I was walking around the new VMware Promontory campus today and found this button.
I’m tempted to press it, but I’m not sure what it will do. Send little stick figures to attack me? Stick me in a little house?
Any ideas?
Update: My apologies to anyone who couldn’t comment. My cache plugin cached the captcha. Oops. That’s been disabled now, so try again.
Yesterday I briefly wrote about the new feature in VMware Fusion called Unity and linked to a video demonstrating what it can do. The buzz we got from that has been a lot of fun. Some people commented on various sites saying it was fake, even, which I found pretty funny having watched this thing being developed. I personally didn’t work on this feature, but I work with those who did, and they’ve sure looked sleep-deprived lately trying to get this feature and the next VMware Fusion beta ready.
They can finally sleep peacefully. We just put out VMware Fusion Beta 4. I want to issue a public congratulations to the developers who have put in a huge amount of time into this product. They’re not done yet, but I think they’re starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel.
Regis Duchesne, one of the developers of Fusion, talks briefly about where things stand and where things are going.
So again, congrats guys. I think I’m finally going to have to buy myself a Mac.
I remember the day I interviewed at VMware. I was asked what I would do to improve Workstation, and one of the things I said was that it would be nice to make a VM go rootless. That is, pull application windows out of the VM and make them integrate well with the operating system.
I wasn’t the only one. A lot of people wanted this type of feature. It’s been discussed for years, but it’s always been hard to find the manpower to do it. But competition is good, and we finally got some people on this feature. And it turned out spectacularly.
Kudos to the people who have spent many nights practically living here. They’ve pulled off an amazing feature. And we’re not done yet.
I know I’m going to be asked if we’re doing this on Linux or Windows. It’s too early to say what our feature list is like for the next major product. So feel free to just speculate 😉
Update: They moved the link on Digg, so updated my link.
The open source world has given developers great tools to make their lives easier. We have editors, bug trackers, source code management tools, repository viewers. Bugzilla, for example, is a very popular bug tracker used by many open source projects and companies alike.
While the life of a developer has in many ways been improved by these tools, there’s one key area of software development that people still do the hard way: Code reviews.
You’re probably familiar with this. A contributor puts a patch up on Bugzilla, Trac, or your project’s listserv. It’s large and spans several files. Eventually you get around to it (if you haven’t lost it in your inbox yet). You open an e-mail or the Bugzilla page to respond, put the diff where you can see it, and start going through the changes, line by line, making comments as you go. It’s tedious. You have to make it clear what function you’re talking about, make references to the general area in the diff. It’s a pain for the contributor too, because they have to figure out what you’re referring to. This leaves room for error.
We’ve been working this way for years in open source projects and at VMware. Code reviews are important to us, and help to keep our code clean and our products stable. It keeps us honest prevents us from cutting corners unnecessarily. However, the process is a bit time-consuming and not at all optimal.
David Trowbridge and I finally got tired of it. We spent too long preparing review requests and we lost too many of them in our e-mail. As our personal projects and our team grew in size, it became harder to keep track of all the open review request e-mails on the listservs. So we fixed that.
We built a code review system called Review Board. Like most projects, it started out simple, but grew to be pretty powerful and useful quickly. It was designed to automate and simplify the process of creating review requests and actually reviewing code.
Management at VMware was excited about this from the beginning. We weren’t being asked to write it, and it was a personal project and all, but when they found out we were doing this, they fully supported us. It didn’t take long for the excitement to spread across many teams, and we had 40 people signed up and playing before we were even ready to announce our phase 1 beta.
One of the things we decided from the beginning is that this must be open source and it must work with other version control systems. For example, we use Perforce internally, but there’s no reason not to include Subversion or anything else.
So we worked and worked in our spare time. After weeks of trial runs and lots of dogfooding, we decided it was time to announce what we had so far.
Details? Alright.
Review Board is an open source program licensed under the MIT license. It was designed using Python and Django. It’s compatible with Subversion and Perforce, and can be extended to support other version control systems.
Review Board has a lot of useful features…
Review Board can generate and display diffs against multiple repositories on multiple servers, each with their own version control system. At VMware, we have a repository for each Perforce server we use, and will soon be adding a Subversion repository for our libview project.
This would be particularly useful for umbrella projects where some parts are available in one repository and others in other repositories.
