complete.

Q: How secure is VMware? I.e. is it possible to break in from the cracked virtual box into the real operating system? (from the Internet and from the local machine, if we imagine that user can't run anything other than virtual machine)

A: The Virtual Machine is like another computer on the same network. If you have the Virtual Machine "VM1" running on top of the host "H1", it is like having two machines, VM1 and H1 on the same LAN. As such, any security violation that can be done between two machines on the same LAN can be done between VM1 and H1 (through networking protocols). From VMware's perspective, the memory and disk are completed isolated. One cannot get to read, and/or corrupt data on H1 through the VM1. If you decide to not have networking on VM1 (disable the Ethernet interface through the settings panel), it will be 100% isolated from the rest of the world (no network access to it). There is a variety of other networking settings that you could apply to VM1 and H1: attach H1 to VM1 through a VPN (Virtual Private Network) and VM1 to the world on the Internet, set one up as a firewall and use IP masquerading for the other one, etc. You can therefore do much more with a PC when using VMware :-)

Q: Could it be possible that some exciting new Microsoft technology (like DirectX 15.0 ;-) ) suddenly prevent VMware from running applications that use it? How long would it take to release new version, the one that support that new feature?

A: If there is a new technology not supported by VMware, applications using it would either not run or run in a "less complete" mode. Depending on the technology, the effort to support it will vary in difficulty. Our goal is to be feature complete and we are working in that direction. We are of course very involved with the evolution of technology and do our best to stay on top of it :-)

Q: If there's one thing you would like to improve in VMware, what would it be?

A: We are always working on improving our software. As the product matures, we are trying to better understand how to serve our customers better. We have a pretty steady stream of communication with our users through Email, and newsgroup postings. Each of our releases have addressed bug fixes and product enhancements as demanded by our users. In the long run, we would like to be as feature complete as possible and support a large variety of host and guest operating systems.

Q: What are your future plans?

A: We would like to build a solid company and expand our product line and technology to help change the way people use their PCs. VMware wants to help people go beyond the current constraints of the traditional computing model. VMware delivers flexible computing to dramatically increase productivity and innovation. Our current product is aimed at the desktop market. We will look in ways our technology could be used in other fields.

Linux Forum

I'm not saying that Linux can't do everything I want. It just doesn't do it the way I'm used to. Since I come from the world of Windows desktops, there are some things I've gotten used to and don't want to leave just yet. It's not that Windows does them better, faster or more reliably; it just does them in a familiar way. As the Linux Desktop environment continues to evolve many of these programs will be either ported or similar programs will have duplicate feature sets. Until that blissful day, there is VMware.

VMware is a virtual machine emulator. It doesn't emulate any particular Operating System. It emulates the machine, and it is up to you to install the OS. In my case I need Windows 98 to run several programs that I don't have an equal for under Linux. Below I'll give you my install experiences and tell you what I've found to be good and bad about the product. One thing you should to keep in mind, I generally don't read the documentation first. There is no challenge in software with documentation. Beside installation and operation should be intuitive.

	The machine I used for this install is:
	Celeron 300A
	128MB SDRAM
	Creative Labs AGP Banshee Video
	Adaptech 2940UW SCSI Controller
	(2) 4GB SCSI Drives
	Panasonic 16X CD ROM
	ESS chip sound card
	Realtek Ethernet card

As you can see from the list of components, this is a slap together machine. I'm running stock Mandrake 6.0 with updates from one of their mirrors. This machine is configured as a desktop with no server type services other than Samba. I have recompiled the kernel like any good user should to optimize it for my machine components.

I downloaded the demo from http://www.vmware.com/ and registered for the free 30-day trial. Installation was quite easy. In fact I really can't remember anything siginificant about the installation process. When I first ran the program and ran through the configuration I realized that I needed about a gigabyte of free space to create the virtual drive. You can set this to any size you want and tailor it to the OS you are going to install. This gave me reason to add the 2nd 4GB drive. After the configuration file and virtual drive was created. I proceeded with the install of Windows 98. The virtual machine comes rather complete. Below is a snapshot of the initial boot process. You can even go into the virtual BIOS. The install of Windows 98 ran flawlessly. The only thing to note is the install took about twice as long as it would have on a stand-alone machine. I feel this is due to the CD ROM access, more about this later.

VMware boot's like a real machine complete with memory checks and BIOS.

