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VMWare stores a disk as a file, and I am not aware of a way to have multiple virtual machines accessing that file at the same time and writing to it.

You can share a virtual disk, see Enabling SCSI Reservation for more information

Absolutely. Until you can use Wine to run Cooperative Linux or boot Linux on vmware then the job is only half done.

A VM sounds nice, but I can't see how it would be any easier to make a VM for OSX than it is for x86-Linux, and the existing x86-Linux emulators (or translation layers or whatever) are far from perfect. I don't want WINE for Mac, I want Windows!

Now WINE isn't virtualization...
VMWare, on the other hand, is. It has existed for Linux (on x86) since the beginning, and there is even a VMWare player for Syllable.

I expect some version of VMWare for Mac OSX, I only hope it comes soon.

upgrade to faster connection, switch to kubuntu (free AND secure), or anything else equally secure.

If you need (unsecure) windows for anything, use vmware player (free), or wine (free), or if you need to play games with 3D acceleration then cedega (nonfree).

Remember about http://www.openoffice.org/ for office work, http://www.gimp.org/ for drawing, http://www.k3b.org/ for burning DVDs... and the list goes on and on.

ps: I've got some karma to burn, so here I'm whoring ;)

The best suggestion I can muster, short of many layers of security, is the VMware Browser Appliance: http://www.vmware.com/vmtn/vm/browserapp.html

As a sidenote, my nephew is doing the same thing, and his iBook works just fine. His employer has a contract with TA, which is where he has his personal wireless subscription. There's no IE-only problems there for him.

If it won't accept that, use the User Agent Firefox module to pretend you're actually running IE.

What is he actually doing that's causing him problems? Downloading spyware apps? Not sure there's a fix for that.

Xen has caused major shifts in business direction for commercial virtualisation companies: VMWare suddenly released their VMWare player in part as an effort to make their "virtual machine file format" the standard one. Look they even want to support virtualisation standards now! SWSoft kicked off OpenVZ for similar motivation: because Xen is a competing solution and (they gamble) that it is going to be better to give away a corresponding part of their "crown jewels" to get more of a market share.

Getting your virtualiser into the kernel (or a vendor tree) isn't about control, it's about being in technical pole position to sell copies of their commercial products. Xen might be free, and might have started this all off, but they too have a commercial arm, XenSource, trying to sell Xen Optimizer, presumably as a coda to other products. SWSoft have Plesk, HSPComplete, PEM and others. And VMWare has ESX/GSX server. All of their selling would be made easier, and their marketing departments made very happy, if the king of open source projects, Linux, includes parts of their core technology.

While I'm not sure what the critiera are for acceptance into the kernel, I don't think it's going to happen for SWSoft. From an engineering standpoint, their technology is not much different from Linux vserver which has been around a while to do much the same job and I imagine its invasive kernel changes to keep everything partitioned are just as (un)appealing to kernel maintainers. On the other hand the Xen kernel changes implement a new "architecture", albeit a virtual one, and (last I looked) were only around 150K in size. So I would have thought that the Xen guys have more of a shot at this one because the bulk of their software is maintained outside of the Linux kernel, and seems like the better solution from an engineering standpoint.

But with CPU virtualisation extensions becoming all the rage this year, I think it'll be a while before the best solution shakes itself out engineering-wise: there is still too much vendor "buy-in" for any of these solutions to seem like a good bet for the mainline kernel.

Also NB from the article that SWSoft have made lots of money from selling a modified Linux kernel, and yes for years before OpenVZ they would give out the sources to Virtuozzo licensees. It's not clear to me whether Virtuozzo uses a forked OpenVZ codebase and they are continuing to develop virtuozzo's kernel bits in secret (which would seem like madness on top of running openvz, but that's commerce for you :) ).

Xen has caused major shifts in business direction for commercial virtualisation companies: VMWare suddenly released their VMWare player in part as an effort to make their "virtual machine file format" the standard one. Look they even want to support virtualisation standards now! SWSoft kicked off OpenVZ for similar motivation: because Xen is a competing solution and (they gamble) that it is going to be better to give away a corresponding part of their "crown jewels" to get more of a market share.

