Category Archives: vSphere

Fusion, user experience, vSphere, Workstation

I love easter eggs

I love easter eggs.  They’re a great user experience if done right. They make people feel more connected to your product because they know one of its secrets.  Easter eggs remind people that there are real people behind what they’re using.  They let the team show some personality and a sense of humor.

Last year, someone discovered that we’ve shipped a game of Pong.  Last week, someone else discovered that there’s more to Pong than meets the eye.

I’ll leave it as an exercise for the reader to discover other easter eggs …

vCloud, vCloud Director, VMware, vSphere

free VMware videos

We’ve just released a website that has more than 50 videos about vSphere, vCloud Director, vFabric, Site Recovery Manager, and more.  It’s a great introduction to VMware solutions to help you learn more about what we’ve got to offer.

I’ve been watching a few of them in my spare time to learn more about some of our products that I haven’t yet had a chance to touch, as well as to see how we’re talking about our products to our users.  They’ve been pretty useful to me, I hope they are to you too.

vSphere

The Register on vSphere 5.1’s Flex-based web client

The Register’s click-inducing title Love vSphere? You’re going to have to love Flash too made me wince when I saw the title, but I was pleasantly surprised to see that it’s a pretty even-handed look at the new web client and how it came into being.  I won’t spoil the whole thing, but here’s the conclusion:

VMware has done a spectacular job of delivering the first enterprise-class Flash application I have had the pleasure to use. The web client in vSphere 5 was an interesting toy that we collectively poked at, shrugged, and went back to the familiar C# client. This time the training wheels are off, and VMware doesn’t disappoint.

For those of you who install 5.1, I’d love to hear your thoughts on the web client.  My team has put a lot of work into this, and we’re continuing on it in the future.  Stay tuned for more announcements of research that my team is doing so that you can help us shape the future of vSphere and the vCloud Suite.

user experience, vCloud, vCloud Director, VMware, vSphere

virtual infrastructure architects and senior admins needed for user research

I’m conducting some user research in the coming months, and I need virtual infrastructure architects and senior admins to participate in it.  At a high level, I’m looking for virtual infrastructure architects and senior admins who do tasks such as manage and monitor virtual infrastructure, plan capacity, create VMs, migrate VMs, or deal with virtual infrastructure help tickets.  If you’re local to Palo Alto, then you can come to my usability lab and participate in person; if you’re outside of Palo Alto (including outside of the US), then we’ll conduct the studies remotely via WebEx.

This user research is a little different than usual: I’m going to be doing a lot of research on a related group of topics in the coming months, and so I’m putting together a small pool of people who will participate in multiple studies over that amount of time.  Every 6-8 weeks, I’ll run another usability study, and I’ll pull from this small pool of participants for it.  You don’t need to participate in each study, but you do need to commit to participating in at least one study.  The first study begins on Monday, August 13.  You will be compensated for participating in each study, and your level of compensation grows with each study you participate in.

If you’re interested in participating, then fill out this survey to tell me a bit more about what you do and what your virtual environment looks like.  And if you’ve got any questions, feel free to ping me.

Apple, VMware, vSphere

installing VMware ESXi 5 Server on a Mac Mini

One of the things that I’ve learnt about VMware is how awesome our users are, and how willing they are to share their knowledge and expertise.  So it didn’t come as a surprise to me when I came across a detailed write-up of installing VMware ESXi 5 Server on a Mac Mini.  Anyone who’s familiar with our hardware compatibility guide knows that this isn’t a supported configuration, so you’re using this at your own risk.  But I know that there are folks out there who are willing to hack at things, so have fun with it — and I’m sure that the authors of that post would appreciate any tips or insights that you have if you give it a go.

As for me, I’ve been wondering about updating the Mac Mini that serves as my home server.  Is this enough to push me over the edge?

vCloud Director, VMware, vSphere

launch day! vSphere 5, vCloud Director 1.5, Cloud Infrastructure Suite

Today’s a big day on the VMware campus in Palo Alto.  Our early-morning1 live webcast just ended, wherein we launched vSphere 5, vCloud Director 1.5, and the Cloud Infrastructure Suite.  Full details are available at the post VMware unveils vSphere 5 and the Cloud Infrastructure Suite at the VMware Console blog, which is the blog of our executive team2.

Aside from the sheer awesomeness that is contained in these announcements, I learnt a few things this morning about this release that make me totally proud to be at this company.  This is the largest coordinated launch of software that VMware has ever done, with more than 1 million engineering hours and 2 million QA hours going into this release alone.

There’s been a lot of effort put into getting workflows right.  It’s not about automating steps, it’s about eliminating steps whenever possible.  For example, in the new vCloud Director 1.5, using linked clones means that you can provision VMs in about 5 seconds.

I’m sure that there’s going to be a lot of articles about these new announcements today.  @vmware is probably the best aggregator of them, although I’ll also point to Duncan’s 5 is the magic number post that lists five of his favorite topics around our announcements.  And, of course, it wouldn’t be a VMware announcement if there weren’t an accompanying video. This one is a five-minute overview of what we announced today, all filmed on our campus:

 

  1. 9am PT is early for geeks! ↩
  2. I have to admit that my little geek heart goes pitter-patter that our execs have such a well-named blog ↩
iPad, vSphere

VMware vSphere Client for iPad available now!

1 Comment

Did I mention that we’ve got more coming for the iPad? Oh, yes, I did!

We’ve now released the VMware vSphere Client for iPad. It joins our VMware View for iPad release earlier this month. Both apps are free.1 The vSphere Client for iPad allows you to monitor your vSphere hosts and VMs, as well as do some management tasks. Srinivas Krishnamurti, our Senior Director for Mobile Solutions, has written a blog post for its release: VMware vSphere Client for iPad has left the building. Also, as with our previous iPad app release, boche.net has a detailed write-up of it.

As ever, a demo is worth a thousand words, so check out part one:

And part two:

It’s available in the App Store today.  Go forth and download!  After you’ve downloaded it, check out our community for VMware vSphere Client for iPad if you’d like to discuss this app or let us know what you think about it.

  1. And, as of this writing, both are doing very well in the list of most-downloaded business apps. ↩