Once the Windows 98 install was complete the virtual machine rebooted, into Windows 98 with no sound and a 16 color screen. Each time the virtual machine reboots, Linux stays up and the window reboots. This makes the Windows desire to reboot after every little change more bearable. At this point I downloaded the VMware Tools and installed that into Windows 98. After a reboot I had the same color depth as my X window (32 bit) environment and no sound. Two and a half hours of trying to figure out what was wrong with the sound (remember not using any documentation), I finally found how to enable sound support in the configuration wizard and got Windows 98 to detect the virtual sound card. I had sound after a Windows reboot.

From that point on it has worked like a charm. My Linux machine hasn't rebooted in the past eight days even though Windows 98 reboots at least three times a day. Every desktop style application I've installed has worked flawlessly with no noticeable delays in operation. I have even installed a few games. Games usually require a bit of adjustments in presetting the screen size and color depth. To do this you will have to set your screen depth on your X Window environment since the virtual machine runs at the same screen depth of your X Window environment.

Below is my list of neat stuff, things to watch out for and what needs to be fixed either by VMware in upcoming versions or through a workaround.

Neat Stuff

You don't have to mount floppies or CDs. VMware takes care of the mount process. It appears that VMware doesn't really mount the CD or floppy in a traditional way. It just accesses the device as needed. This could be one reason for some of the apparent slowness during installs.

While the applications are running and not accessing an external device, there is no apparent slowness. I've put a heavy processing load on my Linux machine and popped over to VMware. The switch to the virtual machine is slow but once I'm in the virtual machine everything appears to run at normal speed.

You can make multiple virtual machines. You can even duplicate a current configuration and virtual drive and run the duplicate as if it was a new machine. If you are really paranoid you could setup a script to automatically copy your working virtual desktop every night so if Windows blows up on you, you have a complete backup.

Using Samba you can mount Linux directories as virtual drives. This way you can keep your virtual drive fairly small and share your data files between Linux and your virtual machine. If you are curious how to setup Samba for this you can check out Simon Says Simple Samba Server for setting up a simple Samba server.

Watch Out

Windows has a really neat feature of polling the CD at regular intervals for auto notification and running all of those autorun files on the CDs. Turn it off. This is the first source of slow downs you will find on your virtual machine. To turn it off open your Windows Control Panel, open System, go to Devices and open the properties on your CD Rom drive. Uncheck Auto notification.

You should have at least 128MB of RAM on your system if you plan to run Windows in your virtual machine. Linux runs quite well in 64MB and Windows needs at least 64MB for any sort of reasonable speed.

Make sure you install the VMware Tools. This greatly speeds up your screen displays. VMware also offers an optimized version of XFree86 3.3.3.1. I haven't installed this because I'm using a 3dfx video card and I'm currently using a specially patched XFree86 3.3.3.3.

When you install the network ability you have several options. The one I chose is bridged. Inside Windows 98 I had to assign a unique IP address to my virtual machine. In many ways I feel that this is the best approach, at least for my networking environment. This makes the virtual machine very independent. It looks and acts like another machine on the network.

Bleah - Things that need to be fixed

There is no ability to change the color depth of the virtual machine's screen without changing the depth of the X Window environment. Many games and education software run at 256 colors. My Linux desktop doesn't look that great in 256 colors.

VMware needs to use lots of space in /tmp. For most people this won't be a problem, but for me I only have 40MB free in that partition. When it fills up, the only way to fix it is to crash your virtual machine.

This was bothering me so much I went to the VMware web site and read the documentation. There is a workaround where you can set the temp directory to another directory by adding a line to your .cfg file for your virtual machine. This fixed the problem for me, but I really would have liked for this to be an option in the configuration wizard. To date I haven't seen it take too much more than 50MB for temp space.

All in all this is a great program. It allows me to run programs like Quicken, Eudora, Turbo Tax, Bryce 3 and Starcraft on my Linux machine without dual booting. I've always disliked the way MetaCreations programs took over the whole screen. Now, I can have it take over a whole virtual machine and keep that machine in a window.

If I had to rate vmware I'd give it 4 1/2 bears out of 5. But we don't do ratings like that here... yet.