Getting your virtualiser into the kernel (or a vendor tree) isn't about control, it's about being in technical pole position to sell copies of their commercial products. Xen might be free, and might have started this all off, but they too have a commercial arm, XenSource, trying to sell Xen Optimizer, presumably as a coda to other products. SWSoft have Plesk, HSPComplete, PEM and others. And VMWare has ESX/GSX server. All of their selling would be made easier, and their marketing departments made very happy, if the king of open source projects, Linux, includes parts of their core technology.

While I'm not sure what the critiera are for acceptance into the kernel, I don't think it's going to happen for SWSoft. From an engineering standpoint, their technology is not much different from Linux vserver which has been around a while to do much the same job and I imagine its invasive kernel changes to keep everything partitioned are just as (un)appealing to kernel maintainers. On the other hand the Xen kernel changes implement a new "architecture", albeit a virtual one, and (last I looked) were only around 150K in size. So I would have thought that the Xen guys have more of a shot at this one because the bulk of their software is maintained outside of the Linux kernel, and seems like the better solution from an engineering standpoint.

But with CPU virtualisation extensions becoming all the rage this year, I think it'll be a while before the best solution shakes itself out engineering-wise: there is still too much vendor "buy-in" for any of these solutions to seem like a good bet for the mainline kernel.

Also NB from the article that SWSoft have made lots of money from selling a modified Linux kernel, and yes for years before OpenVZ they would give out the sources to Virtuozzo licensees. It's not clear to me whether Virtuozzo uses a forked OpenVZ codebase and they are continuing to develop virtuozzo's kernel bits in secret (which would seem like madness on top of running openvz, but that's commerce for you :) ).

Get the free vmware player with browser (which has firefox as the browser) from

http://www.vmware.com/vmtn/vm/browserapp.html

and turn off sound on the virtual machine.

So, giving people root on their own boxes has been very successful for me. You say my way is the wrong way, but I don't see a "right" way to set up their environment that wouldn't waste tons of both my time and the users' time, and even still I don't see what the benefit would be. Can you elaborate on what you think the "right" way is?

To manage something like Apache with sudo, the effort required is really small:

e.g. in sudoers conf:
>User_Alias WEBMASTERS = bob, jane, sue
>WEBMASTERS ALL = (root) /usr/local/sbin/apachectl start, (root) /usr/local/sbin/apachectl stop

As a user, seeing commands you can run with sudo is as simple as 'sudo -l', you can always put a note (with an example of how to do it) in the motd (I've tended to do that myself).

If they are doing software development and have requirements that include things like the ability to experiment with privilage seperation or modify iptables rulesets, then I'd definately have given them VMware (thought I'd probably set up a GSX server in preference to individual client installs of VMWare).

Tools like VMware and Virtual PC are a lot easier to manage than a bunch of desktops and a far better environment for testing and developing in - when someone screws up, they can revert to a previously saved version of the system, or click to make a new instance using an existing image (allowing them to create a version based on whatever distro/OS they need to - for those doing work involving multiple platforms, or with a tendancy to break things).

As well as being easier (for developers and for those supporting them), it's ultimately a lot more useful thanks to things like the ability to easily revert to 'known good' images and to clone systems for testing. It also works out a lot cheaper than buying physically seperate development hardware for each developer (and reduces the downtime for users that comes from only having a single desktop for development and general use).

The 'live production' varient, ESX Server is really cool too (but that's a bit OT).

So, giving people root on their own boxes has been very successful for me. You say my way is the wrong way, but I don't see a "right" way to set up their environment that wouldn't waste tons of both my time and the users' time, and even still I don't see what the benefit would be. Can you elaborate on what you think the "right" way is?

To manage something like Apache with sudo, the effort required is really small:

e.g. in sudoers conf:
>User_Alias WEBMASTERS = bob, jane, sue
>WEBMASTERS ALL = (root) /usr/local/sbin/apachectl start, (root) /usr/local/sbin/apachectl stop

As a user, seeing commands you can run with sudo is as simple as 'sudo -l', you can always put a note (with an example of how to do it) in the motd (I've tended to do that myself).

