TO-Tech Blog

I don’t want this blog to just focus on computing processes that take forever (e.g., my last couple of SpinRite posts). But, here’s another one. This time I’m playing with VMware Workstation 6 and its ACE/Pocket ACE add-on. ACE lets you take a VMware virtual machine image and deploy it with full enterprise policy controls to multiple targets. Pocket ACE takes this one step further by letting you deploy a VM with an installed Guest OS to a portable storage device such as a USB flash drive, iPod, or portable USB hard drive. The idea is that you can take this device, plug it in to a Windows or Linux PC, and run your virtual environment from the portable device without installing anything on the host PC.

So, I built a Fedora 7 virtual machine using VMware Workstation 6 with ACE. I fully patched the relatively small system and installed one application (Mozilla Thunderbird 2.0.6 with my email profile in an account). After doing that, I created a deployable ACE configuration (all wizard driven). Finally, I plugged in a USB hard drive and started the Pocket ACE deployment process. That was over three hours ago. As you can see from my screen shot, it is maybe at the 10% mark at this point. I’m going to leave it running overnight and see how far it gets.

Now, the PC I’m testing this on is just a single core Athlon 64-bit CPU running Windows Vista (32-bit version) Ultimate Edition. Still, this seems awfully slow to me. Will it take 30 hours to complete? I hope not. Stay tuned to yet another TO-Tech marathon process.

UPDATE: It turns out that while VMware Pocket ACE’s deployment process is slow, it is not as glacial as I originally thought. It looks like Pocket ACE didn’t like the external hard drive I used to test it initially. I tried it a couple more times and watched it progress to different levels (all the way up to 40% on one test) and then lock up. I connected a Western Digital MyBook external drive and Pocket ACE was able to deploy my Fedora 7 Linux VM to it in about an hour (still slow but better than overnight). I’m not sure what it doesn’t like about the first hard drive (an old 40GB drive in a Coolmax HD-360 USB enclosure). My first thought was that the drive couldn’t handle sustained large file copies. However, I copied over two VMware Workstation ACE VM directories (10.9 GB of files) and everything copied over fine.

If you use Microsoft Virtual PC or Virtual Server and have Red Hat, Fedora, or CentOS Linux guest OSes, you probably have clock problems. Clocks basically lose an alarming amount of time may be hours off within a day or two. You may also have repeating keys problems when typing. Microsoft’s Ben Armstrong (Virtual PC Guy) posted a tip a while back…

Repeating keys under Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux

…that pointed to a Microsoft Knowledge Base (KB) article that recommends adding the clock=pit (programmable interruptible timer) option on the grub kernel line in /boot/grub/menu.lst. However, if you started using RHEL 5 (CentOS 5 in my case), take a look at your /var/log/messages file. You will probably find a warning that the clock= option has been deprecated. From what I can see, replacing it with…

clocksource=pit

…takes care of that warning. However, the RHEL 5 based Linux clock still runs a bit slowly. I ended up having the clock sync with a time source every hour to deal with it.

I was very interested to find CNet’s comparison of Parallels Desktop for Mac and VMware Fusion…

Inside CNET Labs: Windows virtual machine performance on the Mac

Then, I read what they used for testing: An 8-core MacPro. Ok, everyone out there using an 8-core MacPro, raise your hand. Ok, now everyone else raise your hand. I’m guessing the “everyone else” outnumbered the 8-core users by about 10-to-1 (if not much much more). It would be more interesting and much more useful if CNet had used a more typical user setup like an iMac or MacBook Pro Core 2 Duo with 2GB RAM.
The results are interesting if unsurprising. VMware’s ability to use multiple processors should outperform Parallels by what we see in CNet’s tests. It was interesting to read that CNet could not run the Quake 4 test using Fusion while it did run under Parallels.

I’ll try to provide a more realistic test scenario when I am able to unbury myself from writing projects (due at the end of August). I also have VMware Workstation 6 with ACE 2 for Windows. So, I may be able to test that and provide some comments (although not direct performance comparions) there too.

I installed a beta release of Windows Vista using Parallels Desktop for Mac 1.0 last year using a Microsoft provided DVD ISO file. So, I thought that installing the production version of Windows Vista using 5 CD ISO files would be a more-or-less similar experience. Unfortunately, I was wrong. Vista’s installer apparently got lost in trying to work with the WIM (Windows Image) file format (introduced along with Vista) when used from inside an ISO file (just a guess, btw). So, next up… Installing from real physical CD discs.

I wrote a little PDF book for O’Reilly Media last summer (2006) titled Windows for Intel Macs. This Short Cuts series book was written with a focus on Mac users who also need to or want to run Microsoft Windows on an Intel based Mac running either Apple Boot Camp (dual boot) or Parallels Desktop for Mac (virtualization).

It is amazing how much has changed since the book was released last August. Microsoft released Windows Vista to replace XP. Parallels went from version 1 to version 3 (which was released just this week). Apple released a couple of minor point releases of Boot Camp (1.3 is the current release). But, I’m not going to talk much about that since I prefer virtualized platforms vs. dual-boot.

The old book (10 months is apparently forever in computer time) is still in the Short Cuts Best Selling list. But, with all the changes in both Parallels Desktop for Mac and Windows Vista, I thought I’d provide some updates to the book’s topic area in this blog. I don’t know how regularly I’ll post Parallels/Vista information here. But, I’ll try to post at least a couple of items per week for the next month or two.