ETA on updated beta

[dimonet]

Just wondering if anyone has an idea when we might see the next release?

[rcardona2k]

en: "soon"

fr: <<bientot>>

es: "pronto"

de: "bald"

it: "presto"

[nivenh]

i think its perfectly reasonable to inquire about this without being dismissed by someone who obviously doesn't know either.

if they want my time beta testing, i need a little more transparency about the process by which updates will be delivered. i can wait a few weeks, even a few months, but there's going to be a point where people start to wonder why they even bother.

the "whenever its ready" mantra you keep tossing out isn't going to cut it forever.

[rcardona2k]

>i think its perfectly reasonable to inquire about this without being dismissed by someone who obviously doesn't know either.

Since you're not the original poster, it's a bit presumptuous for you to "shoot the messenger."

If you're frustrated with VMware, let them know. Also as stated before, this beta is completely voluntary[/b]. If you don't like the terms, conditions or issues, come back in a few months or evaluate the product when it's released.

VMware and all software companies have policies about schedules for many reasons. Asking pedantic questions will get you the best possible pedantic answers[/i].

And so my quotation is not without attribution, here is a Fusion engineer re-iterating they are working to get you updated code "as soon as possible"

http://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?messageID=577490

The translations were my embellishment.

[dimonet]

All,

My original post was that merely of curiosity. I am not frustrated at all. I can tell you that over the years I have participated in many BETA programs and VMWARE's program and community has been the most responsive hands down. While a high level schedule or projected releae schedule would be nice I am ok without one for now. I am just happy to be testing.

Many props to the VMWARE team and give rcardona2k a little slack.

Flame Off

[admin]

i think its perfectly reasonable to inquire about this without being dismissed by someone who obviously doesn't know either.

AFAIK nobody outside of VMware knows this, and those inside aren't saying. Unless VMware publicly commits to a schedule, Richard's answer is the best you're going to get from anyone.

there's going to be a point where people start to wonder why they even bother

Because they want a solid, stable final product. Because enough requests and reasonable use cases might influence what goes into the final product. Hopefully not because they just want a free program or because they want to benchmark unfinished code.

[hoju]

Why on earth are you responding to a perfectly reasonable question with such a rude and confrontational answer.

Do you represent VMWare? If so, it seems an excellent reason for everyone to be focusing on Parallels.

Any software project worth it's salt has timelines, and project managed objectives. If VMWare wants free testing, they can offer up some of that information to their free labor participants - and future customers.

Ubuntu can do it. Fedora can do it. And they do it well and with respect.

I have never seen Ubuntu say their next release is coming "soon".

"Soon" is antagonistic and insulting. More of that sort of attitude and I will lose interest in this product completely. It is bad enough the first Beta is benchmarking @ 65% the performance of their competitor Parallels. 65%!!!!

Do you have to add insult to shabby performance and a lack of good public relations?

[nivenh]

Since you're not the original poster, it's a bit

presumptuous for you to "shoot the messenger."

i don't think that not being the original precludes me from having an opinion on the subject.

If you're frustrated with VMware, let them know.

i'm doing so via this forum, which they clearly read.

Also as stated before, this beta is completely

voluntary[/b]. If you don't like the terms,

conditions or issues, come back in a few months or

evaluate the product when it's released.

please don't give me the "if you don't like it, leave" mentality. myself, as well as the several others that have posted this inquiry, are clearly interested in evaluating it and are curious about forthcoming updates.

VMware and all software companies have policies about

schedules for many reasons. Asking pedantic

questions will get you the best possible pedantic

answers[/i].

since everyone who's curious is clearly lacking in some way, i think we'd both be better served if you stopped acting as VMWare's mouthpiece and let them answer (or not answer) for themselves. i only bring this up because in every thread similar to this one, you're the first one to pipe up with the canned "whenever its done" response for the most part.

if i was too terribly worried about release dates, i would have posted the question myself. however, i don't think its proper to dismiss questions. if you're going to bother replying at least be informative without being degrading.

And so my quotation is not without attribution, here

is a Fusion engineer re-iterating they are working to

get you updated code "as soon as possible"

http://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?messageID=

577490

thanks for the link. i clearly missed that one. it may have been more useful to post that in your original response.

