Apple

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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Core 2 Duo Macbook

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I have no self control. I think it simply boils down to that. That explains why I went out and bought a brand new Core 2 Duo Macbook (in black). My Macbook (Core Duo) is only 6 months old, but it is now in the process of going up on eBay. This Macbook is now the latest in a long line of Mac laptops I have purchased in recent years. It is my second Macbook, and is by far the most powerful computer I have had (desktops included) so far. I upgraded it to 2gig’s of ram (the extra memory from the last Macbook was usable in this one). I also got a fast 180gig hard drive upgrade for it!

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Month Long Recap

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Yet again I have been bad at posting. Sean emailed me looking for an update since I haven’t written in a while. I know I have been bad recently with not posting. I will provide a quick update of what happened this month. Ok, get ready here it comes:

Last week I was plagued with migraines from Wednesday till this Monday. It is the weather. I always get sick when the weather starts changing. It is something about the stagnant warm weather, not hot or cold when the AC’s stop running and it is just warm. I am not the only one I know that is affected by this but like clockwork twice a year I have an issue. I am feeling somewhat better now.

Last weekend I stayed in trying to kill the head aches. I ended up having to miss a Halloween party my friends threw because I felt like crap. I did get out a bit on Sunday to help Lauren and Andrew setup there new Macbook Pro. The twins are really cute, but a bit loud for my head aching state I was in.

The week before that I had a cold all week. Thankfully it wasn’t that bad. I took cold eze. I can’t spell it but it works. I sounded allot worse than I felt all week. The Tylenol PM also helped. The weekend of the 14th and 15th I pretty much slept away since I had a cold. Come to think of it, this month has been allot of resting when I am not working. That is a sign that things are crazy busy in the office.

One night a few weeks ago (i can’t remember when anymore) a bunch of us finally got together for poker. Brian’s girlfriend Amy was the big winner. I was the only other person that broke even. I did ok, but no where near as well as Amy. I need to schedule another get together soon.

I did the Jewish holidays at the usual places. One holiday was at my parents best friends house and the other was at my parents place. My dad decided to make the first holiday interesting by getting sick. He ended up in the hospital for a day and half with the flu or something. I am learning that even something as typically normal as the flu can put a diabetic in the hospital. He is ok but it was an interesting few days.

The other holiday was uneventful. I didn’t fast. I really can’t, or shall I say I shouldn’t. Me, medication, and not eating is a bad thing. According to my dad (who after all is a reliable religious scholar:) it is ok to skip the fasting if you need to take meds. Who am I kidding anyway. I am not religious 364 days out of the year, so why should I be that one extra day?

Other stuff went on this month, but I can’t recall all the details right now. Heck, I almost forgot about the hospital thing so I bet I missed some other important piece of info.

Work was really hectic this month. Lost of projects going on right now. I will cover them in another post if I find the time. Hopefully this wont be the last post for another month!

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Mooing Macbook Pro

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My Macbook Pro has been causing me problems for almost a month now. It sounds much louder than it should during normal operation. Every once in a while (more often than not now a days) it will start getting much louder like an engine for a while. After a while it eventually goes back to normal, but as I said normal is still way too loud. Last week I got fed up with the sound (when my office is quiet all I hear is this dam laptop and it drives me crazy) and had it taken in to a Apple service center. I got it back in the middle of this week, and early on it was apparent that the replaced fan did not do much good. Yesterday when it started sounding really loud again I knew whatever they replaced didn’t fix the issue.