If they are doing software development and have requirements that include things like the ability to experiment with privilage seperation or modify iptables rulesets, then I'd definately have given them VMware (thought I'd probably set up a GSX server in preference to individual client installs of VMWare).

Tools like VMware and Virtual PC are a lot easier to manage than a bunch of desktops and a far better environment for testing and developing in - when someone screws up, they can revert to a previously saved version of the system, or click to make a new instance using an existing image (allowing them to create a version based on whatever distro/OS they need to - for those doing work involving multiple platforms, or with a tendancy to break things).

As well as being easier (for developers and for those supporting them), it's ultimately a lot more useful thanks to things like the ability to easily revert to 'known good' images and to clone systems for testing. It also works out a lot cheaper than buying physically seperate development hardware for each developer (and reduces the downtime for users that comes from only having a single desktop for development and general use).

The 'live production' varient, ESX Server is really cool too (but that's a bit OT).

So, giving people root on their own boxes has been very successful for me. You say my way is the wrong way, but I don't see a "right" way to set up their environment that wouldn't waste tons of both my time and the users' time, and even still I don't see what the benefit would be. Can you elaborate on what you think the "right" way is?

To manage something like Apache with sudo, the effort required is really small:

e.g. in sudoers conf:
>User_Alias WEBMASTERS = bob, jane, sue
>WEBMASTERS ALL = (root) /usr/local/sbin/apachectl start, (root) /usr/local/sbin/apachectl stop

As a user, seeing commands you can run with sudo is as simple as 'sudo -l', you can always put a note (with an example of how to do it) in the motd (I've tended to do that myself).

If they are doing software development and have requirements that include things like the ability to experiment with privilage seperation or modify iptables rulesets, then I'd definately have given them VMware (thought I'd probably set up a GSX server in preference to individual client installs of VMWare).

Tools like VMware and Virtual PC are a lot easier to manage than a bunch of desktops and a far better environment for testing and developing in - when someone screws up, they can revert to a previously saved version of the system, or click to make a new instance using an existing image (allowing them to create a version based on whatever distro/OS they need to - for those doing work involving multiple platforms, or with a tendancy to break things).

As well as being easier (for developers and for those supporting them), it's ultimately a lot more useful thanks to things like the ability to easily revert to 'known good' images and to clone systems for testing. It also works out a lot cheaper than buying physically seperate development hardware for each developer (and reduces the downtime for users that comes from only having a single desktop for development and general use).

The 'live production' varient, ESX Server is really cool too (but that's a bit OT).

If you use Windows, go get the vmware browser appliance and use it - connecting to the internet through a virtual machine is like wearing gloves in the OR - it's just common sense.

http://www.vmware.com/vmtn/vm/browserapp.html

Isn't there some Computer Science adage about solving problems by adding another layer of abstraction?

--
Do we need more fiber to keep our network regular?

It'd be pretty convoluted, I know, but you could use the VMware player (brilliant of them to release that when QEMU and similar projects were starting to pose a threat, but I digress) to run Windows under Linux and samba to share your homne directory with the running Windows installation. Free, and wouldn't require a reboot.

Also, don't assume that KDE and GNOME are the only options. I personally run Window Maker (with various dockapps), with fspanel, and KeyLaunch, with xtrlock (invoked via keylaunch) as my screen lock. On top of that, I use various shell scripts that I've written over the years.

Desktop systems, especially for certain classes of users, are highly varied. Good luck trying to study them!

Actually, I have successfully managed to install X windows on OpenBSD using VMWare 4 and 5 workstation edition. It did use VMware tools as well. You just have to follow the instructions found here: http://www.vmware.com/support/gsx3/doc/tools_insta ll_lin_gsx.html(freebsd version) and then the ones found here: http://frogger974.homelinux.org/

With a minimal amount of tweaking, you should be able to get it to work no problem.

I think so.

I believe that is for VMWare *3*. The same antique version that used to run on FreeBSD as a host. It hasn't worked that way since the 3.x series. There was no support in 4.0, 4.5, or the current 5.0. I've also heard of no support upcoming in version 5.5 that's currently in beta.

