4 posts tagged “virtualization”

This week, I was invited by Amit Singh to present a Tech Talk at Google on VMware Fusion.  I decided to do something a little different and dig down into how VMware's goals of bringing people the apps they need wherever they need them is actually really similar to Google's “everything's a web app” strategy.

I had a splendid lunch at one of my favorite Google cafés, American Table, and chatted with a few of their Mac developers.  It's good to hear people sharing their stories from developing and shipping software for Mac; there's a sort of camaraderie, as if we've all lived through the same battles and lived to tell the tales from the trenches.

Google's crack video team swiftly produced and put up a YouTube video of my talk.  Check it out!

For Sale: One Baby

I've just returned from an absolutely fantastic holiday in New Zealand. On the flight home, I actually sat next to a fellow with a VMworld 2006 bag and shirt—chatting with him, it turns out he's a huge VMware Fusion fan, and he's representing some of New Zealand's largest universities at VMworld 2007! What a small world. On top of that fortuitous event, I ran into something that put an even bigger ear-to-ear grin on my face this evening: I saw VMware Fusion for sale in an actual box I could hold in my two eager hands at the local electronics megastore! 

VMWare, which shipped a test version of the product last week, expects it will eventually work with IBM Corp.'s OS/2 operating system, Solaris from Sun Microsystems and software from start-up Be Inc. (It won't support Apple Computer Inc.'s Macintosh system, unless Apple rewrites its software to run on Intel chips.)

"VMWare is quite remarkable," said Jean-Louis Gassee, Be's founder. "They are really clever guys."

Too awesome for words.  Who would have thought that OS/2 and BeOS would be mentioned before the Mac, just 8 years ago?  And now it's all come full circle; instead of Warp, the Media OS, and PowerPC, now it's Leopard, Digital Lifestyles, and quad-core Intel processors.

Happy birthday, VMware Fusion

These days, Macs are showing up all over the place; I see coders, sysadmins, and creative types alike hacking away on their Apple laptops at conferences, coffee shops, and at airports.  Basically, anyone who wants working with computers to be plain old fun again has switched to Mac—more and more, it's pretty clear that the creative movers and shakers that drove the Linux community into the open-source tour de force it became in the 1990s are now using Apple hardware to found another revolution.

That svelte black box

We had the rock-solid infrastructure in place to let us focus on distilling the complexity and power of VMware's virtualization engine down to a simple, native Cocoa user interface.  Instead of quickly porting Workstation or Player, we chose to focus on a totally new market: the consumer.

We knew that Macs, cool as they are, still needed to run Windows apps.  But who wants to reboot all the time?  Instead, we embarked on a design course that took us from a simple technology demo at WWDC 2006 (exactly a year ago!) all the way to the streamlined, intuitive Fusion interface… and we had to break a lot of ground along the way.

What a long, strange trip it's been—and this is just the beginning for Fusion power on the Mac.

VMware Fusion's second beta is hot from the oven (requisite plug: download free at www.vmware.com/mac), just waiting for folks to play with it.  We've been working incredibly hard on this release—Fusion is just getting better and better, and I'm using it every day not only to get my work done, but now I use it to get some game time in.

I helped develop the 3D graphics feature for this release, writing all the Mac-specific bits.  The Mac is something of an ideal platform for this: the variety of software is low (variations on OS X 10.4), and there are only three kinds of graphics hardware (Intel GMA 950 on the Mac mini and MacBook, ATI Radeon X1600 in the MacBook Pro and some iMacs, and NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT, ATI Radeon X1900, or NVIDIA Quadro in the Mac Pro). 

3D Graphics in VMware Fusion for Mac OS X

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Because we only have to deal with so many combinations of hardware and software on the Mac, it's not quite as difficult to work around all the bugs present in the various combinations.  (Yes, a large chunk of the work in anything 3D is working around bugs in various vendors' hardware and drivers, go fig.)  The bonus is that Mac users are traditionally stiffed when it comes to vendors porting 3D games over; with VMware Fusion, even Mac-heads can now play 3D and 2D games, even if their favorite games only exist for Windows.

You might be surprised to know that the current level of 3D graphics functionality (DirectX 8.1) is also present in VMware Workstation and our other products—it's just that VMware Fusion's second beta is the first time it's been available on the Mac.  What's really cool about virtualization is that you'll eventually be able to be playing a 3D game, hit "pause" to suspend your TV, take it along with you to your friend's computer, and hit "play" to resume playing your 3D game.  This will even work if your friend's computer doesn't have the same 3D graphics hardware you do!

Also new in VMware Fusion beta 2 (check the release notes for more):

• Revamped full-screen mode, with support for hot-plugging/unplugging multiple monitors
• Tons of keyboard and mouse fixes, including fixes for third-party mice that don't correctly support HID
• Full support for Airport networks, even in bridged network mode.  (You can connect and disconnect your laptop from a hardwired Ethernet network, and your VMs' networking will continue to work transparently.)
  
• New hardware configuration functionality, with adding of hard drives and other devices
• Support for a virtual battery device: watch your laptop's battery level, even if you're full-screen in another OS

There's even more coming down the pipe soon.  I just got my hands on a bunch of international (French AZERTY, German QWERTZ, Japanese, Spanish) Apple keyboards, and I finally got them all working in VMware Fusion.  (The fixes will be present in the next release).  It's really surprising how some legacy issues carry over into modern operating systems: two keys on European keyboards use different values than the same keys do on US keyboards.  Turned out, they used to be in the same place long ago, but someone decided to swap their positions—but not their values.  And don't even get me started on the AltGr key (which doesn't exist on the Mac).

Japanese keyboards are even more fun.  You can imagine how interesting it must be to type in Japanese; it's not actually that hard (they use the same base QWERTY layout as a UK English keyboard) but their keyboards have lots of extra modes they shift in and out of, which need extra keys that don't exist on English keyboards.

Japanese keyboard layout

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PC keyboards in Japan have six extra keys to shift in and out of these input modes, but Mac keyboards in Japan only have four—two of which don't exist in the same form on Japanese PC keyboards (英数 [alphanumeric] and ひらがな／かたかな [hiragana/katakana]).  Making everyone happy, and mapping the keys by default so Japanese users can get their work done in PC operating systems, is the kind of subtle change that Mac users expect, but nobody really understands has to be crafted just so under the hood.

Now, it's full steam ahead towards the next release.  I'll follow up with some more technical tales of VMware Fusion along the way.