A VMware Gotcha

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A minor gotcha we ran into with our Virtual Center cluster last week and again possibly today. Virtual Center requires a SQL Server (Microsoft I know) to collect telemetry I think. Not really sure why, but it does. It is not critical to operations of any VM, but you do need it for VMotion, creating new VM’s and other admin work. Well when we built our ESX cluster we put our virtual center DB on the one sql server we had on the LAN in that office that had any amount of stability. Well we were wrong. It turns out that the machine we picked (a dev db) runs out of space because our DBA’s don’t pay attention to their backup schedules. I am making an assumption there but it has happened twice in a week and a half. Well when the server runs out of space, there goes virtual center. Jayson has all the details of the issue, but it boiled down to we couldn’t use our virtual center manager until it was fixed. It is our own fault for putting it on a dev box but it was our only option at the time. We are now just building our own SQL server that the operations group will own and all it will do is the virtual center db.

This ESX roll out is a learning experience, but I still believe that we are far better off with our current infrastructure over past non vmware setup.

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My Mistery Trip

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I am writing this on the return leg of my “semi” mystery trip. I say that because no one at work really was supposed to know what we were doing this week. Apparently others are not good at keeping things quiet. I told who needed to know in my group but they always are privy to corporate secrets. that is just the nature of the jobs we have, but the rumor mill is running rampant it seems. I wrote a post all about exactly what we are doing, but it is on my private work blog right now. There it will remain until I am long gone from my current employer. I feel that the smart way to write about stuff from work. I want to write about it but cant publish it.

I can say we were doing some research. It was a very busy 3 days, and then we took yesterday to relax a bit. On this trip we ate very well. Man the food was good. Traveling always lets you eat well and gain weight. I also got the chance to see some really cool technology in action.

We rented an Iridium phone for the week because we were concerned about mobile coverage and the price of service even if we had good signal. It turned out that the Iridium phones are huge, and only really work outside. On the flip side my Cingular GSM phone actually worked so we simply used that. I don’t want to look at my bill this month since the price per minute was very high, but when you need to make an important cal you need to make a call.

I went the almost the entire trip without needing my migraine medication. Right before I got on the plane I felt like I needed to take something. At least I had a good run without the extra medication.

The trip out was uneventful. our short mini trip was nice. I have to say even smaller foreign air carriers have better service than american carriers. In the US you would never see a hot breakfast on an hour long flight but we had one.

On the return trip I went from having an asle seat in the very back of the plane to a decent window seat in an exit row. And I actually did someone a favor with that change. Go figure. The leg room is nice, especially since the carrier we are on was cramped on the way down. Hopefully the remainder of the trip will be uneventful.

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Black Box Project

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As I write this I am on my way home from several days in Costa Rica, and El Salvador. 3 of us have been visiting several sites in both countries for what would be considered a black box project in my company. If this post is ever read it will be after I leave my current job, so I feel I can write about it.

We are researching outsourcing some of our call center operations. I went along to asses the technical operations of each call center site we visited. I also wanted to get an idea of how each company integrates their systems to ours. From what I saw we can send them calls via our providers voice cloud and do percentage based routing to their system. We would allow access to our applications via a citrix or terminal solution. As of now I am thinking a VDI solution that we have been toying around with for a while.

The trip was hectic, but very informative. We visited 3 sites from 2 companies in 2 countries in 3 days. I just hope that upper management listens to our recommendation to actually try and send some calls off shore. The venture would be profitable and still keep the same level of service. I was amazed that the majority of people in both countries that worked at the call centers spoke excellent english. I am in no way a fan of off shoring call centers to places like India because of constantly poor experiences I have had. Everyone we spoke to spoke very good english at each site. And it wasn’t like the discussions were staged. Just walking around and grabbing some food or hitting a bathroom and saying hi to someone they responded with excellent english. That and the technical feasibility of this project makes me want to try it out. Hopefully we will be given the chance.

