Virtual Strategy Magazine Book Review: Professional VMware Server

Automation is not the only improvement to be found in the Workstation 6 release.  Vista host support is just one of the many additions to be found.  The one thing that’s been keeping me away from Vista thus far is the lack of VM support on a Vista host.  I can live with not being able to run Visual Studio on Vista for the time being simply because I do all of my development in virtual machines but not being able to run VM’s on a Vista host was a deal breaker.  No longer however now I’m running Vista with VMware Workstation 6 Build 36983.**

** I’m still puzzled by Microsoft’s decision/lack of action/screw up/whatever around the unfriendly atmosphere that Vista and VS 2005 create.  You just can’t use them together, or at least not without a great deal of pain.  To me… and this is just me talking, I would have made sure that the premiere development platform for Vista development would actually RUN on the platform itself.  Ah, I digress

Anyway, back to Vix.  For those of you who have read my book I touched upon leveraging Vix with VMware Server.  It’s a nice API, or at least it will be at some point.  Vix v1 had a tremendous amount of documentation errors as well as just flaky behavior.  It was of course a v1 product so I’ll cut them some slack.  Now we are moving into a v1.1 product and adding additional product support.  This should be interesting.

Over the next several days I’ll hack out a few Vix scripts that leverage a bit of the VMware Workstation 6 integration.  Let’s see how she handles.

I’ll be there for the afternoon developer track.  I’m sure it will be an interesting lecture.  They usually are.  Make sure and say hello.  I’ll be the one that’s 6′5″.  :)

Honestly I sat down today to kick off the first post here at vmcoder.com with a look at a VMware Workstation 6 Beta 1 install on Windows Vista.  Three hours in now and I can’t stop fighting with Vista long enough to even get to the install.

By far the biggest problem is copying and moving files between hard disks.  Oh dear Lord what a slow and painful process.  In XP you drag a file, or group of files, and drop them in a new location like a second hard disk.  XP would just take off copying the files like crazy.  Well… not Vista.  I literally sat for 15 minutes watching Vista calculate the time remaining on a file copy before anything ever happened.  Then, once it started, it’s moving at a snails pace.  I could tap out the binary in morse code quicker than Vista is copying the files.

“Calculating time remaining…”  *sigh*

Oh… 20 minutes, yes I said 20 minutes, I now have 10 hours and 34 minutes remaining.  It’s a 900MB file being moved between two SATA drives on the same adapter.

Now, this problem is rather simple but might be harder to detect if you are unfamiliar with your machine setup.  It all boils down to drivers.  Vista by default did not install the proper driver for my Intel RAID/SATA card.  The driver it installed worked… kind of.

Quick fix (Temporary):  By default my Dell BIOS is setup to Autodetect RAID / AHCI.  This is found in the drives section of the BIOS.  My transfer speeds, according to the BIOS, were supposed to be 3.0GB/s.  So, I switched the BIOS to Autodetect RAID / ATA and rebooted.  Once Vista started up it started installing new drivers for the SATA devices, the controller, and the drives.  Once the drivers updated and I rebooted once again, at Vista’s request, the transfer speeds and file copy issues were gone.  This is a TEMPORARY fix.  You should use the better fix below.

Better fix: Jump on Intel’s site and use their ChipID utility to determine the chipset you have.  Once you have that information download the newest driver for the SATA chipset from Intel, install, and away you go.  This is by far the best solution but the above will work if you are in a pinch.

Now I can move on to the business at hand, VMware Workstation 6 Beta 1 on Windows Vista.  More to come.