I believe that is for VMWare *3*. The same antique version that used to run on FreeBSD as a host. It hasn't worked that way since the 3.x series. There was no support in 4.0, 4.5, or the current 5.0. I've also heard of no support upcoming in version 5.5 that's currently in beta.

More and more players are entering the virtual market (look at the success of Citrix over the past decade, which is a technology that comes from a similar paradigm) - and that means that more and more datacenters are converting. While the cost per kwh might be rising, the costs of running a data-center are coming back under control.

of course it's "consuming" all the cpu, it's just sat there spinning
read this

http://www.vmware.com/support/guestnotes/doc/guest os_doswin.html

and use that dosidle.exe

In case of slashdotting:

--- Windows ---
http://download3.vmware.com/software/vmplayer/VMwa re-player-1.0.0-16981.exe
md5sum: 69474caa0802be99379973605a93b952

--- Linux ---
http://download3.vmware.com/software/vmplayer/VMwa re-player-1.0.0-16981.rpm
md5sum: 2027d6fa8956b73b9387e9313417ab49

http://download3.vmware.com/software/vmplayer/VMwa re-player-1.0.0-16981.tar.gz
md5sum: cf0f07a05081272c073e2ffd4972b05f

In case of slashdotting:

--- Windows ---
http://download3.vmware.com/software/vmplayer/VMwa re-player-1.0.0-16981.exe
md5sum: 69474caa0802be99379973605a93b952

--- Linux ---
http://download3.vmware.com/software/vmplayer/VMwa re-player-1.0.0-16981.rpm
md5sum: 2027d6fa8956b73b9387e9313417ab49

http://download3.vmware.com/software/vmplayer/VMwa re-player-1.0.0-16981.tar.gz
md5sum: cf0f07a05081272c073e2ffd4972b05f

In case of slashdotting:

--- Windows ---
http://download3.vmware.com/software/vmplayer/VMwa re-player-1.0.0-16981.exe
md5sum: 69474caa0802be99379973605a93b952

--- Linux ---
http://download3.vmware.com/software/vmplayer/VMwa re-player-1.0.0-16981.rpm
md5sum: 2027d6fa8956b73b9387e9313417ab49

http://download3.vmware.com/software/vmplayer/VMwa re-player-1.0.0-16981.tar.gz
md5sum: cf0f07a05081272c073e2ffd4972b05f

Mind checking the price Again? it's $189 these days - for Windows or Linux.

According to the product comparison posted at http://www.vmware.com/products/player/comparison.h tml, the player can in fact use snapshots. There is an asterisk related to snapshots indicating that VMware ACE does not support snapshots, but the X in the "Revert to previous state using 'snapshots'" column for the player would imply that the player does in fact support them.

As they are targeting the player at "developers, testers, and other technical professionals", it would seem snapshots would be a must... especially for testers if something blows up.

You can download pre-built VM's right from the VMWare site. http://www.vmware.com/vmtn/vm/

It looks like you can download an evaluation version of VMWare workstation that "dies" in one month. I'm not sure if you can create a VM with that, then play it with player, or if they're DRMed, but it's at VMWare's site.

You could also download a virtual machine here it looks like. I'm sure if you google you can find others.

Here you go!!! (I hacked VMware's website and put this up just so you could get a free VM. Power to the people. H@x0r 73h p1@n37.

Well, my friend, that's not only twisting the facts, it's wrong.

Plan 9 is an unsupported OS and linux/win* are. So is freebsd. Any vm created in a supported OS will run.

Secondly, Qemu's performance is way worse than VMware's.

FreeBSD (a platform VMWare doesn't even support)

Not true at all:

http://www.vmware.com/support/ws5/doc/ws_newguest_ tools_freebsd.html

Any questions?

is me.

Linux is not just about freedom and power.
It is about extending that freedom and power.
Encapsulating all.

Vmware, Win4Lin, Wine.
Now if only I could get round making PearPC work ...

You can't have read their product brochures very carefully... a VMWare image is a VMWare image is a VMWare image. Whether you run with Windows or Linux as the host OS. I've taken one VMWare .vmdk image that was running under Windows, and ran it unmodified on Linux.

