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Isn't "Hello World" how all blogs & code are supposed to begin? I recently provided some commentary on ESX3i and host hardware direction, that got picked up on the VMTN Blog. I figured maybe this would be a decent spot to elaborate a bit further.... but not too far, my lunch break is almost over. After seeing the announcement of ESX 3i, which was coupled with announcements from HP, Dell, IBM, NEC, eMachines(?), etc, etc, I couldn't help but think back to when I first started working with virtualization. At that time, we had been contemplating the purchase of this somewhat new "blade technology." All the vendors were pushing it, but looking at the premium we would pay it just never made sense (to us)... We were also about to move into new headquarters and Data Center space was the LEAST of our concerns. We saw several limitations in the early generations of the hardware, particularly around network & storage consolidation. This prompted a look at alternatives, one being virtualization with VMware. Seemed there were several progressive VAR's (and HW vendors themselves) around that had quality example business cases for moving towards consolidation via VMware. Of course, each one also wanted to sell services to come in, inventory our environment, and make recommendations on how to deploy VMware. We didn't need this... we knew what we had and how it was utilized. But I could see that their big push was to identify existing hardware that could be repurposed for consolidation. This made their recommendations look all the prettier... "Look at what you can do without purchasing any hardware!" Now, fast forward only a few years. Now we have hardware vendors creating servers designed specifically for virtualization workloads. No local storage, increased IO slots, more memory capacity, etc. I am curious as to what level we will be asked to pay higher premiums for specialty hardware! Of course, we'll still have their commodity hardware as an option. Am I a potential customer for this latest and greatest(?) hardware? Sure. I don't see us moving away from virtualization anytime soon, so I'm not too concerned about hardware that may be "locked" into virtualization workloads. However, if the HP/Dell/IBM's of the world try to pad profit margins beyond what I consider acceptable, then I hope their equipment rots on their inventory shelves. - Random non-virtualization thought: Why is it that young couples seem to have this "let's get a dog" mindset to prove they can actually take care of another living being prior to having kids? My wife and I know we're not responsible enough to handle a dog, that's why we had 2 kids instead!

Não podia ser diferente, primeiro blog, primeiro post, tenho que me apresentar e contar um pouco da experiência que tenho com o VMware ESX Server. Bom, tenho 26 anos, moro em Porto Alegre - RS, recentemente formado na primeira turma do Rio Grande do Sul de Segurança em Tecnologia da Informação pela UNISINOS em São Leopoldo. Meu tema para Trabalho de Conclusão foi Melhores Práticas de Segurança no Ambiente de Virtualização, o qual vou tentar anexar nesse post. Aonde conheci a VMware? Ao realizar alguns cursos de firewall, protocolos de redes, etc... havia a necessidade de ter várias máquinas para formar um ambiente de testes o mais real possível. No ano de 2002/2003 um amigo me falou de um tal de Virtual PC (produto da Microsoft) e do VMware Workstation, que propiciava a criação de várias máquinas virtuais em um único hardware, na época meu desktop com 512 de RAM ;-). Era a solução então. Não sei porque motivo não me interessei pelo Virtual PC, sorte a minha, e comecei a fazer o uso frequênte do VMware Workstation. Até então, eu achava que só existia essa versão para desktops. Em 2004 concorri a uma vaga de estágio na empresa que trabalho atualmente, justamente para trabalhar com VMware, porém, com a versão ESX, cuja eu nunca tinha ouvido falar, mas tudo bem, novo aprendizado. Nesse ano, 2004, fui apresentado ao VMware ESX, que recém estava na sua versão 2.0. Desde então trabalho diariamente, projetando, implementando e migrando as soluções que envolvem o VMware ESX, como por exemplo: VirtualCenter, VMotion, HA, DRS, VCB e etc... Bueno, no mais era isso. []'s Eduardo

And it seems we have made it possible. With the recent patch deploy, the site is now going full speed ahead. It just seems we will not be spending our night here. It is finally going at a great speed and all of us are watching it very closely. Just wait, got a call from Toby of another patch i.e coming up.

