VM /ETC

Looks like someone is at the very beginning of Half Life 2 in that 3rd screen shot. I'd be very impressed if that game played well on a hypervisor. Workstation 7 is just in time for my VCP4 voucher to show up. Hopefully. Soon.

The Record and Replay functions are really special about VMware Workstation and extremely cool ideas, that really set the product apart.

As VMware expands these debugging gems more.. I can't imagine many C++ programmers wanting to do debugging work without Workstation.

I just wish VMware would get the record/replay in vSphere as well, and make it suitable for live servers (not FT).. Imagine the hypervisor having continuous recording on a recently unstable or particularly critical VM have a hook in VMware to automatically dump the past 5 minutes of server execution to a logging store, if an admin-specified condition is met [e.g. security compromise is detected, a critical service crashes, etc..], so.. detailed info is kept to assist thorough offline investigation/debugging of the issue :)


http://www.vmware.com/support/ws7/doc/releaseno...
As a person who dual-boots between Windows and Linux, I also really like the notion of Cross-Platform License Keys, and some of the other added features like.

"Pause a Virtual Machine - Free your CPU resources instantaneously without powering off or suspending the virtual machine.
Expand Virtual Disks — Increase the size of the virtual disk from within VMware Workstation. For Windows Vista and Windows 7 guests, the disk partitions can be adjusted without the use of additional software."

Dracolith,

I'm not a developer so I've never taken advantage of these features of Workstation, but I know no other competing desktop virtualization host can match that integration. VMware has the best offering for development no doubt, and record and replay are incredible.

Adding to vSphere, although interesting and useful, probably means extra storage and I/O. Maybe LabManager makes more sense since it is a perfect for a full development environment. I'm not sure, but I don't think LabManager has record and replay capability today.

Record/Replay is in vSphere in the FT technology. It's leveraged by the FT secondary.

@jasonboche I did not know the FT secondary/shadow VM was actually created via the Record/Replay technology. But, I believe you can't "rewind" a vSphere VM's "life" like you can on Workstation - or can you?

Perhaps... however, as I understand it, FT only "replays" if the source VM's host experiences a hardware failure, it is not useful for IT wanting to troubleshoot an app issue, doesn't really record or keep information once the execution has been logged to the protect VM. If a program running in the protected VM crashes, FT dutifully executes the crash, the app will crash on the protect VM in lock-step with the crash on the protected VM.

vSphere FT doesn't let you clone the fault-tolerant VM to a test environment and re-play the last few moments leading up to a crash of an important app.

What FT _does_ do is show that it ought to be possible, with a certain hardware cost (certainly, such a feature would have substantial overhead like FT).
If FT can log to another VM, it should be possible to log to a file instead, if VMware cares to do it.

Ideal example: production application crashes, say Apache httpd...
Response: auto-snapshot, dump recording and a copy of the VM to 'investigation' datastore
open the clone in VMware Workstation, re-play the moments before the crash while watching with a debugger

It may be used to extract information about the failure that got lost in the automatic reboot of the VM, or that was never recorded in the first place (poor logging).