Digital Rants

Where to begin? Been using it for 5 hours now. Running the 64bit linux edition on a 4GB Q6600 machine, on a Mandriva distribution. First thing first, the virtual machines are a lot faster and very responsive, and it is still free. Good news end here, everything else is broken. As this is an evaluation of the Linux version, the Windows edition may or may not fare as bad.

So what's wrong with it? Well, in a nutshell, everything!

...

Totally broken init script
Virtual machines do not start up in the order specified. Some machines depend on other virtual machines to be started first. VMWare 2 ignores what's configured and start every machine at once!

Worse, when you shut down the host OS, the script does not stop the virtual servers. So effectively your guest machines are not powered down gracefully.

This works so well in 1.0.x, and is totally and utterly broken in 2. You can no longer depend on VMware to automate your startup/shutdown procedure.
You can use vmrun to go around this problem. Too complicated to mention it here, will dedicate a whole blog if I got that working.

Roles and user permissions
This is totally broken! You have to manipulate the scroll bars for the web UI to actually load the user names and groups, and they appeared twice! Not only that, the icing on the cake is - adding any user permissions will throw the following message:

"RuntimeFault: Database temporarily unavailable or has network problems."

You also see this in the log file, you'd find the corresponding entry. That's very helpful, not!

[2008-10-04 13:57:37.210 'Vmomi' 1075861840 info] Throw vim.fault.DatabaseError
[2008-10-04 13:57:37.210 'Vmomi' 1075861840 info] Result:
(vim.fault.DatabaseError) {
dynamicType = <unset>,
msg = ""
}

This totally broken system was not caught by VMWare internally through it's beta cycles and release candidates.

Thankfully, this is easy to fix. Stop all your virtual machines, and remove any process that starts with vmware (broken script!). Next, edit the following file /etc/vmware/hostd/authorization.xml, and look for the entry:

XML:

change the value from 11 to 20 (12 might work, but I give a lot of overload just in case VMware mess up things again in later releases). Restart all the VMware processes, and it should work.

Web interface
Think of anything that's wrong with Web 2.0. And the VMWare Web UI is probably guilty of it - it's cluttered, it's slow, mundane tasks that were simple to perform now involve a lot of clicks and interaction. The design of the whole Web UI workflow is specifically designed to slow you down. Click on a machine, wait 4-5s for information to load. Everything is just so slow it's frustrating.

Halfway while using the UI, everything will suddenly choke and you get random error messages. The following is but one example, there are others!

ServiceNotAvailableException: Web service not available

Reloading will make the messages go away briefly, the only caveat is you have to log in again. Web UI is unusable in the beta and Release Candidates, and the official release is no different. At least VMWare is consistent in something.

VI Client
First of all, for those who do not already know, you can do away with the WebUI if you have a Windows machine running somewhere. The VI Client is a Windows only product and it comes with the installation:

/usr/lib/vmware/hostd/docroot/client/VMware-viclient.exe

Once installed, run it, enter the details and try to login. Chances are, you will get the following message:

Details: A connection failure occurred.

Do not bother clicking the Help button. Google for the answer and you'd find the first text field that says IP Address/name is totally misleading. What it expects is a URL. Yes, a URL, in the form of:

https://[vmware_host]:8333

Change [vmware_host] above to the IP of the machine with VMWare Server 2 installed, and you can finally login and enjoy - after waiting the 5-10s delay introduced by VMWare so you can go get that cup of coffee.

Conclusion
VMware Server? Who are they kidding? This is far from being server grade software. Automation is broken, usability is retarded, documentation is poor, error messages are obscure. This is the perfect software for a lazy IT department as the staff will be busy waiting for the VMWare client instead of doing something productive.

VMWare Server 2 is the dreaded sequel nobody likes. Feel let down when watching the movie Ultraviolet after Equilibrium? This is a million times worse. Feel free to try out VMWare 2 and disagree, I dare you. Warning: Do not upgrade the virtual hardware, it's not backwards compatible with 1.0.7. Sooner or later you will move back to 1.0.x or something else.

VMWare .

Score: 1/10
Pros: Faster virtual machines
Cons: Everything else

Last update: If you wish to rollback to 1.0.x, follow the instructions outlined in this post

Update 24 June 2009: Do yourself a favour, and try out Virtualbox. It's free too, and it works.