It is the Day 4, and we are still working on community platform roll out. We did hit some bumps, and are working on ironing out the wrinkles. Performance was the biggest issue causing the site crawl. However with good work from VMware and Jive , we have been making great progress. It continues to be a great experience in learning how we can all make it possible to reach our goal with the common desire of success.

This is a shot off my iPhone at VMworld07 Smash Mouth, it was a very fun VMworld and I liked the concert a lot. It's been a while since I've felt loud rock & rool pounding though my chest from the massive speakers. The lead singer can sing let me tell you, he was great. I was very impressed with the concert and had a lot of fun.

So it is Friday, Sept 21 and we are all working on rolling out Community platform to production. We are about 12-15 folks sitting in the war room, trying to find last minute bugs and issues on the application. It is a wonderful study in group interaction.This has been an amazing collaboration effort by different teams and groups. Here are some pictures from our effort. We have been working on this for the past 9 months. It has been an awesome experience, working with different teams and bringing this wonderful technology to the VMware community.

En la edad de los automatismos aún existen cosas no automatizadas, sobretodo en el mundo de los drivers. Esta es una de ellas. A continuación os muestro el procedimiento para actualizar la HAL de un servidor Windows de forma que pasaremos de tener un equipo multiprocesador a un equipo con una única CPU. Cabe decir que este procedimiento es aplicable tanto a VMs como a equipos físicos. l ejemplo aplica a servidores Windows Server 2003 con Service Pack 2, en caso de querer hacer este procedimiento para equipos Windows Server 2003 SP1, es necesario instalar primero el parche KB923425 y reiniciar el equipo. Si el equipo es virtual, pararemos el equipo, le configuraremos 1 vCPU y arrancaremos el servidor. Nos autenticaremos en el equipo y desde la consola de dispositivos haradware de Windows veremos que al desplegar "Processors" sólo vemos un procesador, en cambio a nivel de HAL sigue mostrando una entrada de Multiprocesador: "ACPI Multiprocessor PC". [http://www.vmworld.com/servlet/JiveServlet/showImage/38-1542-1529/HAL1.JPG] Tendremos que actualizar el driver de la HAL, para ello nos posicionaremos sobre "ACPI Multiprocessor PC" y pulsando botón derecho, seleccionaremos "Actualizar Driver..." o "Update Driver..." si es un equipo yanki. Descartaremos la opción de "Windows Update" y seleccionaremos la opción avanzada de instalación, donde especificaremos la instalación del driver Monoprocesador seleccionando el driver "ACPI Uniprocessor PC" del listado. Una vez actualizado reiniciaremos el equipo [http://www.vmworld.com/servlet/JiveServlet/showImage/38-1542-1530/HAL2.JPG]