Parallels vs Vmware Fusion Update

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Vmware released the public beta of its Fusion product since I wrote about the closed beta I had. In that time Parallels has come out with 2 more beta versions of their software. The last time I wrote I said that the Parallels beta had the leg up in features over the Fusion product. With the latest versions of each software now installed and running on my Macbook Pro I can say for now that Parallels still has the lead. I still think that VMware will eventually win the feature race, but for now Parallels is on top. Why you might ask? Coherence mode for one still rocks in my book. Also the new ability to create a shortcut on your mac that when launched will run a VM and then open the specified application. If that wasn’t enough Parallels now lets you see each application that you run in a VM its own dock icon. They also are on par with VMware now with there ability to drag and drop applications between VM and host.

VMware Fusion still works better in my opinion with USB devices. I cannot get my Treo to sync with Parallels but it worked with Fusion since day one. Unfortunately Fusion is still slow. Partly due to the mandatory debug mode they impose, but it is still slow. Hopefully the production version will be allot faster.

I will write more as I have more feedback to give.

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Back to GSM

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After a false start earlier this year with Cingular I finally made the switch and went back to GSM. I picked Cingular over T-Mobile because of higher speed data network and a better selection of phones. I still don’t like some of the business practices of Cingular but high speed data is high speed data. I went with the new Treo 680 with the Palm OS. My switch also means I decoupled my account with my companies corporate account. It worked out since we needed to give someone a data plan that didn’t have it already anyway.

I love the 680 but I have two issues. First is the fact that it is very sluggish sometimes with its input. Not all the time, but enough to be a pain. jayson said that his Treo 700p did the same thing but my 700p never did. The other issue is with poor battery life. It is not as good as the 700. I ordered a spare battery that should help, but I would like to make it a day without switching batteries.

Another good thing about GSM is that for $30 I took my locked Cingular Treo and had it unlocked. Not bad since the unlocked model costs $400, and Cingular only charges $199 (after rebate).

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My New Macbook

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I haven’t written about it, but over a month ago I decided to sell off my personal Macbook and pick up a new Core 2 Duo Macbook. It is still the black one. I am one of those people apple gets an extra $150 out of in order to get a black one. I supped it up to 2gig’s of RAM, and bought a 160gig hard drive to give me extra space. I am using it as my primary home computer. So far I am very happy with its performance. I will see what Apple has in store when they have Macworld. For now I don’t want to goto a desktop since the pro line is too expensive even for my blood. The mini is still a bit under powered, and the iMac is an all in one and I like having a KVM at my desk. I tried the iMac twice and both times I ended up getting rid of them because of the whole multiple computer need.

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Parallels & VMware Fusion Head to Head

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Late last week I finally received the email I was waiting for giving me instructions to download the VMware Fusion Friends & Family Beta. It is the same version I saw a demo of at VMworld. My first impression is that I wish it was faster. To VMware’s credit the issue is that by design the beta build has debugging on. It is a closed beta after-all.

My first use of the Fusion was a test for my own personal edification. I cannot get Parallels to sync my Treo 700P with an XP VM. The main reason to use a Windows VM on my Mac at home is to use the windows version of Quicken. I cannot stand the Mac version. This get complicated when I want to sync my Quicken with Pocket Quicken on my Treo. I sync everything else with the Mac, so I just need this one windows program to sync. Up until now I have a Windows XP desktop around with an XP VM on it for me to sync my Treo to. I took that VM with Quicken on it built and run on VMware Workstation 5.5.3 and simply copied it over to my Macbook. I told Fusion were to find the VM, and let it run. After a minute of updating the VM Tools the VM was working perfectly. Within 5 minutes I was able to sync my Treo with the Windows VM. The trick I found was that I disabled the USB sync in The Missing Sync, since I have that software start when the Mac starts. This trick didn’t work with Parallel’s but was exactly what Fusion needed to see the USB device.

