While one can force NetWorker to retrieve a license, that is neither easy not operationally supportable.

Lovely idea, though.

I think you’ll need to check out subscription management – http://en.support.wordpress.com/subscriptions/

RKD – 3 comments in rapid succession on the same topic is a bit excessive for other subscribers of the thread – we don’t need a complete history of both products :-)

Thanks for your article.

I have used both Parallels and VMware Fusion since both products were pre-release beta (approximately around mid 2006 when the Intel Mac first took hold). In general, VMware has emphasized stability with the core virtualization engine and tends to move at a glacial pace. Parallels tends to rush their product to the market without proper testing. Parallels has heavily emphasized integration with the Mac OS X specifically, VMware has reluctantly followed suite. Both products have bugs, but the core of VMware Fusion has been more dependable for me over the last 3+ years. I prefer to use both products running side-by-side on both my Mac Pro and MacBook Pro. The 2 engines will run side by side quite nicely if you have a fast SSD storage device that holds the virtual machines. I prefer Parallels for my “desktop VMs” that run MS Office and other Windows desktop applications. For the “desktop VMs”, I prefer to heavily integrate with the Mac OS X host in seamless (Coherence or Unity) mode. I usually run VMware Fusion in “window” mode in one of my 16 Mac OS spaces for the purpose of development VMs, ESX, project-oriented VMs, and VMs that I wish to move between PCs and Macs. VMware Fusion runs the virtualized Mac OS X Server much faster than Parallels (but the sound doesn’t function like it does in Parallels). Also, VMware Fusion does a much better job of handling the quirks of old operating systems like NT, 2000, 98 which are from time to time necessary for some of my upgrade work.

Having both Parallels and VMware Fusion around benefits everyone. Both products have improved nicely. I doubt Virtual Box will ever emphasize integration with the Mac OS as much as both Parallels, then VMware have done. It has its quirks but Virtual Box for the Mac makes for a nice free virtualization tool. Virtual Box is supposed to support Parallels, VMDKs, Virtual Box drives, and Virtual Server/Hyper-V (.vhd) virtual drives, but it doesn’t work in all cases. Virtual Box doesn’t have a straight forward import process unlike the other two products on the platform. I wouldn’t be surprised if Virtual Box is faster than both Parallels and VMware Fusion once they have optimized the newly available SMP technology. For some users Virtual Box will be all they need. I haven’t found a permanent place in my lineup for Virtual Box (amongst VMware Server, ESX, ESXi, Fusion, Xen Server 5.5, XenApp, Parallels Desktop, and Windows 2008 R2 Hyper-V which I all use for different niches), but I could see using it if I wanted a free virtualization solution for a client that was nice and fast and thin.

It would be nice if you could adjust the 2GB behavior, however the 2GB splitting is still the option I will choose for moving VMs from machine to machine until 1TB USB 3.0 thumbdrives that are faster than current SSDs are commonplace. All my file systems can handle 2TB files, but copying a 30GB to 100GB single virtual disk isn’t always convenient (if you haven’t run into this yet, you will eventually).

I had a LOT of these errors and no recourse previously…

I think there’s going to be a fairly interesting transition period for the data domain folks. The hardware will integrate fairly quickly into the EMC product line (we’re in fact already seeing that); however, where things are going to be interesting is the moving of the data domain management into the BURA stream in those high roles. There’s going to be an adjustment period, for sure, but there’s also great potential to have fresh ideas and fresh perspectives come into these product lines – something I’m greatly looking forward to.

FAST2 will be the more interesting technology for sure. Years ago, as I mentioned in the blog posting, I watched a Compellent demo where individual hot spots were just seamlessly moved up storage tiering; that’s where I’ve been saying for a while now that we’ve reached a point where we need to start doing storage “smarter” rather than just “bigger”. (That being said, I still have some concerns about the rather haphazard approach to data deduplication we’re seeing, but I’ll cover that in an upcoming blog article.)

Thanks for the news from your presentation, much appreciated!

Cheers,

Preston.