Category Archives: VMware

four years at VMware

I joined VMware in November 2010.  The past four years have been a fantastic ride.  Since joining VMware, I have brought new research methods to the company, introduced an annual UX conference and monthly UX tech talk series, and spoken at many conferences.

Looking over my mail archives, I’ve touched many VMware products.  Some of them are probably always going to be VMware applications, like vSphere.  Some are no longer part of VMware but continue on, like Zimbra.  And some products don’t exist any longer, such as vCloud Director.  Looking at my UX projects documented on our internal wiki, I’ve worked on more than 20 VMware products in the past 4 years.  It’s been awesome to have the opportunity to work on such a broad range of products across VMware’s portfolio.

After four years, it’s time to try my hand at something new.  Thank you, VMware, for everything.

more community stories of VMware and Apple OS X in production

My colleague William Lam of Virtually Ghetto has been busily talking to more system administrators who have virtualized OS X in a production environment.  The most recent two are:

This has been an awesome series of blog posts.  I’ve learned a lot!  Want to share your story of using VMware and OS X in production?  Contact William.

“ESXi support for Apple Mac Pro 6,1”

Just a quick post to boost the signal for William Lam’s post “Quick Update – ESXi support for Apple Mac Pro 6,1”:

I know many of you have been asking about ESXi support for the latest Mac Pro 6,1 that was released from Apple late last year and I just wanted to give a quick update. VMware Engineering has been hard at work on getting this new platform certified and supported with ESXi, however, there were some unforeseen challenges that is currently preventing the current version of ESXi to run on the new Mac Pro.

VMware is working closely with Apple’s hardware team to resolve these issues and we expect to have a Mac Pro 6,1 supported with ESXi 5.5 in the future. In the meantime, if you wish to evaluate ESXi on the new Mac Pro (though not officially supported), you can sign up for the new vSphere Beta and run a Beta version of ESXi on the new Mac Pro.

 

 

Q&A: why virtualize OS X?

The question of why one would virtualize OS X came up on the Mac Enterprise mailing list this week.  I got asked that question elsewhere this week too, so it seems like it’s time for a blog post on the topic.

Given that the OS X EULA requires that you virtualize OS X on Apple hardware, and given that the only Apple hardware that is fully supported by VMware isn’t the most current Mac Pro1, what are the benefits of virtualizing OS X?

  • More efficient use of resources. Even if you’re just running two VMs on a Mini, that’s half the capex of needing two Minis for the same purpose.
  • The ability to add new servers quickly, without needing to buy new hardware.
    • You can add services that you would never be able to justify the hardware spend.
    • If you get an idea for something that might work in your environment, it’s pretty quick and easy to try it out.  You can create a new VM or clone an existing one and try it out.  It lets you tinker.
  • Easy creation of test environments. For those of us who are developing Apple apps (either Mac or iOS), virtualization makes running different test environments a whole lot easier. I’ve heard from a lot of iOS dev shops that have thousands of OS X VMs that run Xcode for dev and test purposes.
  • If you’ve got That One App that only runs on Snow Leopard, you don’t have to have dedicated hardware for it.
  • If you upgrade something in a VM and it doesn’t go well, you can roll back to an earlier snapshot quickly and easily.
  • In a disaster recovery scenario, you can replicate VMs off-site so that you don’t lose anything.
  • High availability increases your uptime.
  • Storing a VM on external storage allows you to bring up that VM on another host (that’s running Apple hardware, of course).

 

 

  1. You can successfully run vSphere on a Mac Mini, it’s just not a supported configuration.  Here’s a recent blog post from New Relic about doing so.