I called Apple support today and spend almost an hour on the phone. At first the level 1 support guy was giving me the normal song and dance about how they need to bring it to a depot and take a look at it. He couldn’t shed any light on what was going on. Something must have clicked because after a while he put me on hold and sent me to a specialist. I actually spoke to someone who knew what he was doing. Now it is hard to explain a noise problem. The system functions without any issues, but it is just abnormally loud. I can’t localize the sound. It seems random when it gets really loud, but it is constantly emitting a low hum that it should not. I know it shouldn’t because at work we have a few Macbooks and Macbook Pro‘s. My luck that my personal computer would be messed up. The guy I spoke to supposedly made some special notes on my ticket and I am now waiting for a box to arrive to send it in. They said something about the logic board, but they will run it for a while when they get it to see if the can reproduce the issue. I hope they can, but based off of how often it happens to me I don’t think there will be a problem with them reproducing it.

Now I have to go without my work computer for probably another week. It isn’t too bad since I have my personal Macbook I will bring to the office. The downside is that I normally leave my Macbook on at home when I am at work and run a bunch of different processes. I shouldn’t complain too much since I at least have a laptop to use. I know I get a bit spoiled with the gear I have access to at work. I just hope this unit comes back and works. More news when the unit comes back!

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Novell Zen

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I am not new to Novell’s Zen product suite. I used Zen about 10 years ago at one of my first technology jobs. Looking back I would consider myself to have been closed minded about technology. I was all about Microsoft OS’s and discounted Novell’s NDS. That was difficult for me since at the time I worked for a company who used Novell, and Microsoft was just gaining a footing in the network department. My first real promotion was when I got taken off the help-desk and given the task of dealing with our growing NT environment. As a side aspect of my job I was to head up any special projects that came up. I know that the special projects aspect was just my boss Jeff wanting to be able to get me involved in anything he wanted to put me on. I was one of a few people who he liked to use to just get stuff done quickly.

I bring all this up because one of the first projects I got involved with was Novell Zen. When I was on the helpdesk I got involved in desktop image building, and then projects related to installing applications. I remember spending countless nights with a team of 10 people running around floor after floor upgrading software. I swore there was a better way. One day I was complaining to someone in our network dept and they where like “yeah we have something that would speed that up”. They where talking about ZEN, or Zero Effort Networking. At the time it was a new application from Novell that we owned, but no one wanted to deal with it. My big mouth got me in charge of looking into using it. If after all I had an issue with how we deployed apps, why didn’t I try this out and see if it would work. I remember that most people looked at me funny when I talked about using it. Everyone was skeptical, including myself. But the potential was huge. I ended up leaving that company before we could roll out every application with ZEN, but we had gotten to a few of them, and the fundamentals where down.

The next job I went to ended up having their own packaging system that the put together from an off the shelf app. When you are a group at IBM Global Services you can do such things. The project I was on was a fantastic example of automated application deployment, but I am getting off topic a bit.

In the end after Global Services I really didn’t get to play with any software deployment tools again until recently. The jobs I took for a while where not desktop management related, or where too small of an environment for them. Where I am now has grown enormously since when I started. A few years ago we kicked around using Microsoft SMS, but it never got out of the testing phase. I just wouldn’t do what we wanted. We always talked about how awesome ZEN was, but we thought that you needed a Novell network to run it, and we where all Windows so we never gave it much thought.

That was until last year. My friend Joe who is a big into Novell software said you can get ZEN to work just fine with a windows environment. Our interest was peaked. It wasn’t until Scott (another Scott, not me) started that we had the kick in the ass to look at ZEN. he had some experience with it and finally convinced us to seriously look at it. That was earlier this year. I am amazed at the potential of this application. We are in the middle of rolling out client desktops with ZEN and the Novell Application Launcher. Most of the products we use are packaged, and we are working on the rest of them. What is amazing is that we have eDirectory (Novell’s version of Active Directory, or shall I say AD is Microsoft’s version of Novell eDirectory since Novell has had their directory services around for years before Microsoft’s) getting all its information out of our 2003 domain and it really does work!

