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).

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).

This post was mentioned on Twitter by rbrambley: vmetc.com: VMware Workstation 7 Now Available:

After a few short weeks as a Release Candidate (RC), Version 7 o… http://bit.ly/2xCcDL...

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.

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.”