VMware Reveals New Offerings At VMWorld 2006

Nirav Mehta writes to mention a Techworld article about this past week's virtualization announcements at VMWorld 2006. VMWare had several new offerings in the event's third year. From the article: "VMware has released details of ACE 2.0, which is due for release towards the middle of 2007. The product, which was demonstrated in alpha at VMworld this week, allows administrators to distribute pre-packaged virtual machines to users in a secure manner. This means, for instance, that contractors can be allowed to attach to the enterprise network using their own laptops but only via the ACE VM. The new version was created, according to VMware, because users asked for greater control over the VMs, especially when, for instance, large numbers of remote users need to attach to the enterprise network. Other areas due for improvement include security and integration with enterprise management tools. "

Still Waiting...

[eno2001 (527078)]

...for them to release an affordable hypervisor based virtualization package. Host based virtualization is as dead as BSD.

Re:

[digital photo (635872)]

ESX server.

Re:

[Wesley Felter (138342)]

He said "affordable".

(It depends on your perspective; enterprisey customers probably think ESX is cheap, while whiteboxers think "OMG it costs more than the server".)

Re:Still Waiting...

[93 Escort Wagon (326346)]

I'm pretty sure his "ESX server" comment was aimed at the grandparent's second sentence - you know, the sophomoric comment about host-based virtualization being dead.

In the enterprise, host-based virtualization is pretty much the whole market.

Re:

[93 Escort Wagon (326346)]

... the sophomoric comment about ...

Boy, I hate it when people get snarky on /. - and I hate it even more when I turn around and do it myself. I apologize.

Re:Still Waiting...

[eno2001 (527078)]

Well... I like to be extremely hyperbolic in my statements as it gets a rise out of people. And Slashdot is admittedly a little too boring these days. No more massive flamewars, or death threats going around. So yeah, host-based virtualization is here to stay for a couple more years. But, I speak of hypervisor because I'm already using it with Xen. I ditched VMWare for QEMU because of cost concerns. (Remember when you're dealing with me, you're dealing with a guy who does this stuff at home) I could no longer afford VMWare and QEMU, while not anywhere near as good performance wise, still did the trick for me to have access to Windows as needed. ie. Almost never. But, when I found Xen, I moved all my home servers to it because you can do some damn incredible things with it even if you don't have hardware virtualization support. I have an old P II era Celeron 400 with 384 megs of RAM running three VMs and doing everything it did before + more. It handles DHCP, Internal DNS, External DNS, DBMail for the IMAP portion of things, Postfix for SMTP (Internal and External instances), NTP, NFS, etc... So, that's more what I'm talking about.

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[jallen02 (124384)]

VMWare has two free products. VMware Player and VMware server. I use server on my Linux laptop to run Windows and it works just fine. The performance is excellent on Core 2 Duo laptops. The VMs running on bare metal would be nice, but the free hosted solution just works.

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[eno2001 (527078)]

Yes. I'm aware that they've "freed" the old technology. But, I'm too enamoured of the better performance from Xen to switch back to VMWare for the server end of things. I am currently testing the hardware virtualization support of Xen on my dual core AMD64. Once I get Windows XP to run in it, I'll see if it suits my needs. If not, I might check out the free beer offerings from VMWare. But, if Xen is just as good with Windows as it is with Linux as "guest" OSes, I would expect to see better performance

Re:

[itlurksbeneath (952654)]

EXS is cheap, when you consider you can run 10 servers on one piece of hardware. 10 servers: 50,000 bucks. One server + ESX: 10,000 bucks. That's an 80% savings.

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[Keaster (796594)]

Try 20VM's on 1 server, Dell 6850. Amazing! Dont even get me into templates and VMotion!

Doubles

[Life700MB (930032)]

It also doubles as a great data compressor!

Ok, ok, bad joke, I'll continue navigating with my Firebird browser.


--
Superb hosting [tinyurl.com] 200GB Storage, 2_TB_ bandwidth, php, mysql, ssh, $7.95

Re:

[chroot_james (833654)]

do you mean phoenix?!

vmWare for the Mac...