As I said we are in the middle of a ZEN deployment at one of our offices. it coincides with a new hardware roll out so it makes life easy to enable all new machines to use ZEN. Next up is doing the same roll out in our larger office. We have only cracked the surface with ZEN. Right now we are using the imaging function that works great. We have the remote control feature setup but as of yet I am not sure if we have actually used it on anyone. That makes supporting people between two offices nice since we can have support staff in either office help just about anyone if they have ZEN configured. We also have the packaging part of ZEN down pretty well. That of course was the driving force to use the product in the first place.

Next up is finishing re-deploying desktops and laptops everywhere in the company using ZEN. Then it is on to inventory control and more frequent updates (allot more) of the software suite. Now that we can package and quickly update images we can make changes faster with less down time. it is amazing stuff. I must sound like a Novell poster child? I sing the praises of products that work. Now it wasn’t all sunshine. We had our setbacks, and it took allot longer than we had planned to get as far as we have, but it DOES WORK!!!

It is weird going from mocking Novell, to being a person looking at other products they have going, hey this stuff may be just what I was looking for. And on the flip side I have come to question allot of Microsoft’s moves recently. Not all of them, but it says allot that I am writing this entry on a Macbook Pro, and I find myself looking at linux based applications more and more.

The moral of this entry (yes there is a moral to this) is that I shouldn’t mock any technology because one day it may be just what you need!

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The Perpetual Upgrade

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Since I am perpetually upgrading I am now sporting a new Apple Macbook Pro. Well honestly it is not mine. it is my new work computer. I have given up the small size of my Powerbook 12″ for the power and the Core Duo intel chip of the 15″ Macbook Pro. It is big, but that means the screen is also big. I am hoping not to carry it home every day like I did with the Powerbook. That may make me not care so much about the size. Every so often I swap back and forth between wanting a nice size screen and a small form factor. Neither are perfect, so I never know what I want. I am at a point where I want a nice size screen so I can work off the laptop anywhere.

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New Desk Setup

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Now that the iMac is gone I was able to reorganize my desk a bit and get back to 1 monitor. I rewired my desk with KVM cables. I now have my HP desktop plugged back in along with my Macbook on the same monitor. I switched back to a VGA monitor and put away my 20″ Apple Cinema Display. I am hoping to sell the Apple display since it doesn’t work with my VGA KVM. It is DVI of course. Those displays retain their value a bit so I am hopeful I will get a decent amount of cash for it. Now I can plug in up to 2 more computers but right now I only need to plug in 2.

I also cleaned up some cables and did some heavy dusting while I was under my desk. Man the dust accumulates.

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iMac is Sold

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I have completed my sale of my 20″ intel iMac. It didn’t sell on ebay but one of the bidders was local (i do live in the biggest city in the country) and still wanted it, was willing to pay for the reserve and show up to get it. Now that I have my money I will pay for the Macbook I just got!

Before the sale I ran out on this crappy morning for a hair cut. and then ran off to work (see next post)

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54 Wireless Networks

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With my new Macbook I find 54 wifi networks in my apartment (See the first page of them in picture below). it is crazy. With my iMac or Powerbook I found only like 9. The antenna is that much more sensitive on this new Macbook. Now I have to find out how many of them are open with good signal strength. I also need to make sure my own wifi network is not getting bad signal strength because it is sharing a channel with too many nearby networks.

54 Wireless Networks

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New Macbook

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I broke down this weekend and bought a Macbook. I got the black one. I was hoping for a larger hard drive but didn’t want to special order it. I went to the new Apple store on 59th street. They had a ton in stock, or so it seemed. I decided that I do want a home computer even thought I have a work laptop. I also took Danny’s lead and figured why does my home computer need to be a desktop. I love my iMac. It is fast, and has everything I need, but it also has things I don’t need like tons of size! I also don’t like being locked into 1 monitor size. With a portable I can get a larger external screen if I want one.

So with my new Macbook in hand I will be eBaying my iMac. It served me well, but it does have to go so I can pay for the Macbook. I should get a decent price for it since it is in mint condition, with original packaging and an AppleCare.

I am off to take photos of the gear now!

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