April 2007

The development team at VMware has released Beta 3 of VMware Fusion, and I had the opportunity to download and install the new version earlier this morning.  Based on what I’ve seen so far, this is a solid improvement over earlier versions and the development team is making good progress on the product.

New to this version of Fusion are some of the following features (more information available in the release notes):

• Improved performance (debugging can be turned off)
• Support for Boot Camp
• Host-only networking support
• Improved hardware editor

Particularly useful for me, coming from a VMware ESX Server background, is the ability to access hardware settings directly from the Virtual Machine Library window (the main Fusion window).  This was a key complaint of mine from earlier beta versions, and I’m glad to see it addressed now in Beta 3.  Performance seems much better, which I’m sure is due to the ability to turn off debugging, but I’m also sure that there is still additional tuning to be done by the development team before the product reaches final release.  It’s pretty doggone fast now in my opinion, so I’m really excited to see how much faster it may get.

It’s also nice to see the development team throw in “little” things like support for packages, a Mac OS X-specific thing that allows us to manipulate groups of files as a single item.  (Mac users will know what I’m talking about.)

There are also little UI polishes here and there, like a fade in-fade out effect when suspending or resuming a VM, and graphic overlays on a VM window to run or resume a paused VM.

Users of previous versions, especially the very early releases (I’ve been using it since before public beta), beware of one problem I’ve run into and reported back to VMware:  the early sound device presented by Fusion may cause problems in this release.  I had the UI for Fusion keep crashing due to this problem (the VM still runs in the background).  Manually editing the VMX to remove the sound adapter and then re-adding the sound adapter in the UI fixed the problem.  This will only be an issue for users of very early builds of Fusion who, like me, have kept the same VM throughout all the new builds.

If you are an Intel-based Mac user, you owe it to yourself to have a look at this product.  This is especially true if you have co-workers that also use VMware virtualization products, like VMware Workstation, on Windows or Linux, as this allows you to move VMs between platforms with very little effort.  Right now, that’s an advantage that VMware has over its competition, and a definite plus in my book.

Within the last few days, VMware has acknowledged the presence of a number of security vulnerabilities within the flagship ESX Server product.  At least two of these vulnerabilities were discovered during an internal security audit of the code, but it’s unclear how many of the rest were internally discovered or externally discovered and reported to VMware.  There has been no indication that there are any publicly-available exploits for any of these vulnerabilities.

In fact, in two of the vulnerabilities disclosed by VMware, the attack vectors are currently listed as “unknown.”

For more information, refer to one of the following links:

Secunia - VMware ESX Server Multiple Vulnerabilities

SecurityTracker - VMware ESX Server Double Free Error May Let Remote Users Execute Arbitrary Code

VMware - ESX Server 3.0.1, Patch Bundle ESX-6431040: Security Fix For Buffer Overflow Issue

Installing the patches does require that all VMs on that host be powered off or moved to another host using VMotion, but a reboot of the physical host is not required.

Edward Aractingi started it all back on March 20 when he blogged about why VMware should open source ESX Server.  Tarry Singh then weighed in on the matter from his weblog.  Both men make very good points on the matter.

It’s true that there is a lot of virtualization work being done in the open source community.  We have the Xen hypervisor, now capable of hosting unmodified guest operating systems through the hardware-assisted virtualization support of the newest Intel and AMD CPUs; we have the inclusion of KVM in the Linux kernel and the addition of VMI into the next stable kernel; and projects such as OpenVZ thriving as well.  That’s a lot of activity going on around virtualization and virtualization-related technologies.  And, while it’s most definitely not open source, we also must consider the impact of “Viridian,” Microsoft’s hypervisor to be release shortly after Windows Server 2007 (aka “Longhorn”).

The real question comes to this:  will open source commoditize the hypervisor?  If you agree that the introduction of open source hypervisors such as Xen will commoditize the hypervisor, then VMware’s future needs to lie with other technologies, such as the management layer and value-added functionality such as live migration (VMotion), dynamic load balancing (VMware DRS), and high availability (VMware HA).  In that scenario, VMware would be better served to open source the ESX Server code and allow the community to drive development of the hypervisor itself.  I think that’s a viable model, one that has been embraced by other organizations with varying degrees of success.

If, on the other hand, you don’t think that the hypervisor will become a commodity, then the idea of open sourcing ESX Server doesn’t really hold a lot of value.  Why release your competitive advantage?  Instead, you continue to develop the hypervisor and add features and functionality to it to differentiate it from the competitors.

What do you think?  Will the hypervisor become a commodity?  I think it’s a bit too early to tell.  Open source aficionados point to the success of Linux and tell you that the OS is becoming a commodity, but look at the reality of the sales numbers for Windows Vista.  Perhaps the OS is becoming a commodity, but has anyone bothered to tell people buying Windows Vista?  Linux has had years to make “the proprietary OS history”, and is only now starting to really have an effect.  Will open source virtualization efforts take the same time?  If so, VMware has plenty of time to decide the course of action to take.  In the meantime, I think that VMware has done a reasonably good job of blending open source code, proprietary technologies, and published standards into their products.  If they can continue to find the right balance between these often contradictory positions, I think they’ll continue to be successful.