VMware Workstation 6 is coming shortly, and we’re quite excited about its many new features: support for paravirtualized Linux kernels, integration with Microsoft Visual Studio and Eclipse, high-speed USB support, multiple monitor support, and the new VIX 1.1 VM scripting API to name a few. One other new feature that we’re extra excited about is "VM Record/Replay" (shown enabled below). The idea behind Record/Replay is relatively straightforward. When executing software within a virtual machine (VM), our virtualization layer can record the complete execution behavior. Having saved this behavioral information, the user can go back in time (from the VM’s point of view) and replay that exact and complete behavior over and over again. The keywords here are exact and complete, and that’s where both the implementation challenge and the power come from. First let’s examine why this is so challenging. The execution of any software on a computer is comprised of a fairly complex set of interactions. The computer’s CPU is constantly fetching and executing instructions, accessing memory, and trapping into the operating system for a variety of services. Meanwhile, the computer’s I/O devices (e.g. disks, network cards, mice, keyboards, and timers) are doing things on their own schedule, interrupting the CPU when someone types, a network packet arrives, or they otherwise need the attention of the operating system. When these "asynchronous" events occur, the CPU responds almost immediately, heading down a new execution path to provide the appropriate response for the event. And because the devices are on their own schedules, the complete execution path of the software can be very different from one execution of software to the next. Add multi-threaded programs into the mix and you have a situation where no two executions of software are ever exactly the same. It’s this non-deterministic behavior that makes computers complex systems and that causes such pain for programmers trying to make their code flawless. Many software problems only occur when one of the many millions of possible execution paths takes place, and it is this class of bug that leads many programmers to tear out their hair claiming "well that customer problem doesn’t occur for me". The end result is that bugs often go unfixed. Now let’s discuss how life can be better in a VM. Because our virtualization software sees and controls all of the execution of software within a VM (the "guest" operating system and applications), it can do many things that normal hardware cannot do. One such thing is this VM Record/Replay capability. When you enable the Record/Replay feature, VMware Workstation immediately takes a snapshot of the full VM state, continues guest software execution, and begins tracking its execution behavior. We’re not talking about a movie of what’s on the screen, but the full system behavior including all CPU and device activity. It notes the exact point in time when every device interrupt or other asynchronous event occurs and records this information to a compressed log file until you tell it to stop. It actually has to save a few other things such as the contents of all incoming networking packets, too. When you choose to replay the recording, it restarts the VM from the snapshot and faithfully re-creates the recorded execution by feeding the logged events and data back to the VM at the exact points in time when they occurred during the original execution. The result is that the exact same execution path is followed during replay. And since the log is saved to disk, you can share the exact execution scenario with others and replay it over and over and over again. We also allow you to "go live" at any time, aborting the rest of the replay and allowing new interactions and new behaviors to proceed. One analogy is autopilot for an airplane. You can disengage it at any point in the trip, go to manual control, and head off in a new direction from that point. Following this idea further, the combination of VM Record/Replay and snapshot management allows a user to create a whole tree of execution path alternatives and replay from any point in the tree. Here’s an example tree showing how one might use this to hone in on a problem. To make VM Record/Replay extra useful for programmers, we’re rolling out a variety of tools and procedures that leverage it in interesting ways: We’ve integrated the use of Record/Replay into the gdb debugger. Users can record execution of the VM, and then attach gdb to the guest OS or applications during replay. At that point, they can look at memory, set breakpoints, and single step through the execution. Yes, we can do this in any part of the kernel! Furthermore, we’re able to use this with unmodified kernels (no kdb needed) and the breaking and stepping is completely transparent to the guest OS. The below example shows the debugging of a linux device driver that has an error in its interrupt handler. Unlike traditional debugging, here we can repeatedly hit the issue with replay and then single step through this highly sensitive, privileged code! We’ve added the ability to produce detailed instruction traces from the recorded execution. Unlike existing tracing frameworks, the Record/Replay approach is non-intrusive; it can capture extremely detailed information without affecting the system during capture. Heisenberg would be proud. We’ve also added "in-guest recording control". This lets guest software start and stop VM Record/Replay itself. For example, an ISV might ship their beta software in a VM and have it invoke recording when someone uses a specific feature that has a history of sporadic problems in the field. Should a beta user hit a problem while running this feature, the log of full activity is present. They email it to the ISV and voila... there is now a deterministic case of the bug for developers to work on! We’ll be publishing instructions for using these and other tools with VM Record/Replay shortly so stay tuned.  In fact, one of the developers, Vyacheslav (Slava) Malyugin, has already started blogging additional technical nuggets on using tools with this technology. A few caveats... VM Record/Replay is an experimental feature in VMware Workstation 6.0. This is an extremely challenging problem to solve and our incredible engineers have been hard at work on it for some time now. As an aside, they sure wish they could use record/replay to debug problems in the record/replay implementation. Nonetheless, things are working quite well within a handful of hardware and virtual machine configuration constraints. For example, we’re currently unable to properly record execution when USB or sound devices are in use by the VM. I should add that the core VM Record/Replay technology is useful for many tasks beyond debugging those nasty race conditions. Some customers are telling us this will help them create better sales and training demos that they’re sure will work time after time. With "go-live" mode, they can play the demo, but also let their customers begin interactions at any point. Other customers have indicated they’ll use this for forensic purposes.  For example, with such a record of someone breaking into a VM (a honeypot or a production server), experts can study and understand exactly what went on during the break-in. We have lots of other plans in the works for this technology as well, so stay tuned! So to all you programmers out there, download the latest release candidate (RC2 is coming shortly), and check out this amazing new capability. Once you’ve experienced debugging in a world of deterministic execution, you may never go back to the non-virtual world!