Yes, it works, and there's a whole slew (if you believe their newsletter) of VMWare consultants who will happily set you up with such a setup.

For me, the "workstation" version suited my "windows server running on Linux" needs, but they do have specific versions for servers and datacentres, that among other things like providing enhanced managment and deployment tools, will even migrate running images between physical machines in a cluster of VMWare ESX hosts. Their "success story" propaganda/examples provide instances where a customer has a set of blades and particular images can be migrated to different blades as the cluster grows/shrinks.

Perhaps I sound like a marketing droid, but seriously, VMWare is one of the few commercial pieces of software I own. Worth every penny. And I'm a full-time Linux weenie. Xen doesn't really achieve the convenience that VMWare does (for example, you must physically partition your resources with Xen and so modifications that affect the resources allocated to your dom0 instance require a reboot (adjusting RAM is my biggest issue).

With VMWare, I notice that even if I allocate 384MiB RAM to the virtual machine, top (1) shows VMWare seems to only request the amount of memory the guest OS actually hits. So on bootup, my virtual machine is only occupying say 196MiB RAM even though it has 384MiB available. Additionally, although it can wire physical disks (sidenote: usb, rs232, lp0 devices too) up to the guest OS, you can create virtual disk files of an almost arbitrary size (as far as guest OS is concerned), but actual disk space usage will be much less and will closely reflect the actual amount of data on the guest OS's filesystem.

Not necessarily a useful feature for servers where accurate dimensioning and predictable performance is required, but overall VMWare feels very "dynamic" and Xen very rigid.

That said, I am very impressed with Xen. a) that it's so powerful, and b) that it's open source. Now, if only I could rig my Debian initrd.img so that it didn't require TLS library support when booting from LVM on software RAID...

• PLC's are notorius for having poorly written ethernet communications code. They can really screw up your network. We keep them on separate VLANs.
• Make sure your control software can talk to everything you need on the plant floor.
• OPC compliance can help, but it can be buggy. Make sure you test all components thouroughly.
• We had many custom VB6/VB5 programs running on NT. For those that could not be updated easily, or we did not have source code for, or were too expensive to upgrade, we moved them to VMWare ESX Server with the P2V assistant. It was a lifesaver.
• We use GEFanuc's product iFix for our HMI. There are many other similar products out there from many different vendors. Most of them have very restrictive and expensive licensing. iFix fit us the best at the time.
• We moved all of the old junk desktop/tower server machines to proper rack mount servers and virtual machines.
• Develop a good relationship with a good automation integrator. They can help you more than you think.

• PLC's are notorius for having poorly written ethernet communications code. They can really screw up your network. We keep them on separate VLANs.
• Make sure your control software can talk to everything you need on the plant floor.
• OPC compliance can help, but it can be buggy. Make sure you test all components thouroughly.
• We had many custom VB6/VB5 programs running on NT. For those that could not be updated easily, or we did not have source code for, or were too expensive to upgrade, we moved them to VMWare ESX Server with the P2V assistant. It was a lifesaver.
• We use GEFanuc's product iFix for our HMI. There are many other similar products out there from many different vendors. Most of them have very restrictive and expensive licensing. iFix fit us the best at the time.
• We moved all of the old junk desktop/tower server machines to proper rack mount servers and virtual machines.
• Develop a good relationship with a good automation integrator. They can help you more than you think.

I've used VMWare very successfully to test a site which was to be hosted on physically load balanced servers. We needed to know that if a node failed, or a user was redirected to another server in the cluster, that their session information would be retrievable without the need to logon again.

It worked perfectly. The other nice thing about using VMWare was we only needed to configure the one instance and then clone it. Just make sure you've got heaps of RAM and a fast processor. Dual or multi-core CPUs are even better.

Jesus, man. Buy VMware and save yourself the trouble of having 9 fucking partitions, each with wasted, unused space.

Assuming you mean Microsoft Windows, yes, it does.

If you just want to run some programs that are designed for MS Windows, look at Wine. It can be a pain to set up, but it's free and it works.