Writing version control system backends is easy. They’re simple Python modules that can be referenced in the Review Board database entry for the particular backend. We currently ship Subversion and Perforce backends, as well as a subclass of the Perforce backend making use of special extensions we use at VMware.
Posting review requests is fairly easy. If you use Perforce, it’s especially easy. A post-review tool is provided that allows you to post a review request with nothing other than a change number as a parameter.
If you use Subversion, a little more work is required, though we’re working on a tool to automate this as well. You’ll need to generate a unified diff. Click “New Review Request,” select the repository, enter the base path (the path relative to the root of your Subversion repository where you generated the diff), and then select the diff. Click “Create Review Request.”
You’ll be taken to your review request page where you can fill in description and other information. Click “Publish” when you’re done.
All discussions and updates get sent automatically to the individual reviewers and listservs. This makes it easy for people to see any and all changes. This is configurable and can be disabled if it doesn’t fit in with your setup.
Review Board can use an NIS server as an authentication backend, making it easy to integrate into companies that use NIS. Everyone’s accounts will Just Work in Review Board without any registration required.
All incoming and outgoing reviews can be seen on the Dashboard page. You can look at incoming reviews sent directly to you, sent to a group, or to either (all incoming reviews).
In the future, this will show more information on what’s going on with the review requests in your list. Recent discussions and updates will be shown, making it easier to keep track of things.
Review Board has a JSON-based API for accessing nearly every aspect of the system. This makes it easy to build tools around Review Board. Our post-review tool uses this, as does much of the web UI.
Hopefully in time, developers will make use of this to better integrate with existing systems such as Eclipse, vim, emacs, or other IDEs.
There’s a lot we have planned. Review Board is still just an early beta and a lot will happen.
Wrapping Up, and Contributing
This was a bit long, but I hope it gave a good overview of what we’re putting together here. You can see it in action or visit the project page. If you decide to use it in your project, please let us know! Check the Wiki for install instructions.
Hopefully this will become useful to others as well. We’ll post periodic updates as this project progresses.
Good news, everyone! After several months of hard work, many late nights, and thousands of caffeinated beverages, we have finally released VMware Workstation 6.0. You may have already heard this on the news, but I’m here to tell you exactly what we spent so much time on. Or a glimpse of it, anyway.
We’ve added much improved support for Windows Vista. Yes, you could run it before, but not this well. We have VMware Tools support for many things in Vista now, providing for a smoother experience. A warning, though. Vista is pretty heavy on resources and may still be slower than you’re used to. Not to mention the fact that Microsoft will make you buy the really expensive version in order to legally run in a VM. Still, if you’ve been wanting to see what Vista is like, have a decent machine, and an MSDN license or legal access to a legal version of Vista, install it in a VM and give it a try.
We now support USB 2.0. Your fancy USB 2.0 devices should now work just fine in your VMs.
Starting in Workstation 6.0, your VMs are no longer tied to your UI. Previously, any time you closed Workstation, you would be asked if you wanted to power off your VMs. Now you’re given the choice of continuing to run your VM in the background. It will continue to run without a UI.
This is greatly useful when you have a service running in your VM that you may want to connect to. This is similar to VMware Server, except your VMs will not automatically start when the computer starts.
While the VMs are running, an icon will appear in the system notification area that, when clicked, will display a list of all powered on VMs. Clicking a VM will launch the UI and focus the tab for that VM. A list of running VMs will also appear in the sidebar under “Powered On.”
Users of multi-monitor setups will love this feature. Your monitor layout is now exposed to the guest OS, giving it the ability to make use of more than one monitor when going fullscreen. You can full screen over one monitor, two, three, whatever you happen to have.
In many ways, this feature is still experimental on Linux. It’s currently very difficult to maximize over multiple heads, given the lack of official support in X and window managers to do so. We’ve had to perform some creative tricks to make this feature possible. We’re working on getting official support in so that we can do this properly in future versions.
Full screen has been improved. You can now full screen over multiple heads or set one of several modes. You can opt to change the guest resolution to match the host, stretch the guest (as you would an image), or center the guest on the monitor. We no longer change the host resolution to match the guest, which used to cause some issues and “jumpiness” on Linux.
The Linux version of Workstation 6 now allows for multiple windows to appear on the screen at once within the same process. Now, older versions had a File -> New -> Window, which also created a new window, but it did so by launching a second instance of the application. We now keep this all in the same instance.