Una vez activado desde BIOS podemos activarlo o desactivarlo desde la consola del VIC, desde el host deseado, pestaña Configuration, Processors, Properties: [http://www.vmworld.com/servlet/JiveServlet/showImage/38-1541-1528/Hyper.JPG] Eso sí, requiere un reinicio del host.

Happy 2007 to everyone! Sorry it’s been a while since the last entry... we’ve been quite busy here in VMware Research & Development. On this topic, I thought you’d enjoy a few updates on what we’ve been up to and some things to look forward to in 2007. VMworld In November we held our 3rd VMworld event in Los Angeles. The attendance exceeded our most optimistic expectations again with more than 7,000 people. if you were unable to make it, you can go to http://www.vmware.com/vmtn/vmworld/ to see a video of the general session and to get access to recordings and presentation materials from the breakout sessions. It’s hard to believe, but planning for VMworld 2007 is already well underway. It’ll be from September 11-13 in San Francisco, and I hope to see you there! Products On the product front, these last few months have been among the busiest in company history. In just the last 3 months of 2006, we released: VMware Lab Manager 2.4: This is the first product coming out of VMware’s acquisition of Akimbi, and early signs are that it will be a big hit with software developers and testers. Check out the details here. VMware Capacity Planner 2.2: This is a tool used by professional services teams to assess the utilization of a company’s servers. It’s often used in offerings such as our own "Virtualization Assessment" offering We also went pretty wild with betas. You can check out http://www.vmware.com/vmtn/beta/ to see all of our latest downloadable beta offerings. Earlier in the quarter, we put out a beta of VMware Converter 3.0 and phased delivery of the general availability (GA) version is underway. This tool combines and replaces our older VMware P2V Assistant and VMware Importer tools. It is used to transform physical machines into virtual machines as well as to transform a variety of third party disk images into virtual machine images. The hot cloning feature is particularly nice, so check it out. And then to close out 2006 with a bang, we released several betas on December 21st. These products share a lot of source code, but it’s still a huge challenge to get these all out at once. Making the biggest splash was VMware’s desktop product for Mac, codenamed Fusion. This is our first entry into the x86-based Mac market and the response is overwhelming. We also released a beta of the new VMware Workstation 6.0. This team is great at bringing new software developer- and test-focused features to market and I’m particularly excited about the integration with debuggers, multi-monitor support, and automation APIs. The beta of VMware Player 2.0 comes along with VMware Workstation and we hope you enjoy its increased focus on supporting the growing Virtual Appliance Marketplace. 2007 is going to be even busier! In addition to bringing all of these betas to GA status, we have several new releases on the way. You can look forward to a 2.0 version of the free VMware Server product, a new major release of VMware ACE, and several additions to VMware Infrastructure 3. I can’t share many more details just yet, but stay tuned! People Last, but certainly not least, we’ve been incredibly busy on the people front and working to grow our outstanding R&D group across the globe. In the US, we’re continuing rapid grow in our Palo Alto, California headquarters. This year will be particularly exciting as we shortly move into our shiny new campus. We recently opened a San Francisco office and are filling it up rapidly! We now have enough people going back and forth to support the VMware Palo-Alto-to-San-Francisco shuttle bus. One of our engineers there has a nice picture of the location if you’re interested. Additionally, we are continuing our rapid growth in Cambridge, Massachusetts and are enjoying being in the middle of so many great academic institutions. In February we move into our new Kendall Square offices with a beautiful view of the Charles. Stay tuned for an announcement about our open house there in March. Finally, we’re starting to ramp an R&D office near Boulder, Colorado and have our first people in Austin, Texas. Internationally, we continue to grow rapidly in Bangalore, India. I’m also very excited to announce the opening of our first European R&D office in Aarhus, Denmark. We’re moving into the space as we speak, so I’ll have better pictures than the below shortly. And if it’s not obvious from the above, we're hiring. Hope this has been interesting. One of my new year’s resolutions is to improve my blogging frequency, so drop me a line if there are some topics you’d like to hear about.

