Mike D’s Blog

Just when you thought it couldn’t get any better – VMware is offering Fusion 2.0 for 50% off. Just go here and use the code “CyberMondayDeal”.

For agitated Parallels users you can even use the $30 competitive rebate and combined with the deal above you can get Fusion for $9.99. Yes, $10 to switch to VMware.

Thinking of things to put on your wish list for this holiday season? Why not try something different and ask for a laptop? I know the people reading this blog are geeks at heart. You know the people that know you realize you’re geeks at heart and they want to give you something technology related. For the past few years I’ve had one simple thing on my wish list – a laptop. The only difference is I ask for the XO laptop from One Laptop Per Child and ask that you don’t send it to me but instead get OLPC to send it to places in the world that need it. It’s a relatively inexpensive technology gift at $199. For those that really want to go overboard you can spend an extra $100 and for $399 you can do Give One, Get One. If you ask OLPC they’ll actually send both to people in need of the technology since we all know that we sure as heck don’t need another laptop.

So this year try something different for your wish list and put One Laptop Per Child on the list. You’ll feel better. The world will get better. And all along you’ll increased the geek population.

NOTE: I don’t work for One Laptop Per Child. I know this post isn’t virtualization related but it sure doesn’t help to spread technology knowledge around the world.

For those wanting to P2V some Linux boxes or Windows 2008 hosts you can now get access to the beta of VMware Converter 4. Make sure to provide feedback to the beta team so they know what to fix or what other features you’re looking for.

Recently there was a YouTube video with AMD and Red Hat showing a live migration from Intel to AMD processors. This is something that often comes up in customer meetings. The customers don’t want to be locked into a particular processor vendor if they continue to grow out their virtualization farm. Personally I can’t argue much with that. I also think the video was pretty well done. A bunch of people emailed me and asked why VMware hadn’t come up with this. Well, it’s because it can be pretty dangerous in current environments. Let me explain.

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And just when you thought there was no ROI for VDI sessions. Make sure to read this article on users suing companies because they’re waiting for Vista to start and shutdown and they’re not getting paid while they wait (up to 15 minutes). I guess it’s time to go and sell to the end users. Imagine going home and leaving your VDI session logged in while you’re away. Talk about a cash cow!! Anyhow, really interesting problem that VDI can easily solve.

Employees sue for unpaid Windows Vista overtime • The Register

In an effort to expand some of the knowledge on the blog and get some more relevant posts up I’ve reached out to some people internal to VMware who will contribute here from time to time. First up is a good friend, Rob Randell. I hope you find the different views these guests share. This first post from Rob is more of an intro but you’ll find some more great info from Rob coming soon. Take it away, Rob!

Hi everyone, my name is Rob Randell. I’m a Security Specialist at VMware and Mike is giving me the opportunity to use his blog to talk a bit about virtualization security and more specifically the relationship between the virtualization team and the security teams within the customers that I talk to. My role at VMware allows me to talk to both virtualization professionals and security professionals about the security issues surrounding virtualization as well as the best practices that can help mitigate the risks and architect a deployment. The one thing that I have found in common in the most successful deployments is that the virtualization team works closely with the security team during all phases of the implementation. These customers included the security team as part of the architecture team and made sure they were a part of the deployment each step of the way.

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This post is sponsored by IT Knowledge Exchange. Visit ITKnowledgeExchange.com today to ask your toughest virtualization questions and get answers from your peers.

IBM bought a company called Transitive today. I’ve gotten a flurry of emails after the announcement asking what this means for VMware. I actually think it’s a great thing. I’ve been a big fan of Transitive’s technology for many years now. In a nutshell they allow non-x86 applications like those running on SUN Sparc systems to run on x86 systems. This is traditionally called “emulation”. The Sparc command set is emulated in software by Transitive so the native Sparc app continues to run. It’s really, really neat software.

Why does this make sense for IBM? Several different reasons. The biggest one I think is competition with SUN. IBM competes a lot with SUN for the larger applications in the datacenter. Now that they have Transitive they can take those Sparc apps that were tied to SUN hardware and move them over to IBM hardware. Of course in order to do this you’ll need IFLs on your IBM mainframe and enablement licenses. IBM gets revenue and they get rid of their competition at the same time. It makes complete business sense.

What does this mean for VMware? I really think it’s great for VMware as well. IBM has been a long time and very strong partner with VMware. There’s nothing saying that IBM won’t continue to partner with VMware with the new Transitive software. Now you can bring all of the greatness of IBM servers and storage as well as the power and flexibility of a VMware environment to all of those Sparc apps that are running around the datacenter.