[admin]

Do you represent VMWare? If so, it seems an

excellent reason for everyone to be focusing on

Parallels.

Everyone on this forum is giving their individual opinion, and only folks with the VMware logo emblem are VMware employees.

Any software project worth it's salt has timelines,

and project managed objectives. If VMWare wants free

testing, they can offer up some of that information

to their free labor participants - and future

customers.

I understand your frustration. Fusion does of course have timelines, but we've chosen not to make them public. This can be especially frustrating to people who are used to the world of open source software, with its complete transparency and openness.

There are reasons behind this decision, but IMHO the most important reason is that we want to release the software when it's ready, and we don't want to make promises unless we're absolutely sure we can deliver on them. "Under-promise, over-deliver" and such.

It is bad enough the first Beta

is benchmarking @ 65% the performance of their

competitor Parallels. 65%!!!!

This is really off-topic, but on which benchmarks? There are actually several responses to this point:

1. This is a debug build, as are all of our beta releases. You have to wait for a release candidate to make performance comparisons. Yes, this sucks, but we need a way to make sure that the resulting reports are useful when beta users report bugs.

2. Benchmarking in a VM is actually a fairly hard problem. VMs in general, whether ours or our competitors', have very different performance characterists than real machines. Certain operations that are very fast on real machines (like system calls) can be very slow in VMs, but other operations that are slow on real machines (most disk reads) aren't necessarily as slow in VMs.

3. In a VM, time is virtual and there are several ways of measuring time. This will skew any benchmark that isn't specially designed to run in a VM.

[rcardona2k]

@dimonet, the original poster: Thanks!

@nivenh:

I am politely choosing to ignore your negative comments and only stating this: as clearly visible in my profile, I work for Surgient[/b] and I am NOT paid by them to promote, support, or otherwise help VMware. Surgient is, however, a VMware partner.

Further, I am not a VMware "mouthpiece" and I voluntarily respond equally[/b] to the most technical of issues as well as the most trivial ones, as you can see from my posting history. If you search the forums you will find that I'm also an early, paid-for Parallel's customer. I'm running RC3 right now. I am a member, by the same name, on their forums.

Without violating VMware's EULA on posting performance benchmarks and using a relative measure as you assert "65%", here is a thread you can share your benchmarking comments on:

http://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?messageID=573000

Or create a new one. Chances are, I'll comment there too.

Using Passmark benchmarks and an optimized Fusion VM, I was able to get quite favorable results against a Parallels VM.

Interestingly, I believe the Fusion forum currently has no locked threads. This could be the first if it continues to trend downward.

[nivenh]

@nivenh:

I am politely choosing to ignore your negative

comments

that's very gracious of you.

micah:

thanks for the response. i don't really agree with the reasoning, but accept that there's not much that can be done to change it on the user end. i also don't know that we're asking for promises, just a time frame. we fully expect there to be bugs during a beta phase and if we're still around at this point, are willing to deal with them. waiting for a perfect build to release as beta seems counterintuitive. my pov is that getting the mileage on an updated build will help you identify new bugs, fixed bugs, etc. quicker and get you to some cash flow on this product faster.

having release dates (or even just windows, for updates) sets clear goals for the team to meet. i think that's very beneficial.

obviously the flip side is that if none of the bugs have been fixed yet, or not enough of them to warrant a release, then none of the above really applies at all.

[admin]

We'd certainly like to release beta updates more frequently, but it actually takes a significant amount of work for us to put out a new release. We certainly aren't waiting for a "perfect" build, but we do apply a significant amount of QA to everything we release, including betas.

Take a look at:

http://www.vmware.com/community/message.jspa?messageID=575284#575284

[ColoradoMarmot]

I'm curious as to how you achieved 'comperable' performance between Parallels and VMWare. My experience with Fusion has been that the debug code grossly slows down the system (to the point of being completely unusable - even for evaluation). I've abandoned testing it until we have a non-debug code build available (did I perhaps miss one being released - and that's how you achieved par performance?).

I use parallels for now, but want to switch to VMWare as soon as I can - I've used them for years on desktop and servers, and they definitely have the better technology (especially snapshots). But right now Fusion is useless.