• Linux Today - CNET News.com VMware ready to capitalize on hot server market
• PRNewswire: VMware Announces VMware Express for Linux (May 09, 2000)
• ZDNet: VMware Welcomes Guest OSes (May 02, 2000)
• LinuxPlanet: VMware 2.0: Virtually Magnificent (Apr 10, 2000)
• PRNewswire: VMware Signs OEM Agreement With Microsoft (Mar 29, 2000)
• osOpinion: Somebody give VMWare some venture capital. Quickly! (Mar 22, 2000)
• PRNewswire: Google Deploys VMware Software (Mar 13, 2000)

  "Google also uses VMware to access both the Linux and Windows applications they need. According to Google co-founder and president, Sergey Brin, "Working at a hot Internet start-up today, access to both Linux and Windows is a must, since there are hundreds of great applications and tools for both. VMware lets me use both Windows and Linux on one computer at the same time.""
  

• O'Reilly Network: Interview : Mendel Rosenblum of VMware (Feb 27, 2000)
• PC Week: VMware updates software for running multiple OSes (Feb 17, 2000)
• The Standard: Why Choose [when VMWare Lets You Switch]? (Feb 08, 2000)

[Nov. 20, 1999] Build a useful five-headed penguin

VMware's system emulator lets you run up to five OSs on one box simultaneously

Rawn Shah checks out VMware's latest system emulator, version 1.1. It promises to let you run a Linux host OS, then switch -- without rebooting -- among up to four other guest OSs that operate inside virtual hardware created by VMware. (2,100 words)

[July 25, 1999] Welcome to VMware Inc. - Virtual Platform Technology

VMware software initially comes in two flavors, depending on the user's host operating system: VMware for Linux, and VMware for Windows NT. VMware for Linux (time-limited demo) -- run DOS-, FreeBSD-, Windows 3.x, 9x and NT 4.0-applications easily under Linux. VMware is included in SuSE distribution: http://linuxpr.com/releases/176.html

Experience of on of the users who has Celeron 450 MHz, 256MB RAM and had given virtual machine 64M was quite positive. He used NT driver SVGA from vmware, and after than it started to work with the screen noticeably faster and supported modes more than 800x600. (vmware recommend X 3.3.3.2). in this configuration Visio is working satisfactory (redrawing of screen is a little bit slow in non-full screen mode), but generally is OK. The fact that it's now possible to work on a single computer

Recommended Links

VMware Official Website

Workstation 6.0 Release Notes (HTML)
VMware ACE 2.0 Release Notes (HTML)

Workstation and Workstation ACE Edition Online Library (HTML)
Workstation User's Manual (PDF)
VMware ACE Administrator's Manual (PDF)

Related Documents
Guest Operating System Installation Guide (HTML | PDF)
Virtual Machine Mobility Planning Guide (PDF)
Processor Check for 64-Bit Compatibility Guide (PDF)
Disk Mount User Manual (PDF)
Virtual Machine Converter User Manual (PDF)
Technical Note: Dual-Boot Computers and Virtual Machines (PDF)

VMware's back

• VMware Command Line Tools [UPDATED: Feb. 10, 2004]
  Small console programs to use some useful functions of the official VMware-Tools, such as copy & paste and clock synchronization, from a command line environment such as DOS and Windows' DOS box.
  Also contributed ports for Linux and Solaris guests.
• VMware Backdoor I/O Port
  Information about the VMware virtual machine's "backdoor" I/O port, which the VMware Command Line Tools (and the official VMware-Tools, too) use to communicate with the host.
• Solaris 8 Tips & Tricks [UPDATED: Feb. 10, 2004]
  Some (hopefully) useful tips & tricks about building a comfortable Solaris 8 environment in VMware.
• VMware SVGA driver for Solaris [UPDATED: Feb. 19, 2004]
  XFree 86 4.2.0/4.3.0.1 VMware SVGA driver for Solaris 8/9 guest.
• Virtual Floppy Driver
  Virtual floppy disk driver for Windows hosts to access floppy image files.
• Virtual Disk Driver
  Virtual disk driver for Windows hosts to access virtual disk files.