If you want to run a MS Windows OS, then you need VMware. This lets you run MS Windows in a virtual machine under Linux (or vice-versa). It's nto free, but works well.

err...someone did: http://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?thread ID=19827&tstart=15

The OS emulation part of vmware workstation really has nothing to do with storage.

Perhaps not for VMWare Workstation. EMC was probably a lot more interested in the VMWare ESX Server product. See VMWare's VMotion. Moving live virtual servers from one physical server to another without downtime. This is a beautiful thing if you've ever managed a large server farm. Oh, and it requires a SAN back end.

For many VMware is just workstation product. Because that is what they get to see people discussing in the LUG. Please checkout www.vmtn.net (VMware technology network) and see the discussions on ESX,VC and ACE from the enterprise users. The feature set that you get there is mind blowing. I cant think of anything equivalent in any other product/OS currently or in the near future. VMware has many "first" to their credit that no other software provides/provided. But I would say they have been such a low profile company. They are hitting the headlines only after their EMC acquisition, which is understandable considering they are moving more into Enterprise segment. Just a partial list of features: NICteaming across different NIC make and models at the kernel level Virtual VLAN Beaconing NIC Failover PXE boot SAN Multipathing Multi vendor SAN support at the kernel level SAN path failover Hot backups of virtual machines through redo logs VMotion (move VMs from one physical host to another without the underlying OS knowing about it) Perl/COM APIs to control Virtual Machines Multiple level of snapshots with VC Cloning from the same base image in WKS By far the largest number of guest OS support. ACE -Virtual machine deployment (http://www.vmware.com/products/desktop/ace_featur es.html) The product and its features just speaks for themselves. Go and read the specs or try it for yourself. Do not compare VMware with Xen/Virtual PC or any other projects. They have just started to do things that VMware did 6 years ago. yes pacificia and vanderpool will let anyone do virtualization. So what ? If vmware could do so many things when there was no hardware support for virtualization, imagine what they could bring in when the support is built into the hardware. With them already ahead of the game by miles, I could only see that vanderpool and pacifici help them proliferate further in the server market space.

VMWare Workstation

It's awesome for the money. I run it under Linux (though a Windows version is available) and have all kinds of Windows instances available with different browsers, different patch levels etc.

Bob

I've always had to own at least one additional windows box to do quite a lot of programming on windows. Well, it's all about JNI-Bindings in my case...

So -- A fast VirtualPC would be like a miracle, and I suspect VMWare guys will get into the ring. I really love Apple for this step, because I really enjoy Mac OS X. For me this means I can get a decent Apple-PowerBook with excellent performance and top notch Windows-compatibility!

I expect some more players getting into the game:

• Game industry - porting of OpenGL powered games gets easier (= cheaper) than ever, no more AltiVec
• Wine and (of course) CodeWeavers for Wine/CrossOver Office on OS X
• Lot of heavily optimized media-related stuff running exclusively on Intel boxes due to SSE, SSE2, MMX...
• Much more Linux-stuff due to easier compilation of "poorly programmed" software that doesn't respect endianess and other stuff

Now, if only eclipse got faster on OS X!

step 1: sell everything
step 2: take all that money and buy 1 killer machine
step 3: Go here

You're already have access to servers and a network. Use it. Practice working on the skills that are listed in the test objectives. If you can't or don't want to do this on you companies network, set up a lab at home. (at least 2 servers, recommend VMWare or Virtual PC to get a more systems going, if you want)

The MS Press books are ok but they don't spoon-feed you. Sybex books are also good. You'll get the most out of them is you spend time applying what you learned in the lab.

Avoid Braindumps. You goals should be to learn not just pass the test.

I recommend visiting the forum at Tek-Tips for more advice on certifications.

Good Luck

:p

:)

Granted, it's intended for games, but DOSBox is a very good way to accomplish running DOS based applications.
Also, look at VMWare

1. There are open-source Xen and well-tested vmware already.
2. In order to decrease feature duplication modern hypervisors hand out many crucial tasks to main OS so the solution inherits weaknesses of the OS.
3. Even if MS hypervision tech would not inherit insecurities of Windows, there would be justified fear that their software development methodology introduces more security bugs into hypervisor code.