Posts tagged VMware
Macbook Pro
Aug 10th
So, I finally got my offer letter from VMware and started looking a little more seriously at new laptops. As I mentioned earlier, I’m interested in the 13″ Macbook Pro, however with Core i7 Mobile coming out in (supposedly) the next couple of months, I’m worried to pull the trigger in the event that a refresh could happen later this year. With Snow Leopards improvements to multicore performance via Grand Central Dispatch, a Core i7 should provide a pretty big performance increase over the Core 2 Duos that are currently used. Then again, this may be another case of me wanting more horsepower than I really need, as my laptop’s primary functions are generally Web and Email. Graaah.
My Short Summer
Aug 10th
I’m in the middle of my short break following Summer semester at UofL. I’m very happy to finally have classes done with for the semester, and look forward to (hopefully) going back to work soon. I’ve been talking to people at VMware for the last couple of weeks, and so far everything seems to be in order, and I’ll know for certain soon. However, rent at the apartment complex in San Francisco I lived in last time has shot up $300 (to $1900/mo).
Since Palm released the Mojo SDK, I’ve been spending some time tinkering with it and developing some basic applications. I’m hoping to start work on a bigger webOS project soon, though I’m not entirely sure what that will be (I do have some ideas). I’ve also been playing around with several of the apps in Precentral’s homebrew section. In particular, I really love the Prepod app, which is a podcast streamer/downloader that lets me listen to my podcasts over the air, specifically in my car. It needs just a *little* more polish, but then it’s easily worth a few dollars on the official app store (whenever Palm decides to open that up).
Lately, I’ve been drooling over the new 13″ unibody Macbook Pro, but there are a couple of things keeping me from pulling the trigger on one, not the least of which is my current lack of money. However, the upcoming release of Snow Leopard and (supposedly) Core i7 mobile are keeping me from buying one just yet.
I’ve been spending my Thursdays for the last couple of months at Flanagan’s, a pub over on Baxter Ave. that has a weekly Pint Night, where two special beers are rolled out, including glasses from the brewery that you get to take home with you (and are already taking over all my available cabinet space). So far, all the beers I’ve tried there have been fairly interesting, and it’s been a great way to discover new beers. At first, it was just 3 or 4 of us going every week, but it’s slowly been growing and now we actually have a pretty good crowd, mostly members from Speed’s ACM.
That’s pretty much all I’ve been up to lately, besides burning through my Netflix queue and poking around online, maybe I’ll write something again when I have something more interesting to report.
Wacom Bamboo in Ubuntu 9.04
May 13th
Today I got my Wacom Bamboo USB Tablet in from Newegg. Installation in Jaunty was incredibly easy, I just plugged it in and the Wacom drivers were already installed and ready to go. The corners of the tablet automatically mapped to the corners of the screen, which in some previous Ubuntu releases required a bit of editing to Xorg.conf.
I’ve really only messed with two apps so far, Gimp and Evernote. Gimp is, of course, preinstalled in Ubuntu and allows pen input just fine, although it doesn’t automatically map the eraser to the Erase tool.
Evernote doesn’t have a native Linux version, but it runs quite well in Wine. The only issue I’ve come across so far is that I cannot drag and drop files from Nautilus into a notebook. My plan is to use this to handwrite notes for school, and I’ve already been typing my notes into Evernote for the last few days. Evernote is nice because it automatically keeps your notes synced between multiple installations (for me, that’s Evernote/Wine Evernote/VistaVM and Evernote/W7) and also has a web interface for when I’m not at one of my computers. This syncing allows me to drag files to Evernote either by opening a VM or remoting to my desktop and then they will automatically be synced back to the copy of Evernote I’m running in Wine.
Week in Review…
Jan 20th
I’ve finished my first week back at VMware. For the first couple of days, I didn’t have a workstation, so I wound up using my laptop. Once I eventually got my computer, it took a couple of days before I had it up and running as well as last time, but as of today, I’ve been able to compile the latest revision of our software.
For the most part, I’m working on the same things as last summer, and I’ve seen some of my own code while looking through the latest source checkout, which was cool.
As usual, there’s some gadget I’m drooling over, and for the time being, it’s the Palm Pre. The Pre is the first phone I’ve been interested in that will actually be debuting on the Sprint network (the iPhone and G1 were on AT&T and T-Mobile). Unfortunately, there’s no release date known other than H1 09.
