blog.scottlowe.org

Welcome to another installation of Virtualization Short Takes!

• For you Quicksilver lovers out there that also run VMware Fusion, here’s a handy trick to allow you to launch Windows apps to run under Fusion via Quicksilver.
• Duncan of Yellow Bricks points out this VMware Communities Forums thread discussing how to determine which host has a lock on a LUN. This thread also makes brief mention of the new VMFS version, version 3.31, that was released with ESX 3.5, which does a better job of handling SCSI reservations than previous versions. Good find, Duncan!
• Speaking of the new VMFS version, a summary of the information shared in the VMware Communities Forums threads can be found here.
• While we are on a bit of a storage kick, VMware has launched a new VMware Storage blog, and one of the early posts deals with VMFS. The post primarily attacks the notion of VMFS as a “proprietary” file system (which it is) by describing the advantages that VMFS provides. I’m hoping that the new storage blog will get more technical than marketing in the future, but the information is useful nevertheless.
• This link falls more into the “ironic” category than anything else. Do you suppose he got into trouble with Citrix for blogging about how to use a competitor’s product to test ICA performance?
• John Howard gives us an in-depth look at Hyper-V’s handling of virtual NICs in this article. This is particularly important for users who are interested in cloning VMs hosted on Hyper-V; I would assume that SCVMM 2008 will handle this correctly.
• This news emerged several weeks ago via VMblog.com. It’s good to see Leostream getting some recognition; their broker is actually quite good in many respects.
• Sven over at Virtualfuture.info recently blogged about XenServer’s HA functionality and how Marathon’s EverRun products play into that functionality. I actually had a conference call with the folks from Marathon several months ago about EverRun, but never got around to blogging about it. I do like the fact that you can control HA functionality on a per-VM basis, whereas VMware HA is applied to all VMs. (Well, I suppose you could disable HA for the VMs that you don’t want restarted, but it’s not quite the same.) I do agree with both Sven and PeterB’s comments regarding “Continuous Availability”; the sooner that VMware gets this functionality out the door, the more of a leg up they’ll have on the competition.
• As has been reported elsewhere as well, Reflex Security has released the Reflex Virtual Security Center (VSC). The full press release is here. Based on what I’ve read thus far, it appears that the idea behind the VSC is to combine the information from multiple instances of their Virtual Security Appliance (VSA) so that users get the “full view” of what’s occurring across the virtual infrastructure. In this regard, it is remarkably similar to Altor Networks’ Virtual Network Security Analyzer (VNSA), which is also designed to provide visibility across the entire virtual infrastructure.

As always, feel free to share other interesting links and news in the comments below. Thank you!

Until just recently, I was using the free text editor Smultron for my text editing needs. To be absolutely honest, my text editing needs aren’t really that great; basically, I use a text editor to:

• take quick notes during a meeting, seminar, or class;
• edit the WordPress code (more precisely, the CSS style sheets most of the time) for this blog when I’m feeling adventurous; and
• write articles to be submitted to my editors in plain text format.

Smultron is free and is a very capable text editor, but lately I’d been thinking of moving to a different text editor. Everyone raves about TextMate, so I downloaded it and I’m giving it a whirl. So far, so good; everything seems fine and performance is great. But here’s the real question: am I using a sledgehammer when what I really need is something much smaller?

I mean, TextMate seems like the “power user’s text editor,” and when it comes to text editing, I’m not a power user. Sure, I do a lot with my Mac; at any given time, I’m running Mail, Adium, Camino, NetNewsWire, OmniFocus, Ecto, various Office 2008 applications, Pukka, Skim, Preview, Graphic Converter, Colloquy, and VMware Fusion. So I would consider myself a “Mac power user,” but not a “text editing power user.” Make sense? Is TextMate too much power for what I do? I’d love to hear from readers as to their text editing needs and what tools they use to meet those needs.

For the past few months, I’ve been messing around with Evernote, an information tracking/note-taking service. Evernote is interesting for a couple of reasons:

• The service’s “claim to fame” is some proprietary image recognition technology that allows you to search for words found inside images. So you could store pictures in Evernote and then search for text found inside those pictures, for example. You have to synchronize your notes to their server (more below), where it is then processed for searching.
• Evernote uses a hybrid web-based/local client arrangement, and makes clients available for a reasonably wide variety of platforms. I’m using the Mac OS X version, but there are also versions for Windows, Windows Mobile, and (soon) an iPhone version.
• Evernote synchronizes your notes across all platforms, so you could create a note on your Mac laptop and then search it from your Windows Mobile smartphone. Each client synchronizes with the Evernote server(s) so that your notes are available from any client. You can also log in and view your notes from a Web browser as well.