[creimer (824291)]

I'm still waiting for vmWare for the Mac. I'm still ticked for not receiving an email for the beta version. I can beta test Microsoft's Vista bloatware but not vmWare's only Mac product? Incredible!

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[Anonymous Coward]

I'm still waiting for games for the Mac. Oh, wait - no I'm not - Mac is garbage.

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[0racle (667029)]

They're still taking E-Mails to pre-register for the Mac Beta. Relax, it hasn't been released yet.

Re:

[creimer (824291)]

The private beta is what I was referring to. I didn't get the email!

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[jmoen (169557)]

I where at VMWorld and saw they demonstrated it. They had several Mac's there to play with with VMWare installed. They demonstrated copy/paste between host (Mac) and guest (XP), shared networking, file transfers etc. etc.

Seemed to work ok and didn't sound/look like it was a long way until release.

But I'm not a Mac person so I didn't pay that booth much attention, not that I paid the rest any more attention ;)

Re:

[Fonce (635723)]

I concur - this was a reaction to the market climate, not to the users. Still, it's nice to see.

What I don't get, though, is why this even exists? Is it for simplicity's sake? Because for me it's easy to generate a clean VM with VPN and throw that out to any machines that need it. I didn't need a separate product to do this for me.

Not to troll, but wouldn't your average IT professional rather rely on tried and true methods as opposed to a rather exotic setup for their secure enterprise attachment need

Re:Huh?

[tgd (2822)]

Its a lot tricker than it seems... You need to get the images to the user either pre-customized for them, or you have to have a way to take a generic VM and provision it for that end user automatically, including getting it joined as a unique machine into the enterprise domain. Add to that keeping that up to date, secure and making the virtualization experience end-user-friendly and a slew of other issues, its far easier to use a product that manages that for you than to DIY, unless you're doing it for a small number of fairly technical end users.

Its like anything related to desktop management -- you can of course do it on your own, but a tool can make it a lot easier and save a lot of time and money in the long run.

Disclaimer: I work for one of the companies building the competing products I think the AC was refering to.

Re:

[mrbooze (49713)]

If I recall, one of the features of ACE is that the images you distribute can be disabled or expire based upon some criteria. So you can not only give a contractor a VM that has access to your corporate VPN, and maybe even has some of your corporate software/source code/whatever on it, but that whole VM can stop working when that contract expires.

I'm not sure how simple that is to do if you're just distributing your own VM images.

Re:

[Fonce (635723)]

Now THAT'S a useful feature. It's one that, for me, would make this all worth it.

The only question I have is this: can that be reversed, either by the distributor or by hacking it? The former would be handy, the latter is a nightmare.

Also, this is a whole lot cheaper and easier than those self-destructing DVDs I've been working with. Man, it's a pain when those go off in my hand.

Re:

[joshv (13017)]

Great, so when my orginal contract expires, despite the fact that my manager extended the contract, and told IT about it a month ago, my access goes *kablooey*.

This has happened almost every place I've worked with NT user accounts. Almost always, they expire on the day of the original contract expiration date - no matter what - doesn't matter of the contract was extended, or you flipped to be an employee.

-josh

question...

[RyuuzakiTetsuya (195424)]

was WMWorld itself a tradeshow or was it a tradeshow virtualized within another one?

resize hd images

[Anonymous Coward]

All I want is the ability to resize an "automatically resizing" disk.

Re:

[fonetik (181656)]

If you have GSX or the free server product, there is a command line util that does just that.

"vmware-vdiskmanager.exe -x 36Gb myDisk.vmdk" for instance would expand the disk to 36GB. You can also convert from automatically resizing to fixed and vice versa.

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[Keaster (796594)]

Dude when using vmkfstools in ESX it is a -X not -x, is it really different in server? I'm just curious not trying to be a dick.

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[Matthew Bafford (43849)]

Dude when using vmkfstools in ESX it is a -X not -x, is it really different in server? I'm just curious not trying to be a dick.

I don't know about that, but with workstation:

-x <new-capacity> : expand the disk to the specified capacity

Re:

[fonetik (181656)]

Yeah, I don't think it's case sensitive in GSX/server. Either way, it's possible already in GSX and ESX, and I think that's what the original post was asking for.

