The technology fairy dropped a note in my inbox about a Public technology preview for VMware’s Desktop Virtualization Products (VMware Workstation and VMware Fusion). While this is a bit unusual for VMware, new and shiny is always fun. The details are below:

VMware Workstation CTP

The VMware Workstation Team is excited to invite you to participate in the VMware Workstation Technology Preview 2012.  With the recent availability of Windows 8 Consumer Preview, Windows Server 8 Beta, and Ubuntu 12.04 Beta (Precise Pangolin) we thought it was the perfect time to release a technology preview.  We would like to get your feedback on new capabilities that may appear in future releases of VMware Workstation. 
In this preview, please try the following:

• Run Windows 8 Consumer Preview and the Windows Server 8 Beta as a guest and host
• Run Ubuntu 12.04 Beta as host and guest and test the new OpenGL driver
• Test the updated virtual graphics hardware with a wide range of applications
• Try new features: Tabs in Windows full screen, download from vSphere on Linux

This is a public technology preview.  You may share this email with your peers so they can download and review the latest VMware virtualization platform.

Get Started Now

1)     Download the VMware Workstation Technology Preview here:
http://communities.vmware.com/community/vmtn/beta/workstationtp2012

2)     When prompted, enter this expiring license key to enable the software:
M108C-N0LE1-08L82-03ARK-2EJPY

Feedback

To provide your feedback to VMware, please visit the technology preview community site:
http://communities.vmware.com/community/vmtn/beta/workstationtp2012?view=discussions
Please contribute to an existing discussion or start a new one.  Our Developers, Quality Assurance Engineers, Support Teams, Technical Writers and Product Managers are all actively involved in the forums to ensure that your suggestions and comments get our attention.

VMware Fusion CTP

The VMware Fusion Team is excited to invite you to participate in the VMware Fusion Technology Preview 2012 program. With the recent availability of Windows 8 Consumer Preview, OS X Mountain Lion Developer Preview and Ubuntu 12.04 Beta (Precise Pangolin), we thought it was the perfect time to release a technology preview to get your feedback on what may appear in future releases of VMware Fusion.
In this preview, we’d like you to try the following:

• Running Windows 8 Consumer Preview and Windows Server 8 Beta as a guest
• Running OS X Mountain Lion Developer Preview as a guest if you are a member of the Mac Developer Program
• Running Ubuntu 12.04 Beta in a virtual machine to test the new OpenGL driver
• Graphics correctness running a range of applications

This is a public technology preview.  You may share this email with your peers to download and review the latest VMware virtualization platform.

Get Started Now:

1) Download and try the VMware Fusion Technology Preview: http://communities.vmware.com/community/vmtn/beta/fusiontp2012
2) When prompted, enter this expiring license key to enable the software:
M141C-N0L03-48U8A-00ARH-AEJ4U

Feedback

To provide your feedback to VMware, please visit the technology preview community site http://communities.vmware.com/community/vmtn/beta/fusiontp2012?view=discussions and contribute to an existing discussion or start a new one.  Our Developers, Quality Assurance Engineers, Support Teams, Technical Writers and Product Managers are all actively involved in the forums to ensure that your suggestions and comments get our attention.

This is a revisit of an older post on running ESX4.x in Fusion 3.x. This time updated for ESXi 5.x and Fusion 4.x. The steps this time around are nearly identical to the ones last time:

1. Pull down the ISO
   
2. New VM
   
3. Point the installer at the ESXi ISO:
   
4. Confirm the OS Type:
   
5. Wait a bit… then awesome:
   

There you go. If you liked this, then you should follow me on Twitter here.

It took a little while, but we’ve received a submission for the VCAP-DCA voucher contest. The submission came from Kendrick Coleman.

The critical details:

Date/Time: Friday, March 11, 2011 @ 7PM CST
Register: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/689250984

Come join us for our first Live Lab presentation!

What started as a journey to deploy a few OVF/OVA files into fusion turned into quite the entertaining experience. Why? Well, following the advice here and here, I reinstalled the latest version of Fusion. However, there was still no OVFTool. How’s that? Well, VMware provides two different Fusion installers:

There is much more than McAfee in that download so the title is a bit misleading. I’d rather it said “VMware Fusion 3.1.1 Kitchen Sink Edition” or so. Once you pull that download down, select “Customize”, and finally the options you need:

From there, follow the bouncing ball to a good and proper installation. The files will be there when you’re finished:

I mean it. Really. One of my pet peeves is the fellow who installs VMware server on his workstation to run his work provided Windows XP image (or some variant of Linux). The logic behind this usually goes something like:

“I needed to be able to create virtual machines and VMware Server is the only free VMware product that will let me do that.”