Back to VMware
Nov 23rd
A few days ago, I got a final offer to return to VMware next semester. I’ll be flying out early January and starting on the 12th.
Clusterf*ck: Mass Virtualization
Jul 30th
Sometime after I get back to Kentucky, I’m thinking of building a server for running virtual machines using VMware Server 2.0. The idea is to virtualize as many of my machines as possible. Virtual servers, in particular, benefit from this by being able to be easily moved or cloned. Rather than having to take a server down for upgrades, you have the ability to clone the VM, apply the upgrade to the clone, then switch them out, resulting in nearly zero downtime.
In addition to running web and mail servers, I could also virtualize the backends to some other applications, namely Deluge and MythTV, so that the computers they ran on didn’t need to be on 24/7. MythTV is a little tricky due to the lack of support for PCI passthrough in VMware, but I could of course use USB tuners. I could also use a virtual machine as my primary desktop, and use a small, low powered, thin client to access it over VNC or SSH.
I recently looked into the hardware I’d want for such a server and came up with the following:
- Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 2.4GHz CPU
- Intel BOXDG31PR Micro ATX Motherboard
- Kingston 4GB (2×2GB) DDR2-800 Memory
- Seagate 1TB SATA2 Hard Drive
- APEX DM-387 Slim Micro ATX Case
The build would be another slim micro ATX build, similar to Cervantes and have a quad-core CPU, 4GB of ram, and a terabyte of storage. In total, it came to a little under $600 for the entire build (I love how cheap hardware is getting) but I think I’ve decided to hold out for Nehalem before I build it. With native quad cores and hyper threading, Nehalem should work well for this kind of project.
Poster Session
Jul 24th
Today I had my “Poster Session” at VMware. All interns are expected to create a poster showcasing what they had done over the summer, so mine focused mostly on VDI and VDM. I was suprised at the attention that my poster attracted, as several people stopped by to ask me questions about the project. Mine was one of the projects that had a more obvious application, versus other projects that would be considered mostly “under the hood” improvements.
The interns whose posters receive the most votes get a free trip to VMWorld, this September in Las Vegas.
Virtualizing the Source Engine
Jul 17th
Today I played around with a recent experimental build of VMware Workstation 6.5. I installed Steam and downloaded Counter Strike: Source and Half Life 2: Lost Coast (Two apps with benchmarking utilities).
CS:S ran pretty well at the default settings, and got an average of 35fps for the stress test.
Lost Coast, however, managed to completely crash the virtual video card, I’m giving it another go now. I’m guessing that HDR was too much for the virtual machine to handle.
Well, LC is clearly unhappy, it’s refusing to start now…
And now CS:S won’t start either, great. Time to do some debugging…
XPe on ESX 3.x
Jul 11th
So, after I posted my method for building and testing XPe images in Workstation, I was asked to get my XPe VMs working in ESX as well. ESX uses an older version of VMware’s Virtual Hardware, so XPe VMs I created with my previous method will not run if transferred directly to an ESX machine.
Creating the virtual hardware component is pretty straightforward, and follows the same general process as my previous guide. For your convenience, I’ve uploaded my component that I created running XP on ESX.
However, just the component isn’t enough for ESX. ESX 3.x doesn’t support virtual IDE hard drives. Likewise, Windows XPe doesn’t support SCSI drives. So, you’ll have to install the VMware SCSI driver. During a normal XP installation, you can do this by pressing F6 during installation and loading the drivers from a floppy, but because you build XPe rather than installing it, you have to componetize the driver. Again, I’ve already done this for you.
If this doesn’t work for you, you can download the floppy image containing the driver from VMware.com, extract it, and then import the vmscsi.inf file into the XPe Component Designer.
Once you have both the vmware4 and vmscsi components added to your XPe profile, run dependency checks to pull in the required components and build the image like you did in the last guide. After that, move the Virtual Machine onto your ESX box (assuming you didn’t create it there) and fire it up.
Using VMware to Build and Run XP Embedded
Jun 17th
XP Embedded Studio isn’t actually a horrible application at it’s core. Now, the user interface and documentation are God-awful, which is why I’m writing this post. As you saw in my last two entries, I’ve been working with XPe for the last few days, and there has been plenty of frustration to go along with it. What should have been a fifteen minute task wound up taking several days. However, one week and a few dozen BSODs later, I present this how to:
More >
Flickr
Last.fm
Twitter
Facebook