My work requirements are a bit more intensive for what I need in a VM than my home needs. At work since I use a Macbook Pro, I still need to access some Windows only tools. From time to time I also need to simulate our users working environment, so I need a Windows XP VM with our corporate software build on it. Getting the software build working in Fusion was as simple as copying the XP VM we have ready with sysprep onto my laptop and turning it on. After joining it to our domain, and updating the VM Tools I was up and running. This template VM of Windows XP SP-2 was built to work with VMware workstation as well as Server, so I had no problem getting it running. The drag and drop copy between host and guest worked exactly as advertised. Rob wanted a copy after I showed him how I can move stuff around between my Mac and the VM. The auto resizing of the VM window was also very helpful for day to day work. I didn’t have any stability issues with the beta, but I did have a very noticeable performance loss in the VM. Debugging does give you a noticeable speed hit.

If I had to rate the Fusion Beta against the current final build of Parallels I would say Fusion has all the advantages except for the fact that it is beta, and Parallels has been out for months. Fusion beats out Parallels in basic features. Add on top of that the fact that I can use existing VM’s we build for Workstation & Server it puts Fusion over the top. Of course if I had to rate the Fusion Beta against the beta of the next update to Parallels that I just downloaded I am not so sure. The Parallels beta offers a conversion tool from VMware to their format. Helpful yes, but not as good as having full two way compatibility between Mac, Windows, & Linux versions of VMware. Then there is the Coherence feature. The few minutes I had to play with it tonight has me wanting to give it a full workout tomorrow at the office. They say a picture is worth a thousand words, so take a look at this photo posted on Flickr by someone to explain what Coherence does. And yes my friends it works just like as it looks. The video is a bit choppy, but it is beta.

So the jury is out on what features VMware will add to Fusion as it gets closer to release. Parallels also seems to be adding more features as they roll out updates. For me, if VMware can compete with Parallels on features they have the advantage simply because of the interoperability between their other products. For now I look forward to the next versions of both Beta’s. More opinions as I get them.

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The Waiting…

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At VMworld I signed up to be in the friends and family beta of Fusion, the VMware product for the mac. I wonder if anyone that went to VMworld and signed up for the beta actually get their email invite to the program? They said to look for the information this week, and it has been over 2. I am not sure if I am being impatient or I got forgotten about:(

I thought about that the other day when jayson was building some VM’s for Parallels to test some new linux software on his machine. I wanted to try it out also, and thought if I had Fusion I could just use the virtual appliance we were trying to replicate in the first place.

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Vista on VMWare Update

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Apparently the newly released version of VMware Workstation 5.5.3 provides experimental support for Windows Vista. I already downloaded both 5.5.3 of workstation and my MSDN copy of Vista. Now I need to find time to try it out and see if it works. This hopefully solves some of the issues I brought up with last post.

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Windows Vista on MSDN

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It looks like Microsoft finally got the Windows Vista RTM ISO on MSDN. I kicked off a download of the DVD iso. Even on my cable modem it says it will take another 11 hours for the 2.5 gig iso to complete. I want to say that is huge for an OS, but Red Hat, Suse and Apple all ship now on DVD.

I am not sure what test box I will put Vista on at work. I want to first try and get it into a VM, but from what I have read it is not fully supported with VMware Workstation 5.5.3. I might have to wait for a Workstation 6.0 beta. There is a hack for getting it to work on VMware Server, but if I get it working I want to get it working correctly. My main focus is getting it in a VM and testing how much resources it needs to see if it can be used as a Virtual Desktop. My gut is saying we will need to stick with XP for the foreseeable future, but I want to at least try.

My next task is to see how the final RTM version performs on our new HP desktops we just deployed. RC1 performed ok, but I want to see how the final version handles. In reality I don’t see using vista at all anytime soon. That is a major departure from my opinion of XP as it was coming out, when I couldn’t get the ISO fast enough.

Further thoughts on the final release once I have it installed somewhere.

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