VMware

Planet VMware, Planet V12n

We officially announced two new planets last night at VMware: Planet VMware and Planet V12n, both powered by Planet.

Planet VMware is a Planet for VMware employees, in the spirit of Planet GNOME and such. There are currently ten VMware bloggers on there. This will of course increase in time.

Planet V12n is designed to be the go-to source for virtualization news. Blogs and sites such as virtualization.info and Virtual Strategy Magazine are included, with news covering all things virtualization, VMware and otherwise. The VMware employee blogs are also shown alongside the virtualization blogs.

The planets are very new, so there’s a couple of bugs to work out. The Planet VMware atom feed is busted right now, but it’s a known problem and will be fixed shortly. Please let us know if there are any other glaring problems.

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Gallery Virtual Appliance

Virtual machines used to be all about managing your data center or server consolidation or running applications that only run on some other operating system. Lately, virtual machines have been gaining momentum in a new area: software distribution.

This is actually quite powerful. Instead of a giving a user a complex set of instructions for installing some application or web service, and telling them what they need to install beforehand and what distros or operating systems it works on, the distributor or project can instead provide a bare-bones virtual machine containing the application or service pre-configured, and users can simply download it and power it on. It’s a great way of previewing applications or even running them day-to-day (depending on the application).

There’s a wonderful service out there called Gallery. It’s a web-based photo gallery that users can install on their server in order to share photos with the world. There’s a number of modules available. Many programs work with it. You can do things like order prints through the web. Great program.

And it’s now available in a virtual appliance! They have a description and instructions for setting it up, and I’ve been informed that they plan to keep it updated with each new release. It contains both Gallery 1 and Gallery 2, giving users a chance to see the differences between the versions and decide which suits them best. It can be used in VMware Player, Server, Workstation, and probably ESX (I haven’t tried). It’s downloadable from their website or from VMTN. You can see h0bbel’s blog post for more information on the appliance.

I think this is awesome and I hope it works out well for them and for the users. I’d love to see more projects go this route, and with any luck, Gallery will have set a precedent in the web services world. And for the developers creating these appliances, please feel free to let us know what VMware could do to make your lives easier. We welcome feedback, and you can send it directly to me.

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VMware Server 1.0 Released

As most people have probably seen on Slashdot or Digg by now, we just released VMware Server 1.0. As promised, it is a free product and should run your virtual machines much faster than the earlier betas did.

(If you’re not sure what VMware Server is all about, please read my original post.)

VMware Server has already been deployed at several companies ever since beta 1. I’ve always found that amusing, given how young the product was at that stage (even though this is essentially GSX 4). However, my experience in talking to beta testers so far is that most people are pretty happy with the product, especially given the price. I am personally running it at home for my Linux development VMs and it has been working nicely.

My thanks go out to all the testers that have reported problems or who have given us feedback of any kind. As one of the developers on VMware Server, it has been nice hearing positive reports and stories :).

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Bocce Ball

The VMware Hosted UI group (the group I’m a part of) went on a team-building exercise today. We had a nice meal and then went to play Bocce Ball, which is a game that until today I had very little knowledge of. It turns out to be a pretty cool game, with some strategy involved. Our team kicked ass 😉 I’m actually hoping to play again at some point soon. Perhaps we can buy some Bocce Balls and play in the hallways by our new offices.

Oh, yeah, so we moved offices at work. My nice corner office is no longer mine. However, the new office is actually bigger, and the view isn’t too bad. I’ve only spent a few hours in it so far, but it’s not as bad as I feared. I’ll have to take pictures soon.

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Goings Ons

Hard Day in GNOME

All day long, people have been talking on IRC about the Novell lay-offs. It’s been sad to see, and as hard as it was for the people who were let go, I’m sure it was just as hard for those that had to let people go. My condolences to everyone who’s been affected by this.

I’ve talked to a few people individually about this, but it’s been recommended to me by a couple of people that perhaps using Planet GNOME would be the best way to reach everyone interested…

I’d like to offer to anyone affected by this who is looking for a job to send me your resume if you’re interested in a job at VMware. I can make sure it goes to a human being who will actually read it, rather than in some queue somewhere. We’re looking for good people, and the company is nice to work at. Although the Palo Alto offices are where all the interesting things happen for the Linux desktop development, some jobs are available at our new Cambridge office. So if you’re looking for a fun job where you can do interesting work with good people, and this interests you, even a little, we can try to get the ball rolling. To everyone else, best of luck. I don’t doubt that you will all find good jobs soon, and everyone appreciates what has been done so far by everyone in the Ximian team.

Nokia 770

My Nokia 770 came today. I haven’t had much time to play with it, but it’s quite nice so far. Cute little device, and I’m eager to hack on it. I have a couple of games I’ve written or PDAs that I hope to port. Taco would be fun to port to it, if it had cairo (which I don’t believe it does? Correct me if I’m wrong!).

Galago

A lot of work has been done in Galago SVN the past couple of weeks. A lot of the code has been cleaned up and the API is in the process of being fine-tuned. Python bindings are being written. libgalago is moving to glib. All neat stuff. I’ll post more when I get closer to being finished, but this is very cool:

for service in galago.core_get_services():
    print service.get_name()
    for account in service.get_accounts():
        print account.get_username()

Just so easy. That’s not the final API, though. The core_get_services() part will change. Anyhow, fun stuff.

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