We've been touting the notion of open standards, specifications, and formats for quite a while now. I wanted to take an opportunity to re-derive the importance of this openness to the virtualization industry and give a brief update as to where things stand. We're all seeing two very strong trends in the virtualization industry; growing enthusiasm for the notion of virtual appliances and a rapidly growing ecosystem around the virtualization layer. Virtual Appliances First, virtual machines are becoming a preferred way of developing, deploying, and managing software. We've termed the combination of an application and its operating system in a virtual machine a "virtual appliance", and these truly have the ability to change the way we all think about software. For virtual appliances to achieve their full potential, openness in virtual machine-related interfaces is critical. The real promise is "any software on any virtualization layer". We believe customers should be able to choose and/or purchase a virtual machine consisting of any application running on any operating system and then run it on their virtualization layer of choice. This scenario requires openness in virtual machine disk format, software licensing policies, and operating system-to-hypervisor communication. Dan Chu addressed the first two areas quite nicely in his recent blog. We're seeing growing openness around Microsoft's VHD disk format, but are concerned that they may start restricting the use of these virtual machines to their own virtualization software. Much has also been written about "paravirtualization", a set of optimizations that an operating system can leverage when it knows it is running within a virtualized environment. As mentioned in a previous blog, the Linux community seems to be iterating quite nicely towards a public, open approach to paravirtualization. This will allow a paravirtualized Linux-based software stack to run equally well across a variety of virtualization layers. Microsoft also has a paravirtualization approach known as "enlightenments" that it will take advantage of in future versions of Windows. There has been no public commitment to freely allowing non-Microsoft virtualization layers to take advantage of these optimizations. We of course think that this is not in the best interest of customers or of the industry as it can lead to customer lock-in, non-interoperable virtual machines, and ultimately reduced choice in virtualization solutions. Virtualization Layer The second trend in the virtualization industry is rapidly growing adoption and a corresponding growth in the eco-system around the virtualization layer itself. There are several instances of virtualization available today and surely there will be even more in the future. We have been focusing on two areas important in helping both customer and others in the industry more easily manage and make sense of the growing options. First, effective management of the virtualization layer is key to realizing its operational benefits. Furthermore, as virtualization further penetrates the datacenter, more and more customers will want their existing tools to be aware of, and in fact leverage virtualization's unique capabilities. To work towards open industry standards, VMware and many other key players in the virtualization space are active participants in the DMTF SVPC (system virtualization, provisioning, and clustering) subgroup. Second, customers continuously ask for benchmarking tools to enable them to intelligently make choices as to which virtualization offering makes the most sense for them and which hardware configurations are most appropriate for their needs. We recently blogged about VMmark, an approach to virtualization benchmarking that we have worked on with several partners.  More importantly, we're pleased that the SPEC organization will begin work on an industry standard version of such a benchmark. In summary, we're at a unique point in time in the industry and have a great opportunity to do things better. By focusing on open standards, interfaces, and formats in several critical areas, we have a chance to really take advantage of all that virtualization has to offer.

Welcome to the new home of Virtually There, the blog of VMware vice president of technology development Steve Herrod. Recent posts from Steve include The Road to 64-bit Virtual Machines, 64-bit Virtual Machines for ESX Server!, and Technology Preview for Transparent Paravirtualization.