All of this may not be a solution for everyone. There are several datacenter owners that I know that are very tied to their SUN hardware. I can’t blame them – the stuff just runs. However, even before our current economic situation companies were looking at how to streamline their operations and save money. For the cost of SUN maintenance alone you could retrofit your environment with a pretty nice IBM-VMware-Transitive environment.

Time will always tell how these things play out but you now have a strong VMware partner with a great piece of technology. I for one wouldn’t want to be working for SUN right about now.

I’d be interested to hear other’s comments on if they think this is a good thing for IBM or not.

I was reading through one of my more favorite blogs (vinternals) today and it was brought to my attention that Symantec does not support VMotion. I found that a little shocking. No real reason was given for this in the Symantec KB other than intermittent communications. I highly doubt that’s because of VMotion since (a) VMotion doesn’t occur very often and (b) network communication isn’t dropped with a VMotion. And if you’re not going to support VMotion on VMware then where is the lack of support for live migration from the other vendors which operates in the same manner? It sounds to me like someone over at Symantec doesn’t understand what’s going on. Time for some alliances work. In the mean time I agree with the vinternal guy – customers need to push back on Symantec and tell them it’s time to belly up to the virtualization bar and start doing some real troubleshooting of their issues.

(Via vinternals.)

UPDATE (11-20-2008):

Symantec has updated their support policy. Apparently the old link above was a premature KB article that accidently got released. Good to see they do know what’s going on. Here’s the new link.

I was reading through a bunch of past articles and came across one about Microsoft patching a SMB security flaw from 7 years ago. Normally this wouldn’t concern me a lot for a couple of reasons:

1) There’s a lot of security holes that are less critical or never get exploited and so companies take a while to patch them. I’m not saying that’s a good thing – just that it happens.

2) I’m a big believer that people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones. I work for a software company and as long as your software is running there could be a security issue. That’s just the nature of complex pieces of software. I don’t like to point out other’s vulnerabilities because it will just circle back around to hit me again.

With that said, this one sort of shocked me. A long time ago I used to do security audits for a living while working for a VAR. One of the very first things I’d do is crack out a tool that exploited the SMB issue referred to in the article to grab the SAM and thus a bunch of great passwords (including Domain Admin). It usually took all of about 5 minutes and worked every time. There are dozens of hacker tools out there on the web that include this exploit. This brings up the question of why Microsoft waited this long to fix a hole exploited by the #1 tool in my arsenal.

I haven’t done any audits in the past 6 1/2 years so maybe this little trick just stopped being used. Maybe people didn’t like the fact that you had to be on the network behind the firewall in order to use this attack. At schools and universities this just meant jacking in at the library or something. For corporations I would usually just setup some fake meeting during lunch, miss the person I was meeting with, and wait for them in a conference room – again behind the firewall. The point is you can’t always trust that just because something is behind a firewall that it’s protected so it really shocks me that this vulnerability is just getting patched.

Hoff, if you’re out there and reading, or any other security minded people please let me know what was up with this one.

Parallels has just released v4.0 of its Mac desktop product. It looks like most of the new features are clean-ups or improvements over previous versions of the product. The big new feature adds are speech recognition, iPhone access, screen shot utility, and performance. It all sounds nice, but do these things really add enough value to pay for the upgrade again?

Pre-built voice commands to control Parallels sounds interesting but is this really useful? How many people out there use voice commands to control their Mac on a daily basis? Besides, it took about 5 minutes to setup the same speech commands by hand to control VMware Fusion. Not sure how much value is really packed into this “feature”.

iPhone access is also a neat little thing but again I question the value. In order to really do anything you’d want to be sitting in front of your Mac so are you really going to pick up your iPhone to start or stop the VM you want are would you just click on the app with the mouse that’s probably closer to you than your iPhone?

A screen shot utility also seems like a little overkill. Why not just hit Apple-Shift-4 and use the built-in screen shot utility built into Mac OSX? I’ve used it to do screen shots of VMs hundreds of times with no issues. Do we really need to upgrade to get this?

Now we’re down to the 50% performance boost they claim with v4.0. Parallels claims support for Intel VT-x2 for the performance boost.

Now if only Intel VT-x2 (an outdated name) was available with shipping Macs. The technology is only available in Intel Nehalem processors which won’t start showing up in Macs until mid-to-late 2009. This performance claim is sort of like saying “hey, you’ll get a 50% performance boost for your car with this shinny new gear shift knob…huh?…yeah, it will look great in the Ferrari you buy next year”. So after you buy your nice, new, faster Mac next year you’ll get the performance boost that Parallels is promising you today.

