Archives for posts with tag: Software

VMware Workstation 8 — What’s new?

September 7, 11 //
8

VMware is close (still in beta) to releas­ing the new major release of VMware Workstation.

Update 14. Sep­tem­ber 2011: VMware Work­sta­tion 8 has now offi­cially been released.

VMware Work­sta­tion 8 brings a lot of new fea­tures and enhance­ments to the table, and I’ve been lucky enough to play around with it in the beta program.

VMware Work­sta­tion 8 Sys­tem Requirements

To be able to install VMware Work­sta­tion, the host sys­tem proces­sor needs to meet the fol­low­ing requirements:

  • 64-bit x86 CPU
  • LAHF/SAHF sup­port in long mode



To deter­mine if your host sys­tem is 64-bit capa­ble, down­load CPU-Z to deter­mine the capa­bil­i­ties of your processor.

To be able to run nested 64bit guests, like VMware vSphere 5 hosts, the sys­tem needs addi­tional CPU features:

  • AMD CPU that has segment-limit sup­port in long mode.
  • Intel CPU that has VT-x sup­port. VT-x sup­port must be enabled in the host sys­tem BIOS.

For a list of Intel proces­sors that sup­port VT-x check Intel® Vir­tu­al­iza­tion Tech­nol­ogy List, or use CPU-Z to iden­tify that as well.

VMware Work­sta­tion 8 — New features

  • New User Inter­face
    The user inter­face has been updated with new menus, tool­bars, and an improved pref­er­ences screen.


  • Remote Con­nec­tions
    Con­nect to Server fea­ture allows remote con­nec­tions to hosts run­ning Work­sta­tion, ESX 4.x and Vir­tual Cen­ter. You can now use Work­sta­tion as a sin­gle inter­face to access all of the VMs you need regard­less of where they reside.


  • Upload to vSphere
    Inte­grated vSphere drag and drop inte­gra­tion. Auto­matic usage of OVFTool enables easy upload­ing of VMs from VMware Work­sta­tion to ESX hosts or vCen­ter. Move work­loads from local test envi­ron­ment into pro­duc­tion envi­ron­ment with a few mouse clicks.


  • Share your VMs
    This new fea­tures allows you to con­trol who access them from other instances of Work­sta­tion, great fea­ture for teams work­ing together or sin­gle admin­is­tra­tors that access the same VMs from mul­ti­ple com­put­ers. Also, a VM that is shared is started with the host OS with­out start­ing the VMware Work­sta­tion GUI, sim­i­lar to how VMware Server worked before it was discontinued.


  • New default key­board dri­ver
    To limit the num­ber of reboots required dur­ing installation/upgrade of VMware Work­sta­tion, the Enhanced Key­board func­tion­al­ity is no longer installed by default.
    Note: Upgrad­ing from VMware Work­sta­tion 7 to 8 keeps and upgrades the exist­ing dri­ver unless VMware Work­sta­tion 7 is unin­stalled before installing ver­sion 8.


  • Vir­tual VT-x/EPT or AMD-V/RVI
    This is a good one, at least for all of us that run lab envi­ron­ments on our desk­tops or lap­tops.
    This set­ting enables you to run 64bit guests inside nested hyper­vi­sors like VMware vSphere 5. To enable it, edit the vCPU set­tings for the par­tic­u­lar VM.


  • Bet­ter Teams

    Add team attrib­utes to any VM with­out any of the draw­backs. No longer forced to make a Team in order to man­age mul­ti­ple VMs together.


  • Improved graph­ics per­for­mance in guests


  • Improved vSMP


  • Other Vir­tual Hard­ware Improve­ments
    Mem­ory sup­port is now 64GB pr VM
    HD Audio is avail­able for Win­dows Vista, Win­dows 7, Win­dows 2008, and Win­dows 2008 R2 guests (Real­Tek ALC888 7.1 Chan­nel High Def­i­n­i­tion Audio Codec)
    USB 3.0 sup­port for Linux guests. (Not avail­able for Win­dows guests)
    Blue­tooth devices can be shared with Win­dows guests

Installing and running VMware Compliance Checker for vSphere

April 20, 11 //
0

The first ver­sion of the new VMware Com­pli­ance Checker for vSphere tool is now avail­able for down­load.

VMware Com­pli­ance Checker for vSphere lets you scan your ESX and ESXi hosts for com­pli­ance with the VMware vSphere hard­en­ing guide­lines to make sure your hosts are prop­erly con­fig­ured. It also lets you save and print your assess­ment results, so you can track your com­pli­ance level over time, or use them as doc­u­men­ta­tion for inter­nal audits.

Installing VMware Com­pli­ance Checker for vSphere

After down­load­ing the VMwareComplianceCheckerForvSphere.msi installing is done in a mat­ter of sec­onds, using the all to famil­iar click Next to con­tinue Win­dows instal­la­tion rou­tine. The tool is Win­dows only at this point.


The tool is Java based, so the client machine you run it on needs to have it installed locally before you can use it.

Run­ning a Com­pli­ance Scan

Run­ning a com­pli­ance scan is very easy. Start up VMware Com­pli­ance Checker for vSphere and point it towards either a ESX/ESXi host, or towards your vCen­ter installation.

The tool runs for a while, and in the end you’ll be pre­sented with a nice HTML based report high­light­ing all your com­pli­ance shortcomings!

Impressions/Conclusion

VMware Com­pli­ance Checker for vSphere looks like it can be a valu­able tool to add to your vAd­min tool-belt. In it’s first ver­sion it does a good job of iden­ti­fy­ing poten­tial issues with your envi­ron­ment. As far as I can see, William Lam’s Perl based vSphere Secu­rity Hard­en­ing Report Script does more exten­sive checks for now.

The vSphere Secu­rity Hard­en­ing Report Script also has a cou­ple of other advan­tages, one being that it’s oper­at­ing sys­tem agnos­tic (since it’s Perl based) another advan­tage is that since it’s writ­ten in a script­ing lan­guage you can set up auto­mated cron jobs that per­forms the scan­ning for you. As far as I can see the VMware tool is miss­ing the abil­ity to sched­ule scans, which is some­thing I really hope VMware will add to it in the not to dis­tant future.