Solaris on VMware

• Getting Started with OpenSolaris Using VMware
• JE Solaris on VMware
• Sys Admin v13, i10 Solaris 10 x86 on VMware
• VMware Community WebForum
  VMware's Back by Kenji Kato
  Rob Bastiaansen VMware page
  Virtual Machine Technology Online Training

Etc

Society

Groupthink : Two Party System as Polyarchy : Corruption of Regulators : Bureaucracies : Understanding Micromanagers and Control Freaks : Toxic Managers :   Harvard Mafia : Diplomatic Communication : Surviving a Bad Performance Review : Insufficient Retirement Funds as Immanent Problem of Neoliberal Regime : PseudoScience : Who Rules America : Neoliberalism  : The Iron Law of Oligarchy : Libertarian Philosophy

Quotes

War and Peace : Skeptical Finance : John Kenneth Galbraith :Talleyrand : Oscar Wilde : Otto Von Bismarck : Keynes : George Carlin : Skeptics : Propaganda  : SE quotes : Language Design and Programming Quotes : Random IT-related quotes :  Somerset Maugham : Marcus Aurelius : Kurt Vonnegut : Eric Hoffer : Winston Churchill : Napoleon Bonaparte : Ambrose Bierce :  Bernard Shaw : Mark Twain Quotes

Bulletin:

Vol 25, No.12 (December, 2013) Rational Fools vs. Efficient Crooks The efficient markets hypothesis : Political Skeptic Bulletin, 2013 : Unemployment Bulletin, 2010 :  Vol 23, No.10 (October, 2011) An observation about corporate security departments : Slightly Skeptical Euromaydan Chronicles, June 2014 : Greenspan legacy bulletin, 2008 : Vol 25, No.10 (October, 2013) Cryptolocker Trojan (Win32/Crilock.A) : Vol 25, No.08 (August, 2013) Cloud providers as intelligence collection hubs : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2010 : Inequality Bulletin, 2009 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2008 : Copyleft Problems Bulletin, 2004 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2011 : Energy Bulletin, 2010 : Malware Protection Bulletin, 2010 : Vol 26, No.1 (January, 2013) Object-Oriented Cult : Political Skeptic Bulletin, 2011 : Vol 23, No.11 (November, 2011) Softpanorama classification of sysadmin horror stories : Vol 25, No.05 (May, 2013) Corporate bullshit as a communication method  : Vol 25, No.06 (June, 2013) A Note on the Relationship of Brooks Law and Conway Law

History:

Fifty glorious years (1950-2000): the triumph of the US computer engineering : Donald Knuth : TAoCP and its Influence of Computer Science : Richard Stallman : Linus Torvalds  : Larry Wall  : John K. Ousterhout : CTSS : Multix OS Unix History : Unix shell history : VI editor : History of pipes concept : Solaris : MS DOS :  Programming Languages History : PL/1 : Simula 67 : C : History of GCC development :  Scripting Languages : Perl history   : OS History : Mail : DNS : SSH : CPU Instruction Sets : SPARC systems 1987-2006 : Norton Commander : Norton Utilities : Norton Ghost : Frontpage history : Malware Defense History : GNU Screen : OSS early history

Classic books:

The Peter Principle : Parkinson Law : 1984 : The Mythical Man-Month :  How to Solve It by George Polya : The Art of Computer Programming : The Elements of Programming Style : The Unix Hater’s Handbook : The Jargon file : The True Believer : Programming Pearls : The Good Soldier Svejk : The Power Elite

Most popular humor pages:

Manifest of the Softpanorama IT Slacker Society : Ten Commandments of the IT Slackers Society : Computer Humor Collection : BSD Logo Story : The Cuckoo's Egg : IT Slang : C++ Humor : ARE YOU A BBS ADDICT? : The Perl Purity Test : Object oriented programmers of all nations : Financial Humor : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2008 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2010 : The Most Comprehensive Collection of Editor-related Humor : Programming Language Humor : Goldman Sachs related humor : Greenspan humor : C Humor : Scripting Humor : Real Programmers Humor : Web Humor : GPL-related Humor : OFM Humor : Politically Incorrect Humor : IDS Humor : "Linux Sucks" Humor : Russian Musical Humor : Best Russian Programmer Humor : Microsoft plans to buy Catholic Church : Richard Stallman Related Humor : Admin Humor : Perl-related Humor : Linus Torvalds Related humor : PseudoScience Related Humor : Networking Humor : Shell Humor : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2011 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2012 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2013 : Java Humor : Software Engineering Humor : Sun Solaris Related Humor : Education Humor : IBM Humor : Assembler-related Humor : VIM Humor : Computer Viruses Humor : Bright tomorrow is rescheduled to a day after tomorrow : Classic Computer Humor

The Last but not Least Technology is dominated by two types of people: those who understand what they do not manage and those who manage what they do not understand ~Archibald Putt. Ph.D

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Last modified: March 12, 2019