[hoju]

Sorry micah, and thank you for the reply.

I did not know about the icon. Now I do.

I had assumed the mouthpiece was a VMware one, as I could not fathom why someone would just start spouting off in response to a question that was clearly directed at VMware. Such is the bizarre world of our business, and the folks still living in their mother's basements that frequent it.

I eagerly await the next Beta so I can retest the benchmarks. However in all fairness, the Parallels version I benchmarked against was their RC3, also not an optimized build.

I understand your position and policy, but my word, we sure are due for a refresh

(especially with that leaked 3D video - it is a sort of inhumane torture for VMware not to even comment at this point)

[ColoradoMarmot]

I'm curious as to how you achieved 'comperable' performance between Parallels and VMWare. My experience with Fusion has been that the debug code grossly slows down the system (to the point of being completely unusable - even for evaluation). I've abandoned testing it until we have a non-debug code build available (did I perhaps miss one being released - and that's how you achieved par performance?).

I use parallels for now, but want to switch to VMWare as soon as I can - I've used them for years on desktop and servers, and they definitely have the better technology (especially snapshots). But right now Fusion is useless.

[admin]

I use parallels for now, but want to switch to VMWare

as soon as I can - I've used them for years on

desktop and servers, and they definitely have the

better technology (especially snapshots). But right

now Fusion is useless.

I know the debug code is frustrating, but I'd hardly call a debug build "useless". Inside VMware we typically use a build which has even more debugging enabled than our beta releases- and it's certainly much slower than our releases, but I wouldn't call it unusable.

Are there any particular operations that have been unusably slow on the beta? There might be ways of speeding those up without giving up debuggability.

[RDPetruska]

>having release dates (or even just windows, for updates) sets clear goals for the team to meet. i think that's very beneficial.

In case you don't know, it also sets financial deadlines. If not met, there can be penalties enforced by the SEC and/or other institutions. What Richard was attempting to convey to you is what has been written about by both employees and non-employees over the past several years, every time another VMware product is in a beta cycle... No employee can or will comment on the potential release of a future product until a public announcement has been made. It is a matter of serious financial impact to their company if they did!

[nivenh]

no one is asking for the final release date. we \*were* asking for a timeline for the next test release. this kind of information is given out by Microsoft, Parallels, etc. all the time on pre-release/beta versions without what you describe happening so i don't see how you're point is applicable.

[dotel]

Well I for one can wait. One thing I have noticed about VMWARE vs. Say Microsoft about release dates.

So far every release date (once released) VMWARE has come through and actually FIXED the problems. Vs. say Microsoft that will go through a dozen releases without ever fixing the problems.

Also VMWARE may not have a release date because they are still collecting information on the problems and debug. If your list of things to do is not yet made, how can you estimate a time frame to complete the list. .

[ColoradoMarmot]

I use a large VM image (1.5 GB RAM), running Win Server 2K, DB2, WebSphere, and several java-based products. On my 1.6 GHz Pentium M WinXP laptop (VM Workstation 5.5), performance is adequate - boots in 10 minutes, once loaded mouse response and screen changes are nearly as fast as native.

On my 2.33 Core 2 Duo Ghz MacBook Pro, the VM takes twice as long to boot (20 minutes), there's a lag of more than a second when I click a mouse, and the performance of the applications in the image is terrible (several seconds to switch screens).

So I've a faster machine, that has more available RAM, and less than half the performance. Converting the image to Parallels achieves performance better than the WinXP machine (not by much though) - which is more than twice what Fusion provides.

All my images contain snapshots (well, the Parallels one obviously doesn't), and are hosted on internal drives. The Mac drive is 5400 RPM, the PC is 7200, so that might explain some of the load time difference, but not the actual application performance.

From my perspective, the beta is useless - I can't even consider using it for a customer demo, to prepare for a demo, or even as a contingency plan in case my windows machine crashes. I realize that these images push the limits of laptop capability, so perhaps I'm seeing behavior that others are not - but they do work acceptably on Workstation 5.5 (and 5.0) on XP.

While I can't share the image, I'm more than happy to help troubleshoot the problem - please let me know.