Martin O'Donnell told us that IBM announced it is partnering with VMware to ship virtual machine software with certain x360 and z800 servers. This is intended to provide customers with a way to consolidate servers on to larger, more powerful machines. This will also allow the IBM servers to simultaneously operate under multiple operating systems.

An article on this subject published in The Wall Street Journal today says, "{IBM} said that a machine equipped with the software will be able to simulate up to 20 individual computers running either Windows or Linux."

Posted by Dave Aiello at 9:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Dave Aiello wrote, "I finally got a working mp3 player to use with my Windows 2000 Professional virtual machine that is running under VMware Workstation 3.0 for Linux. I thought this was the last thing I needed to take advantage of the new features of the new release of VMware."

"In the course of trying to get the mp3 player to connect, I discovered that VMware's USB support only works if the parent operating system itself supports USB, regardless of whether the child OS supports it natively. I guess this makes sense, in that it would be hard to make a machine running Windows NT 4.0 as its base OS support USB. But, I assumed that I would have no problem because my base OS is derived from RedHat Linux 6.2. Wrong."

Continue reading "Another Obstacle to Using USB with VMware 3.0 Workstation for Linux" »

Posted by Dave Aiello at 7:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

LinuxLookup has published a review of VMware Workstation 3.0 for Linux. They generally like the product, although they are more concerned with the apparent degradation of Windows virtual machine performance than we have been here on CTDATA.com. All in all, it is a good review, and worth reading in conjunction with other evaluations of the new version of the workstation product.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 3:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Dave Aiello wrote, "For the past few weeks, I have been trying to upgrade the copy of VMware Workstation on my Linux laptop. I expected to easily upgrade the existing virtual machines that I had on my laptop, and be able to utilize all of new features that we touted in our story about the VMware Workstation 3 shipment."

"Unfortunately, I ran into problems that I can only describe as frustrating when upgrading my Windows 2000 vitual machine. Read on for an explanation of what those problems were, and a couple of important tips to maximize the value of the time spent upgrading to 3.0."

Continue reading "VMware Workstation 3.0: Upgrade Not as Easy as We Hoped" »

Posted by Dave Aiello at 6:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Yesterday, VMware announced the shipment of VMware Workstation 3.0. CTDATA continues to endorse this excellent product, and we consider several new features must-haves for those developers who need to use multiple operating systems. Among the new features that we find particularly compelling are:

ZDnet has done the software development community a service by taking the time to compare and contrast the Windows emulation products that are currently available for the Linux platform. Although CTDATA has pretty much committed itself to using VMware, we found the comparison between VMware GSX Server and VMware Workstation with WinToNet, Win4Lin, and WINE to be really interesting. This article is strongly recommended to anyone who is in the process of evaluating virtual machine software products.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 12:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Dave Aiello wrote, "For the last few days, I have been trying to document an annoying problem with the suspend-to-disk feature on my Linux laptop and its interaction with VMware Workstation 2.0 for Linux (specifically, 2.0.3 build-799). I managed to repeat the problem and it is this: if you attempt to use the suspend-to-disk feature when a Windows 2000 virtual machine is in full screen mode, the laptop will hang, rather than suspend."

Continue reading "Bug in VMware Workstation 2.0 Causes a Problem with Windows 2000 Clients" »

Posted by Dave Aiello at 1:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The VMware section of ctdata.com is a place to document our experiences with VMware's products. At the present time, CTDATA uses VMware Workstation for Linux extensively, and we have recommended it to several of our clients as a way to improve the productivity of software developers and testers.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 12:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)