Evernote just recently opened up their beta to the general public (it’s been a private beta until now). If this sounds like something that might be useful to you, go sign up and put it to work.

Personally, I’m still struggling with the best way to use Evernote. Thus far, my usage has been very light. I’ve particularly wrestled with getting information into Evernote. If any readers are also Evernote users, I’d love to hear how you’ve been using Evernote and which tool—the Evernote Clipper, the Web Clipper, printing as PDF into Evernote—seems to work best for you.

No, this posting isn’t about me; I switched to the Mac years ago. Instead, this posting is about a story that I’d seen quite a while ago, but just hadn’t gotten around to discussing here on the blog.

Quite some time ago, Computerworld ran some articles about an enterprise company that was switching entirely to Macs. The articles are here:

Mac Attack! An enterprise PC shop switches to Apple
Mac switch revisited: An enterprise PC shop’s move to Apple isn’t as easy as expected

It’s an interesting pair of articles that help to highlight the attention that Apple and Mac OS X are getting these days. In this particular case, I found this statement particularly compelling:

Frantz says AWC had calculated “significant savings” associated with migrating to Apple software during the proof-of-concept testing last summer. “We knew we would have sufficient ROI for the change based on some broad generalizations, and the savings were enough to green-light the project,” he says.

Everyone likes to talk about how expensive Macs are, and yet here is a company that has found “significant savings” upon switching to Apple hardware running Mac OS X. Interesting.

To be fair, the company in the article—AWC—isn’t going completely Mac; they are keeping SQL Server on Windows and a few other applications as well. That’s fine; I’ve long advocated to use the best tool for the job. If SQL Server is the best tool for the job for them, then they should use it. I’m just glad to see that companies are increasingly recognizing that Windows on the desktop isn’t always the best tool for the job anymore.

VMware has released Beta 1 of VMware Fusion 2.0, the next major upgrade to VMware’s desktop virtualization product for Mac OS X. Even more exciting, VMware has announced that version 2.0 of VMware Fusion will be a free upgrade for existing Fusion 1.x owners, as a “thank you” to their early adopters. Sweet!

The list of new features is far too long to reproduce here, but a few stick out as notable:

• Multi-monitor support: Guest operating systems will see multiple monitors attached to the Mac, and when in Unity mode you’ll be able to drag Unity windows between monitors.
• Improved 3D support: Fusion 2.0 now supports DirectX 9.0 Shader Model 2, allowing even more 3D applications to run as a VM under Fusion.
• Easier Windows printing: Windows VMs will pick up printers attached to your Mac without any additional setup.
• Various networking improvements: Fusion 2.0 Beta 1 also includes a number of networking improvements, such as the ability for bridged VMs to detect changes to the Mac’s network connection and refresh their network address automatically.

Be sure to visit the Fusion 2.0 Beta 1 landing page for the complete list of features and more complete information.

Personally, it’s interesting to me to see how the VMware Fusion team has really capitalized and focused on the user interaction side of desktop virtualization. Much more so than with VMware Workstation, VMware Fusion is really bringing to life the idea of application agnosticism (great idea, not so great name, but I coined it so I guess I’m stuck with it) or personal computing as a collection of VMs. As virtualization becomes more pervasive, it also needs to become more transparent, and as its transparency increases its adoption—at least among consumers—will also increase.

VMware has released an update to VMware Fusion, their Mac OS X-based virtualization product. Version 1.1.2 includes a number of fixes and new features. More information is available here.

If you’re a Fusion user, go grab the free update.

I installed the update first thing this morning. I wasn’t suffering from any of the problems that were fixed in this version, so I can’t attest to that, but I can say that resuming and suspending VMs seems quicker. Perhaps it’s just my imagination…

In the last few days, I upgraded my work laptop to Office 2008, the latest version of Microsoft’s office suite for Mac OS X. I was looking forward to the Universal binaries (no more sluggish performance due to Rosetta) and Office 2007 file format compatibility. I did get those, but what I also got were some really ugly icons.

So, I did what any enterprising Mac user would do. I replaced them with a new set.

Here’s what the new icons look like:

I found the replacement icons here; look for the set titled “HLD V2 by Henri Liriani”. The icons are well designed and come in a variety of sizes. Upon unpacking the downloaded file, I simply took the .ICNS files in the package and replaced the original files in the application bundles.

For example, right-clicking on Microsoft Entourage and selecting “Show Package Contents,” opening the Contents folder, then opening the Resources folder will show where the new icon needs to be copied. The original icon is in a file named Entourage.icns. Rename this file (just in case you need the old one) and replace it with the downloaded version, making sure that you name the downloaded version with the same original name. Poof—Entourage now has a new icon.