Part of the benefit here is that you can now drag tabs between windows in order to better arrange them. You can place two windows side-by-side and view a Linux VM in one window and a Windows VM in another. You can also rearrange tabs within a window.
Here’s a feature Windows users have enjoyed for a while now, which we’re finally getting on Linux. It’s now possible to drag files from your host into your guest, or files from your guest into your host. Need to copy some documents from your Documents folder on Linux into your My Documents in your Windows guest? Just select them and drag into the VM.
Workstation 6 is the first product to ship with the experimental Interrupt Record and Replay functionality. This allows you to capture everything happening to a VM — network packets, disk I/O, mouse events, etc. — into a log and replay it later. It’s very useful when doing debugging. Ever hit a crash that you can only reproduce one out of every 10 times? This should make it easier to track down.
The first version of this is a bit limited, but we’re working on improvements for the next release of Workstation that will help make this invaluable to developers.
We now ship extensions to Eclipse to ease development of applications and testing in a VM. See this blog post from the developer for more information.
Many of our error dialogs that would block a VM from powering on have become passive popup notifications. We suspect the elves did it. Now little things like your sound device being blocked won’t prevent the VM from powering on when you ask it to.
If you miss a notification or wonder why your device was disabled after coming back from a coffee break, you can check the new message log and see the contents of the notification. It’s accessible through a non-intrusive icon in the bottom-right of the Workstation window.
VMware Tools are essential to the smooth operation of a VM. They help to accelerate video, provide more natural mouse support, and end all of life’s problems (results may vary, not typical of average use). However, they’ve always had to be upgraded manually.
Starting in Workstation 6, tools are capable of auto-upgrading when a new version is available. This can be configured globally or on a per-VM basis. One less thing to think about, and this is a Good Thing.
To take advantage of all the features that a new VM hardware version gives you, you have to upgrade. This has always been true, and we’ve always provided a quick way of upgrading VMs. However, there are times when you may want to downgrade instead in order to distribute a VM that more people can take advantage of, or to make it ESX-compatible.
We’ve added a new wizard that quickly guides you through upgrading or downgrading a VM. You can make the VM Workstation 4, 5, or 6 compatible, and choose whether or not it must also be ESX-compatible. The wizard will give you the option to either modify the VM in-place or to clone it first. No longer does upgrading to a new version of Workstation lock you in to a particular hardware version!
Ever want to run SimCity 2000 in a DOS VM and access it across the network? Okay, well, maybe an older Windows install or something? You can now make any VM VNC-enabled. Simply toggle the option, set an optional password, the port (on the host computer) to connect to, and you’re done! You should be able to access your VM through VNC on any other computer on the network. You can even see how many people are connected and boot them off, just in case they’re sending Godzilla after your city.
VMs are becoming a big thing for application distribution. It’s possible to download virtual appliances for all kinds of things. Need a pre-configured e-mail server or a development environment for an embedded device? Chances are you’ll find it nowadays. Simply download it, power it on, and go.
There’s a lot of things we’re planning to do to make virtual appliances better and easier for both the developer and the end user. The Appliance View in Workstation 6 is the first step in this. It features a cover page that can be displayed as the VM powers on (instead of the console view) and can contain the appliance name, version, author, logo, and descriptive text.
A status area at the bottom of the Appliance View indicates when the VM is powering on, waiting for the services to start, or that the appliance is ready to use. When it’s ready, a button will be available for easily launching a browser to connect to the web UI for the appliance.
Watch this space. We have some cool things we’re planning.
Paravirtualization is getting a lot of buzz. A paravirtualized kernel performs better in a VM than a non-paravirtualized kernel. The VMI interface we helped to create is now a part of version 2.6.20 of the Linux kernel. Ubuntu Feisty ships with this kernel, meaning it should perform better in a VM when paravirtualization is enabled (in VM Settings -> Advanced).
The icons in the Linux version of Workstation got a complete makeover. We’re now following the Tango style for all icons, including the launcher icons. We’ve released most of these icons (the ones that don’t include trademarked logos) under the Creative Commons license. People are welcome to use these icons in their programs and icon theme designers are also welcome to provide alternatives in order to better style Workstation and Player.
