how about adding virtual disk and network activity lights?

[bigrock0]

i can't recall if workstation on PC had these lights on the status bar. but don't you think this would be useful to see fusion's hard disk and network activity lights, just like the real computers?

[HPReg]

VMware Workstation on Linux/Windows has these lights. They are very useful to developers.

But keep in mind that Fusion is not Workstation: Fusion targets the consumer market, and consumers don't really care when their devices are accessed.

[johnstonf]

I don't agree... i think it would be useful also to consumer

audience, as it gives a sign of virus, bad health, etc., and

more and more, consumers are getting smarter.

[bigrock0]

these lights are indicators for network and hard disk activity. i don't see how it's only useful for developers.

would you reconsider?

[rcardona2k]

I don't think VMware is saying 'never'. There is plenty shareware out there that enables disk and net i/o as system tray icons. The grand scheme the priority of this feature, IMO can wait. What do you think: could this feature wait for a successor release of Fusion or Workstation? Are third-party a decent workaround?

[CJConline]

I have found from my long association with computers, and particularly Windows, it is alway very help to be able to check the disk and network activity lights. Not all software displays progress bars or other indicators when they are doing extensive background work, so I find them helpful to monitor activity in the Windows world. Now if you could ensure that software never hangs or that computers don't crash, then I agreed that the lights would be redundant.

I completely disagree that only developers would benefit from having those activity lights - we are talking about Windows remember.

Perhaps make the display of these lights optional for those that want them. It must be a pretty simple thing to do.

[tirmidi]

Are third-party a decent workaround?

I tried this one (tho it's a beta) and it works quite well:

http://www.cylosoft.com/Products/TrayMonitors.aspx

[admin]

Third party is useless as the most often reason to look at the lights is when the guest OS is sluggish or completely unresponsive. In that scenario, its like the 3rd party tool in the guest won't be getting updated. Putting these indicators at the host level is necessary to make them useful. Just knowing whether its the CPU getting crunched or the disk being thrashed can tell a lot about why the guest is unresponsive at the moment.

I do not think that these indicators are only of use to developers. Even if they are, I believe I am one of many developers using Fusion and would like to see these. I have been working around the issue by keeping Activity Monitor open and watching the CPU, disk and net usage of the vmware-vmx-debug process. With multiple VMs at once, it can get tricky telling what activity corresponds to which.

Please consider this a request for feature parity with the Workstation product in this respect.

[dotel]

While I agree these would be nice. I would much rather the vmware team focus on the larger problems. Expanding the supported OS's etc. I for one would love to see this in future versions. But i'd rather not have the first release delayed because of something like this.

[rcardona2k]

>Third party is useless as the most often reason to look at the lights is when the guest OS is sluggish or completely unresponsive. In that scenario, its like the 3rd party tool in the guest won't be getting updated.

Flashing indicators or not while unresponsive is still...[i]unresponsive[/i]. I don't see the point of the difference, you're still stuck??

[eobet]

Windows has a built-in network activity light if you enable the tray icon for each connection.

As for disk access... how about the task manager if you need to check on things?

[admin]

Flashing indicators or not while unresponsive is

still...[i]unresponsive[/i]. I don't see the point

of the difference, you're still stuck??

Every little bit of information helps tell what is going on. On real hardware, the indicator lights and the sounds from the hardware give hints. With a VM, there's no hardware to hear (disk churning, processor sticking in a loop, etc), so the indicator lights are the best we can get.

Let's say Windows is just totally unresponsive, but we've got some indicator lights. If the disk is lit up, then its just an I/O wait that will probably clear up with some patience. If the CPU light is solid / CPU bar full, then its likely a runaway task and the sooner you call for the task manger, the sooner it will eventually appear so it can be used to attempt to kill the offender. If there's no sign of activity, then its just one of those Windows moments where its decided to sit on its ass and ignore all events for an indeterminate time, which might be solved by waiting or might take a hard reboot to get going again.

Basically, every little bit of awareness helps to point to what the holdup is and give some hints as to what to do Wait it out, go do something else and check back, punch ctrl-alt-del and then do something else while it slowly figures out task manger should come up, waste no time and hot the reset on the VM, etc.

The lack of a disk activity light on the Mac is nearly inexcusable. Luckily, the fans are so quiet that the hard drive can be easily heard, even when doing a large sequential read or write, not just seeking. This brings up another bit, figuring out if all the activity that can be heward on the real hardware is something in the host running amok or just the guest being greedy.

[admin]

While I agree these would be nice. I would much

rather the vmware team focus on the larger problems.

Expanding the supported OS's etc. I for one would

love to see this in future versions. But i'd rather

not have the first release delayed because of

something like this.

Of course there's other stuff to do. For example, allowing multiple VMs to run at once without taking a completely crippling speed hit, or mapping virtual serial ports and floppy drives to the real hardware on a Mac (which certainly exists on my machine, so none of that "Macs don't have those crap"), etc. However, this is something that shouldn't take more than an hour to implement. The hardware emulation layer obviously has the provision to provide the notification if Fusion is the Workstation 6 code and the Workstation product has these indicators. Its just a matter of putting a few GUI elements in place and 'wiring' them to the notifications from the lower level. Even with the minimal time requirement, I'm not saying this is a priority item, but rather saying there is user demand for it.

[silliker]

One of the areas that I use disk indicators a lot in Workstation began with the introduction of the feature where the VM would allow you to interact with it while the resume is still in progress. The indicator on the bottom of the screen didn't hurt either.

A pegged green disk light would indicate that the vmss was still being loaded into memory, so things may be sluggish or unresponsive.

With Fusion appearing to have that same "quick resume", but no disk activity light, how are you to know when the machine is, in fact, fully resumed?

[Pat_Lee]

Thanks for the feature request. We will definitely consider this for a future release.

Pat

[CJConline]

And here, in VMware's own backyard, is one very clear case that would have saved a lot of time if there were some CPU / disk / networking activity indicators on the host VM toolbar.

See this post : http://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?threadID=75209&tstart=0