Hey there,

As far as I know, the current implementation only supports them on bitTorrent. I'll let you know if I find out otherwise.

I guess you'll either have to unblock (not always possible) or download from another location and bring the appliance in on a burned CD or other media.

-Daryll

Sure, BitTorrent traffic CAN be legal, but the vast majority of it is not. Saying it should be an educational experience for IT departments is fairly unreasonable. Few IT managers could ever come up with a valid reason to allow any sort of file sharing software on their network. That being said, I understand why VMware is going this route, however it would be nice if customers under support contracts could get the downloads via http/ftp.

I was just burned with BitTorrent. I'm an old but regular user of VMware products and their neat appliances in business and lab environments for my clients.

I wanted an appliance from VMware that I would only downloading using this thing I'd never heard of called BitTorrent, so installed it on my laptop at home and downloaded the appliance, and thought that was it. I just assumed it was like the Microsoft File Transfer Manager which does checkpointed/trickled downloads.

The next week I was plugged into the lab side of our corporate network when the network police came around to disconnect my "rogue" laptop from the network that was compromising the network acceptable use policy by poking/scanning at firewall ports.

I'm fairly religious about hotfixes and virus signatures and only trusting known sources, so this was pretty embarassing as it compromised my reputation for this corporation.

Yes I've learned a lesson about installing anything that connects to the network, but certainly I feel "betrayed" by VMware; a company I had trusted until now. Never had any problems before downloading free appliances from their site.

Solutions?
How about licensing the Microsoft File Transfer Manager or some other tool to limit the use of EMC's bandwidth while providing an acceptable download experience.

Or get the BitTorrent people to develop separate download-only client and server applications, and have well-behaved clients which can talk to well-behaved servers with controlled uploads.

Okay Okay, I will have a little cheese with the whine.

Thanks for listening.

BitTorrent is becoming quite an accepted industry-standard transfer protocol. It has lots of antvantages, including saving our beloved VMware thousands or tens of thousands of dollars on download management, servers, and bandwidth. The advantage for clients is that in optimal conditions, you can get incredible download speeds, much more than the average hoster could ever provide, and you can download even if the hoster has network problems.. Sweet!

@SCampbell
I'm sorry to hear you got in to problems because you didn't know exactly how bittorrent works, and couldn't explain it to your network security officers. I can understand that was embarrassing. However, I don't think it's right to blaim VMware, and I don't think this is something to feel betrayed over.

But I admit it's kind of a strange protocol.. If your company's network doesn't allow bittorrent usage, you'll have to download it on a seperate machine and then get in.. But it's the same with active FTP, some networks only allow passive FTP, or the other way around. I have a remote linux box on a remote location, to do things like this.. I download a torrent with the console program btdownloadcurses, and then download it into my network using FTP or HTTP.

It wasn't.

It was using BitTorrent's range of ports to try and share bandwidth. That's what BitTorrent is (you should have read about that before you installed it).

The purpose of BitTorrent is to allow large files to be downloaded, and in return you share some bandwidth back. The files wouldn't be available otherwise.

If you felt betrayed or your reputation compromised it was for two reasons:
1. You didn't read what BitTorrent did before you installed it.
2. The IT department wrongly told you that BitTorrent does port scanning (it uses a standard list of ports, and perhaps uPnp).

It's important that you don't blame either BitTorrent or VMware for this.
You didn't read what the software did before you installed it.

BitTorrent is *the* way to obtain large format files as fast as possible. The bandwidth required for a single host to deliver such files to you at the same speed is never going to compare to the near-free cost of having those who want the files to share with each other. Many massively-multiplayer games produced by major software houses distribute the game client, patches and additional content via BitTorrent now.

I agree with other comments: not only should you read and know about the software you're installing, there are also a number of options in most BT clients that make it a bit less 'promiscuous' (for want of a better term) when used in an office environment. A popular torrent file can easily saturate even a high bandwidth connection at your end - which network admin folks will *definitely* notice. If you're a guest on a network rather than an employee, then I'd recommend explaining what you'd like to do beforehand to a network admin type person -- chances are they'll have a BT client in an area of the network (DMZ) that can fetch the file for you anyway.

Set the download speed limits appropriate to your network, prevent or restrict the uploading/sharing portion of the client (if you must) and yes, stand up for yourself in obtaining a business-required file via a time-appropriate method. If you're worried about installing a huge client, then use www.uTorrent.com - it's one EXE file that you can remove at will. A scheduler panel in this client even allows you to step up the speed overnight.

Personally, I'll happily download such torrents at home if there's no method at a client site; just need to be aware of download quotas, etc.