First, while that may have been the case in the past, it is not anymore. Second, there are a host of reasons why Server likely is not suited for your workstation workloads.

When to use VMware Server (Use Case pt 1)

I hear you asking: “Well, when do I use VMware Server?”. The answer here is that server has a few use cases. For example, if your server hardware is not otherwise on the HCL and you have a need to run VMs in a non production environment. Server makes a great choice. It also makes a great choice when you want the virtual machines to start on boot, and will be accessing them remotely. It also makes sense when doing server development and snapshots are critical.

When not to use VMware Server (Use Case pt 2)

This list may actually be a bit longer than the above. Basically, you will want to avoid VMware server if you will be:

• Managing VMs from the console
• Want to play Doom or use 3d acceleration (can be enabled in the vmx, but let’s not go there)
• Need workstation like performance
• Continued upgrades and support (http://virtualization.info/en/news/2010/05/vmware-server-to-be-discontinued-by-june-2011.html)

Basically, VMware Server is well suited for background server work loads, rather than in your face workstation like work loads. You have VMware Player for that.

Alternatives

So if you’re not supposed to use VMware Server for workstation tasks… what are you to use? In keeping with the “Free” product type requirement, there are several good alternatives:

• VMware Player 3.0
  Player 3.0 gives you the ability to create and run virtual machines and seemingly shares some of it’s code base with VMware Workstation. Meaning while they may not be feature compatible, you will still be performance compatible.
• Sun/Oracle Virtual Box
  A bit more feature rich (teleportation anyone?). Virtual box is open source and free for use as well. It also provides excellent workstation performance.

Some for-cost alternatives involve VMware Workstation or Fusion, as well as Parallels. I’d be amiss if I didn’t also tell you that if your hardware is on the HCL and you don’t mind remote access, ESXi is likely the route to go with your server workload issues.

Summary

Basically, you’ll want to use VMware Server for server workloads on hardware that is not otherwise on the VMware HCL. For everything else there is ESXi or VMware Player (or Virtualbox, etc).

While this actually requires no special settings, I figure it’s worth noting, if for nothing more than to state that in VMware Fusion 3, ESX 3.5 requires no additional settings to be operational. Basically it works as follows:

1. Download the ESX ISO (vmware.com/download/vi)
2. In VMware Fusion create a new virtual machine, choosing said ISO:
   
3. The correct OS is installed automatically. The version may be ‘incorrect’ but it works just fine:
    
4. And all installed:
   

Also of note: The splash screen seemingly does a lookup against the hostname you have configured to produce the IP address displayed.

Along with the last Fusion related post, this post also takes a slight tangent from our normal ESX/vSphere centric coverage to document something for myself that others may indeed also find useful.

Setting the story: Thanks to some awesome folks at work, I recently acquired a MacBook Pro with VMware Fusion installed. While awesome (Both the MacBook and Fusion (And the folks at work)), I was keying up an ESXi post for the blog, and found myself looking for the files that made up the ESXi VM. Looking in “Finder” I was a bit lost:

Where were all the files? No VMX, no VMDK… what gives. A quick search turned up this communities post, which boils down to: “Right (Ctrl) click the “vmwarevm” file, and select “Show Package Contents””

Like that. Once done, you are presented the following:

There are actually plenty more files than that, the screenshot is truncated for space. Seemingly VMware Fusion uses a concept called “Bundles” to capture all the files in one location. Bundles are essentially a way of saying “all of these things belong together.

Thanks to the generosity of some really cool folks at work I am now a MacBook Pro believer. That said, one of my tasks over the holidays was to get things migrated from my old Ubuntu install and into OSX. The first place to start was with my Virtual Machines. The first one over was my Windows 7 VM, the process for this was three steps, copy, paste, go. Next it was time to take the training wheels off VMware Fusion and have some real fun: Installing ESXi.

1. Pull down the ISO
2. Fire up the “New VM Assistant” & point it @ the install disk (note it recognizes it):
   
3. After clicking continue & finish, the install begins:
    
4. After a few minutes… done!
   

That is all there was to it really. Questions? Drop a line in the comments.