Overall is this worth the $40 upgrade? Not so sure about that. This brings up the last issue – why is Parallels still charging for all of these upgrades? If you’ve been a Parallels user since day 1 and you’ve jumped on the reduced price upgrades you would have paid $40 + $40 + $40 = $120. VMware Fusion on the other hand would have cost you $40 and that’s it. All of the upgrades for Fusion have been free to date. And if you look at all of the stuff on the Parallels site the same features (including the future 50% performance boost from Intel VT-x2) are included in VMware Fusion today. So if you’re going for bang for the buck VMware Fusion is a much better buy. Yes, I’m biased here, but the numbers and feature sets speak for themselves.

I was checking on some of the blog stats today and found that I had hit a nice metric – 2,000 subscribers. I’m not sure if that’s good or not since I’m still pretty new to blogging on a regular basis. I’ve been getting about 5,500 page views a day which has been good as well. I’ve even been picked up in the NY Times. All of this means I must be writing something that you all like so thank you! If you happen to have any topics that you’d like me to drill into just comment here and I’ll make sure to bring that topic up soon.

Today, VMware announced that they were buying Trango. Trango makes virtualization solutions for the mobile phone or other embedded devices. Now why would VMware do this? Well, if you were at VMworld then you heard all about VMware View. Basically it’s the thought that once you put an app on top of a virtualization layer then the layer actually stretches all the way down to the end device so you don’t have to worry about which app works with what. This is really key when you start looking out at cloud. Cloud is just the middle glue that gets the user to the data. In order for that to work you really need a layer on every possible device that the user could come from. VMware had most of the bases covered already since it’s been in the client virtualization game since the very beginning in 1998. The one missing piece was the cell phone and other embedded devices like set-top boxes.

The play is nice for those in the embedded industry. That industry stretches from the obvious (phones and set-top boxes) to the not so obvious (control systems in most automobiles or on-board missile guidance systems). The real pain the these devices is keeping up with the change in processors, applications, and operating systems. Let’s say you’re cruising along and developing an app for the iPhone. All of a sudden Apple makes someone mad and you get rid of all of the iPhones and go with Blackberries. What do you do with that app? Even worse is when you’re someone like Motorola who has hundreds of set-top boxes and all of them have different architectures. How do you write one app to run across all of these systems?

What this acquisition does is give VMware the keys to the kingdom. They’re now in a position where you can deploy your app on VMware View and know that it can truly get to any device in any location at any time. It also opens a whole new slew of customers to go after in a space where there really aren’t many competitors. It will definitely be interesting to see how this pans out.

Every time I meet with a customer and every where I turn I see more and more about “Green IT”. Sure you can save power by consolidating servers and that’s where most customers stop. What they don’t realize is that about 80% of the power that IT uses is actually outside of the datacenter being used by desktops. Some people also don’t realize that the chillers that are working hard to cool your datacenter are only about 40% efficient to begin with. Oh, and don’t forget about all of the lights left on in your datacenter all the time. Probably the biggest thing people don’t take time to think about is that the power that’s feeding your datacenter is most likely coming from a coal plant somewhere near-by and by the time the power hits your transformers it’s only 1% efficient.

So why am I ranting about all of this? It’s to get you to think. If you’re truly going to be a Green IT environment then you need to think beyond just server consolidation and what that can do for you. You need to start thinking about the bigger picture. Of course that’s hard to do since nearly every CIO I’ve talked to admits they don’t see the total power bill for what they’re using. A lot of that is absorbed in a facilities budget somewhere. Maybe it’s time for a walk down the hall to bring the two groups together.

At any rate, the thing that got me started on all of this (at 1 am in the morning) was an email I got from The Computer Management Group. They’ve now added a Green IT track around virtualization at their upcoming conference in Vegas on Dec 7 – 12. For anyone that’s going make sure to check out the track additions. It will be interesting to see if they really pull back the covers on this whole Green IT thing beyond just server consolidation.

If you’re ever faced with having to explain that virtualization is or can be secure then Gabe has put together an excellent post for you.

So you have that talk with your security officer again…: “”

(Via Gabe’s Virtual World.)

At VMworld this year during my Deploying VMware in a Linux Shop I demonstrated how to PXE boot VMware ESXi and automatically add it to Virtual Center. As promised a long time ago I’m finally documenting everything I did to get it to work. All of the work for this project was really done by an incredible engineer here at VMware named Lance Berc. I’m just putting some more step-by-step to it and making the process easier to find. Thanks, Lance for all of your work on this and the long night just before VMworld trying to troubleshoot issues!

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