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[JamesTRexx (675890)]

If only... Just tonight one of the guys at work asked me if workstation was free now that we bought two ESX servers. Had to disappoint him.

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[nurb432 (527695)]

Video performance and such is not the same between workstation and GSX/VMServer.. There are still reasons for 'workstation'.

Besides, isnt all software free anyway ?

Re:

[mrbooze (49713)]

Also unless they have finally updated it, which I fully admit they may have at this point, the Server version doesn't have the same flexibility with snapshots that workstation does, where you can have multiple snapshots.

What's the point?

[chris_7d0h (216090)]

This means, for instance, that contractors can be allowed to attach to the enterprise network using their own laptops but only via the ACE VM

For all clients I've worked with, they either:

1. Allow me to use my laptop on their network and allow me to connect to my company's network through their corporate network or through a dedicated network they've set up on the side, using a VPN client.
   
2. Allow me to use my laptop on their network, but do not provide me with a network for reaching my company's network.
   
3. Do not allow me to use my laptop on the corporate network, but instead provide a "standard laptop", same as the rest of the workforce is using or a desktop to use.
   

In the first case, I'm always more productive and cheaper per unit of delivery than the other options, because I've got all my tools setup and on average all software (except perhaps one or two apps) I need to perform my work already licensed. I'm also able to harvest the information, knowledge and assets available through my company's network. Some clients realize the benefit of this and instead regulate which tools I may use and what I may do while connected to their network by making me sign an agreement (along with the standard NDA).

In the second and third scenario, clients still require me to sign the same "usage agreement" and NDA, so there really is no benefit for them from a liability standpoint. The risk is the same for all three cases and mitigated the same way (through agreements). On the downside, each unit I deliver costs more because I don't have my toolbox and don't have the software configured for optimal productivity. However I still deliver reasonable value per dollar spent because I am still able to leverage resources from my company by using my own laptop on the side (either through a client provided network or a 3G card).

There is really no benefit that I've witnessed from a client perspective in not allowing me to use my own machine and tools.

Now, the quoted statement of having me use my own machine coupled with the limitation of not having my tools available and also not being able to use the resources available through my company's network for the client's benefit seems like a worse situation for a client than any of the previous ones.

No matter from which angle I try comparing the three typical scenarios with using ACE for the suggested purpose, I fail to see the bottom-line benefits for a company relying on consultants / contractors.

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[bastion_xx (233612)]

There is really no benefit that I've witnessed from a client perspective in not allowing me to use my own machine and tools.

Now, the quoted statement of having me use my own machine coupled with the limitation of not having my tools available and also not being able to use the resources available through my company's network for the client's benefit seems like a worse situation for a client than any of the previous ones.

No matter from which angle I try comparing the three typical scenarios with using ACE fo

That's fantastic, but...

[Weaselmancer (533834)]

How 'bout getting DX9 working, or maybe allowing the virtual machine direct access to the graphics card so it can use DX natively?

Still no Firewire support?

[PingXao (153057)]

My company is doing driver development for IEEE 1394, i.e. Firewire, devices. Not having 1394 support in VMware is a show stopper for us. Unless and until they get around to including it we'll be sitting here experiencing BSOD crashes several times per day, and sometimes per hour. We've heard the reasons VMware has not virtualized Firewire and, quite frankly, they don't hold water.

I do this myself.

[Ymerej (12280)]

I have to VPN in to work from home. I built myslef a virgin, pristine, virtual VM under Parallels with exactly what I need to get in to work, and nothing more. More secure for everybody. Sweet.

Interesting bits from the show not mentioned

[MeepMeep (111932)]

I just left LA today (Friday), the conference ended yesterday (Thursday) and now I'm freaking stuck at O'Hare overnight because they cancelled outgoing flights due to weather...so I'll write up some of the interesting stuff I saw.

Most interesting comment - During Partner Day, Karthik Rau (the Vice President of Product Management) during his presention made a comment that 'Windows Vista may be the last OS of it's type', which drew a gasp from partners around me. Hyperbole? Well, we'll see.

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