VMware Hits One Out of the Park.. Almost

      by Wyatt Walter

I decided today to upgrade VMware server on my desktop to the new version 2.0 (after all I got the email that it was released over 24 hours ago!). I had used the beta and knew that the new version of the software was web-based and was very welcome to the change. One of my biggest annoyances with VMware was the lack of server console for the Mac. It’s fine that I have to run the server software on a Linux box, but I’d really like to be able to manage it straight from my machine (a Mac). I was thinking “Wow, this will be great.. Now that VMware is web-based it’ll be OS-agnostic and I can run it from anything.” Sadly, not so.

Once I had the server upgraded from a 1.0x release and running (which is nothing on my Ubuntu 8.04 system), I hopped over to my MacBook and went to the web interface. The management is great. It’s pretty similar in functionality to the old console, which I would expect. It definitely has some nice improvements and added features. Unfortunately, there’s no way to run the virtual machine console from a Mac. I realize this is a free product, but.. If VMware is trying to use portray itself as this ‘cloud computing’ enabler and pushing their new “DataCenter OS”, then why don’t we see a trend towards becoming OS agnostic from a management standpoint? Perhaps we are caught in the cross-fire between one of the world’s largest virtualization software maker and the only OS (to my knowledge) which explicitly prohibits virtualization of the OS in the EULA. The product is great (though the JavaScript seems a bit buggy), don’t get me wrong, but it’s the little things that make the difference.. like manageability.

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Filed under Tech Trends : Comments (0) : Sep 25th, 2008

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