VMware Fusion Talk at Google
by Al
I saw a notice last night about a talk that Ben Gertzfield gave at Google the other day as a tech talk. Ben works for VMware and did a lot of work on VMware Fusion. Fusion is the Mac-based virtualization product that VMware released the 1.0 version of a few months ago.
I’ve written about virtualization a bit during the last few months because we use virtual machines quite a bit for our testing at MoCo. The advantages are the ability to run multiple operating systems, as needed, on the same machine and also the ability to save state or start from a known good state. This gives QA the flexibility to quickly test on multiple operating systems.
VMware Fusion is the software that we generally use for this because most of us in QA have Mac machines for our primary boxes. The others running Linux or Windows can use VMware Workstation and still share virtual machines with us because VMware uses a common format (for the most part…) between products. The one unsolved issue, something that is causing pain now that Leopard is coming out, is that there is still no way to create virtual machines for Mac OS X. This makes the testing of Mac products a little rougher (and is part of why many of us choose to have a Mac as our primary work machines).
Ben speaks in his talk a bit about the capabilities of Fusion and a lot about the internals of how it functions on the Mac. He also demonstrates things a bit and speaks a little about the future. There is also a bit of Q&A at the end. I found it to be pretty interesting, even if it fairly long.
The talk is up on YouTube for viewing for those interested in watching it.
Found your blog post via Google Blog Search. I’m really glad you enjoyed the talk! It’s terrific to hear your feedback. Happy to hear any constructive criticism, as well!
Cheers,
Ben
Find a way for us to virtualize the Mac operating system.
The only other request is to get the snapshot system built. This is really getting in the way, especially since those of us using VMware Workstation are able to handle multiple snapshots.
Virtualizing Mac OS X is really more of a legal issue than anything else. Make your voice heard loud and clear to Apple, and tell them you want to legally run Mac OS X in a virtual machine!
We do know that multiple snapshots are something a lot of people have been asking for. Stay tuned!
Awesome presentation – thanks for the link!
I’ve been a long-time fan of VMware…’tis one of the only proprietary applications I ever bought for Linux. IMHO, Win2k ran faster in VMware on Linux than on bare metal! I’m absolutely convinced the networking was faster for that matter.
D’oh…way too many exclamation points there, and I strayed from the point I was going to make, but VMware is just that awesome. (And I’m planning on getting a copy of Fusion for my MacBook, so this was really nice to see.)
Anyway…I remember seeing things about bsmedberg packaging all the major platforms with a tool on OS X, as it was said this was the only way to cover every platform. Seeing this presentation, I found it fascinating to see that the only major holdup is the final packaging as DMG – the actual compilation can be done on Linux. Given the abundance of x86 hardware to run compile farms, I should think that this could be used for QA builds of Fx, with a final step of sending the binaries to a Mac for DMG packaging. (And for small changes, I should think one could just copy the binaries to a workstation and run it!)
Also, this is newer news of course (I kept this tab open until I had an hour to watch the talk) – Apple is said to be allowing virtualization of OS X Server, so perhaps more progress can be made on that front, and dev. work can be sped up.
Again, cheers on the fine link!