Of course, a lot more went into this release than just the above features. It’s been a huge effort and I’m personally pretty happy with the result. A big thanks to everyone who’s worked on this release and to the people who helped keep me sane at 2 in the morning during our crunch times 🙂
Also, a big shout out to the developers of VMware Fusion, the new virtualization app for MacOS X. They’re working hard to produce some awesome features and are undergoing their own crunch time right now. If you’re a Mac user, you might be interested in reading the CompFusion and Infusion blogs by a couple of our Fusion developers.
Release!
Well I dropped the ball on this one, but we released VMware Workstation 6.0 RC2 last week. This is our second release candidate, and for those using our betas in the past, you should know that that means a final release isn’t too far away!
Not much has really changed in RC2, aside from more bug fixes. We’ve taken care of a lot of critical issues that have affected some users and ourselves. If you used the Workstation betas in the past and haven’t tried an RC release, you should notice a huge speed increase when using the guest. Feels a lot more native with all that debugging turned off.
The betas are of course free to use, but Workstation 6 itself must be purchased. If you’re in school, you should be able to get a nice academic discount, and if you’ve bought Workstation 5.5 since January 1, 2007, you can get a free upgrade.
Desktop Integration
One of my personal goals has been to improve integration with the GNOME desktop. I feel we’ve made a lot of progress since Workstation 5. The big highlight of 6 has been the Tango icons (I’m biased, as I made most of them). Even the product icons on Linux are in Tango style now. This definitely cleans up the look and feel of the product and helps it to feel like it’s just any other GNOME app, rather than some big proprietary product half-ported to Linux (of which there are many).
There’s more that we could do, though. I’d like to hear from GNOME developers and users about other ideas to better integrate with the desktop.
The VMware Workstation 6 betas have been out for a while now, so I’m sure those using it have noticed that we’ve been trying to make our icon theme fit in with the Tango icon style (well, to the best of my current abilities). So far this has proven to be a dramatic improvement over our older icon style used in Workstation 5.x, and it really fits in a lot better on modern GNOME desktops. The overall look feels clean and polished, mostly thanks to the hard work of the Tango project.
We’ve been lucky in that the Tango project has provided such a good variety of high-quality icons. I haven’t had to do nearly as much work as I expected in designing these icons. There were several existing VMware icons that we needed to move to the Tango style still, such as power icons, USB, serial port, message log, etc. Just a handful, but while many of them may be somewhat VMware-specific, there are some that we felt could be useful to other software projects, icon designers, and, perhaps, to Tango itself.
So we’re releasing our non-trademarked icons (everything the lawyers are okay with) under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 license. It’s only fair that we give back, afterall. There will be a dedicated page for this later, but for now, you can download it directly from here:
Download: vmware-tango-icons-0.5.tar.gz
You can see what we currently have available in the image below. I’ll put out updates as we come up with new icons and tidy up some of the remaining ones that we still want to release.
Thanks again to the Tango project for all your work in making the Linux desktop a more beautiful place, and if any of these icons look at all useful to the project, please feel free to use them, modify them, or have me tweak them.
We’ve just put out VMware Workstation 6.0 beta 3. As per the ancient traditions set forth by the VMware founders, we decided to make this release awesome. I’ll go over a couple of my favorite, but for the rest, read the release notes.
Workstation 6 beta 3 is the first release to support our new Record/Replay functionality that we mentioned at VMworld. Essentially, it allows for making a recording of (almost) everything that happens to a VM between the time you hit Record and the time you hit Stop. This is not a movie recording, but more of an execution recording. You can play it back however many times you like.
What is this good for? Well, have you ever tried testing a program only to encounter a bug that you just can’t reproduce? Maybe there was some memory corruption that happened under some specific case that you just can’t seem to diagnose. Or maybe it’s a network packet that came in in some form that your application didn’t expect. Under normal circumstances, you’d have to do a lot of guesswork in order to find out what exactly happened. Far too often, it’s just too hard to reproduce the bug and it goes unfixed for some time.
Now imagine instead that you’re testing the program in Workstation and, before your testing, you hit Record. You attempt the test and the program crashes in some weird manner. No problem. Hit Stop and replay the recording. Just before the crash occurs, stop the playback and attach a debugger. Messed up? Didn’t find the cause? Replay that recording again.
It should be pointed out that these recording logs take up a lot of space, so you don’t want to keep too many around. Also, the feature is very experimental, so don’t be surprised if there are problems. Some things are not yet supported, like 64-bit guests, Virtual SMP, and certain devices (USB, for example). We plan to change the UI around a little bit, and it’s likely that future Workstation releases will improve the usability and usefulness of this feature.