For the other applications, the files to replace are:

Microsoft Word/Contents/Resources/MSWD.icns
Microsoft Excel/Contents/Resources/XCEL.icns
Microsoft PowerPoint/Contents/Resources/PPT3.icns

Replace each of these files, keeping the filename intact, with the new versions.

Once that’s done, you too can enjoy much more pleasant Office 2008 icons!

VMware recently announced their “Switch to Fusion” contest, inviting users who have switched to VMware Fusion to run other operating systems on their Macs to create a video documenting their conversion.

Unfortunately, I can’t participate; I don’t really have a “switch to Fusion” story. Why? Because I started out with VMware Fusion, back in the pre-public beta days before VMworld 2006. Well, I guess that’s not entirely accurate. I did use Microsoft Virtual PC for the Mac on my old PowerBook G4 in order to run (slowly) the occasional Windows application.

About the time that rumors were surfacing of VMware Fusion—this would have been early- to mid-October of 2006, perhaps just a bit earlier—I had hoped I would be selected to participate in the private beta program. I had signed up and requested to participate. Unfortunately, I didn’t have an Intel-based Mac yet, and I wanted to wait until Apple revised the MacBook Pro with the newer Core 2 Duo processors before buying one.

For weeks I watched the Apple rumor sites, waiting for word that the MacBook Pros were going to be revised. Then comes the e-mail from VMware, inviting me to participate in the private beta for their new Mac virtualization product, code-named “Fusion”. But I still didn’t have an Intel-based Mac! I was still waiting on the revised MacBook Pros. So, here I was, on the beta participant list and signed up to leave for VMworld 2006 in Los Angeles, and still no Intel-based Mac.

Finally, near the end of October, Apple announced the Core 2 Duo-based MacBook Pros. At last! But now I had to wait for retail availability. I called the local Apple retail store, and the manager there put my name on the waiting list for a 15″ 2.33GHz matte screen model. Days passed. Still no word. Time was literally running out—I would be getting on a plane to go to LA in just a couple of days.

The phone rings at my office. “May I speak with Scott Lowe, please?” It was the manager from the Apple store! I left my office that day, went straight to Crabtree Valley Mall, and picked up my brand new MacBook Pro. That night I had the Friends and Family release of VMware Fusion running on it, and I’ve never looked back since then. Two days later, my wife and I were off to Los Angeles for VMworld 2006, my trusty new VMware Fusion-toting MacBook Pro with us.

OK, so I guess I did have a Switch to Fusion story after all! Maybe this will qualify me to compete for the iPod touch…

The recently announced beta for VMware Workstation 6.5 includes support for Unity, a technology that was originally introduced with VMware Fusion. Unity allows for seamless windowing of VMs; that is, windows from VMs and windows from the host can be seamlessly intermingled so that the distinction between the virtualized OS and the host OS almost disappears. This is the continued emergence of the application agnosticism I discussed near the end of 2006 and furthers the possibility of collections of VMs becoming our new working environments.

It’s very cool technology, and it’s also very exciting to see VMware bringing this technology to VMware Workstation. I hope that VMware also takes some of the new Unity features—like the badge that helps identify which windows belong to a VM and to which VM they belong—and backport that to future versions of Fusion as well. Of course, I’d love to see all of Workstation’s functionality ported over to Fusion, but that’s just me.

There’s more information on Workstation’s new Unity functionality from Christian Hammond, a VMware developer, on his blog.

At the start of 2007, I wrote a pair of articles on Mac FTP/SFTP clients, lamenting the performance of the open source Cyberduck application and eventually settling on Interarchy as my replacement product.

Quite a bit has happened since that time, and I now find myself in a bit of a quandary. Cyberduck has replaced the underlying file transfer engine to dramatically improve overall throughput, and Interarchy has “refined” the user interface to make it look more Mac-like. Unfortunately, in the process, Interarchy has become downright ugly. I don’t like the ugly chiclet buttons in Leopard’s Finder, I don’t like them in Safari, and I don’t like them in Interarchy, either. I very much prefer “old school” color icons in the toolbars.

Given that the new Interarchy interface was really bugging me—the Finder, at least, is still usable when you turn off the sidebar and close the toolbar—I thought I’d try Cyberduck again. Simple, one-file performance tests showed that Cyberduck, with the option to transfer files via SCP enabled, was coming much closer to matching Interarchy’s performance; Interarchy remained in the lead for raw performance, however. I figured that I could live with the performance degradation for most tasks, and started trying to use Cyberduck whenever possible.

Until tonight, that was. I needed to transfer a large number of smaller files up to one of my web sites, and Cyberduck simply dragged. I guess it’s the method whereby Cyberduck manages connections that slowed down the process, since it appeared that it checked the connection to the server for each file it was transferring. In any case, I’ve found that it looks like I’ll just have to suffer through Interarchy’s new look; the alternative is just too slow.