Jase's Place

The VMworld 2010 Keynote is almost underway.

What exciting announcements are in store for the future of virtualization?

I got a sneak peek today in the VMworld 2010 Solutions Exchange.

Chad Sakac took the time to talk to me about some of what EMC is doing this year.

From everything that I saw, a lot of hard work has gone into the EMC booth(s).  Everyone that has been a part of the task should be proud of their work.

Thanks Chad for the quick look and looks like EMC is going to have a great show!

There is a new area on the VMTN site dedicated to the Office of the CTO.

This is a new area that Steve Herrod, as well as other members of the Office of the CTO, can blog about upcoming topics and interact directly with those of us that post on VMTN.

Contributors:

• Steve Herrod: VMware CTO and SVP of R&D
• Allwyn Sequeira: VP of Security & Networking Solutions
• Richard McDougall: Application Infrastructure CTO & Principal Engineer in the Office of the CTO
• Winston Bumpus: Director of Standards Architecture
• Scott Davis: VMware CTO of End User Computing
• David Hunter: VMware CTO of the Public Sector
• Srinivas Krishnamurti: Senior Director for Mobile Computing
• Josh Simons: CTO of High Performance Computing
• Ben Verghese: VP, Chief Management Architect

There are several areas that each of the members of the Office of the CTO have available to discuss VMware topics from the past, today, and what’s around the corner.

Areas:

• Security
• Cloud Application Architecture
• Open Standards
• End User Computing
• Public Sector
• Emerging Devices
• High Performance Computing
• Management

I started a discussion about the Mobile Virtualization Platform, and got some good news from both Steve Herrod and Srinivas Krishnamurti.  That discussion can be found here: http://communities.vmware.com/thread/281926

I’m looking forward to some of the discussions in this VMTN area, and plan on adding the RSS feeds to my news aggregator.

Here’s the link the to the community for the Office of the CTO if you want to see what these leaders have on their mind or start a discussion with them.

http://communities.vmware.com/community/cto.

VMware Workstation was updated to version 7.1.1 on 8/13/2010. As a Windows user (for the most part), I quickly logged into the download site, and downloaded an updated build.

I’m also a Mac user, and yesterday I decided to see if Fusion had also been updated. Low and behold, it had been.

Here are the release notes:

VMware Fusion 3.1.1 is a maintenance release that resolves the following issues and adds new support. It is a free upgrade for all VMware Fusion 3.x users.

• VMware vSphere 4.1 is now supported as a guest operating system. VMware Certified Professionals (VCPs) and virtualization experts can use VMware vSphere 4.1 to install the latest server virtualization software and experiment with server setup, conduct training, show demos, and test production configurations. Running ESX as a guest eliminates the need to have spare hardware available to run ESX natively and enables ESX to run on systems that are not listed on the ESX hardware compatibility list (HCL). For more information on the supported processors and host operating systems, see see Considerations for Running an ESX Guest.This feature is intended for educational and demonstration purposes only and should not be used in production environments. To use this feature, you must download vSphere 4.1 from the VMware Web site and follow the installation documentation provided with VMware vSphere to install ESX.For more information on VMware vSphere, see http://www.vmware.com/products/vsphere/.
• Resolves an issue around accessing some iSight cameras.
• Resolves an issue where an incorrect disk error message appeared after a host crash occurs while working in a virtual machine.
• Resolves an issue where audio recording failed when the recording device output was not 44.1 kHz.

For more details, see Resolved Issues.

So like Workstation, Fusion has been updated to support running VMware vSphere 4.1 as a guest.

Both of these applications, along with appropriate hardware, work well for training, testing, and demonstration purposes.

Thanks for the update VMware.

Click here to download it.

I was working on a specialized project that included the use of vmrun (part of VMware VIX).

The Project
This project required the ability to restore a VM to a baseline Snapshot.

The challenge is that the user is not a tech person, and the requirement was that it was very easy to restore the baseline Snapshot using a simple batch file.

The Problem
So I ran vmrun (located in C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware VIX) to see the necessary syntax to revert to a Snapshot.

The syntax is:
vmrun -T ws revertToSnapShot “C:\path\vmname\vmname.vmx” SnapShotName

The error I received “was: The specified version was not found”

After some looking around, it appeared that one of two things happened:

1. The updated VMware VIX package was not updated from my 7.0.1 installation of VMware Workstation
2. The updated VMware VIX package was not included in the 7.1.0 installation of VMware Workstation.

I kind of think that the first is true.  I say this, because when VMware Workstation is initially installed, a VMware VIX installer presents itself to augment the installation.

The Solution
I went to VMware’s site to download the latest version of VMware VIX.
http://communities.vmware.com/community/developer/forums/automationapi

After installing the updated VMware VIX build, my problems were solved.