We now offer the ability to debug applications inside the guest from Eclipse on the host. This provides for a nice sandbox for the application. Your app can crash the computer during a debug session and your host won’t even feel it! There’s a good blog post from the developer of the Eclipse support discussing this feature and some of its many uses.
A previous beta introduced the new combined Fullscreen mode. We used to have separate Fullscreen and Quick Switch buttons on the toolbar, each useful for certain purposes. The new combined mode is closer to Quick Switch, but until now has missed the nice aspect of Fullscreen where the image would actually by the size of the monitor (due to changing the screen resolution).
Now, when in fullscreen, you have the option of changing the view mode (from the drop-down toolbar). The guest resolution can be changed to match the host’s screen resolution, the guest can be stretched (emulating the original fullscreen), or the guest’s screen can be centered on the monitor.
The Linux UI now supports tab dragging, thanks to the new support in GTK+ 2.10 and some hacks to get around some bugs. Combined with the multiple window support we put in a previous beta, you can now have as many windows open as you like and drag and drop VM tabs between them. While not a major feature itself, it is a nice usability thing we’ve wanted to do for a while now.
The new feature list may not be huge, but at this point in the beta cycle there shouldn’t necessarily be a lot of new features. So what have we been doing? Why, fixing just tons of bugs of course. A lot of crashers have been fixed, work has gone into improving multiple monitor support, the UI has improved in various areas, and code has been cleaned up. All in all, we’re in good shape, and will be mostly staying in bug fix mode until the final release to ensure that the result is a product we can all be proud of.
I should also point out that if you are not a Workstation user but have been contemplating a purchase, you don’t need to wait for Workstation 6. You can now buy Workstation 5.5 and get a free upgrade to 6. This only applies to new purchases, so if you’ve been a Workstation 5 user for a while, you’ll have to purchase 6 separately.
VMware IPO
Wow, exciting day for VMware. For those who haven’t yet seen the news, our parent company, EMC, announced a VMware IPO. Approximately 10% of VMware is being sold. This is all news to me too, but it’s damn exciting.
“VMware is one of the fastest-growing businesses in the history of the software industry. We expect the IPO to unlock more of VMware’s value for EMC shareholders while also strengthening its ability to retain and attract the software industry’s top talent.”
— Joe Tucci
I know many people have said they would invest in VMware if it had its own stock symbol rather than sharing EMC’s. Now you have no excuse! 😉
3D in VMware Fusion
Some people, including a couple of competitors, are of the belief that nobody to date has supported 3D in a virtualized environment in any usable way, and have made claims that they’ll be the first. It’s not their fault, this wasn’t so widely known. Afterall, we’ve only had this supported and documented for two years now.
Well, cat’s out of the bag now. I was doing my usual search for VMware on Digg, and this post came up showing a video of 3D in VMware Fusion. As you can see from the video that it links to, 3D in VMware is quite usable. 🙂
Update: The URL for the digg post has moved. Fixed the link.
Another year come and gone. Hopefully everybody is out having a good time or recovering from a good time. I just finished up for the night and am planning to get some reading done before bed, but thought a quick blog post summarizing the year was in order.
I’m sure I’m missing a few things. 🙂
Now, New Years Eve doubles as my mom’s birthday, which I imagine was not fun when growing up. I think the only day worse for a birthday is Christmas. It was certainly fun tonight, though. The night was spent with my mom, stepdad, brothers, sister, and Jamie. We watched Cars and played Scrabble, Bomberman Touch! for the DS (fun game!), and Cranium. We ended up spending most of the evening on Cranium, which has to be my favorite family game. We kept laughing so hard that we got ourselves sick.
Jamie brought over a bottle of champagne for us to drink. It was a late Christmas present, intended for New Years. We’re not heavy drinkers, so we only finished half the bottle, but it was very nummy. Along with that, we had a variety of snacks, including cheeses, beef sausages, vegetables, sodas, and pizza. This was, I think, my first New Years with my sister Jenna, as she had always been visiting cousins on New Years. She was pretty good most of the night, considering she had to stay up until midnight 🙂
January 1, 2007. With any luck, this year will be more exciting and eventful than last year. There are changes I hope to make, projects to abandon, projects to take up, and places to go. I think I’ll get some sleep so that I can get a head start on that.
Happy New Year!