Justin's Blog

Here at Mozilla, we have been pretty happy VMWare customers (aside from some of the p2v migration hell). We are moving quite a bit of our infrastructure to VMs and it seems to be working out well.

Enter VMWare 3.0.

You might ask "why would you want to use the first rev a such a new release"? Good point - problem is, VMWare only supports one, that's right one 4 port ethernet card (Intel quad port). No problem - I order our servers with the supported Intel PRO/1000 Quad Port Server Adapter. This adapter has worked fine in other older boxes so I have no reason to think it won't work. Well, Intel has discontinued the "MT" version of the cards, and only sells the "GT" version of the cards. After 5 days of tedious interaction with VMware web support, we find why 2.5.3 won't see the card - 2.5.3 only supports the out of date and impossible to get "MT" version of the card.

VMWare 2.5.3 only supports one quad port card that you can't get, with no ETA on "GT" version support for 2.5.x - great - guess we'll try 3.0. So we get 3.0 install and it recognizes the "GT" version of the card - yay.

Now the real fun starts - I go to the web admin console that I have used in the past to configure the host - wait - there is nothing here?!? No network configuration, no VM config options, nothing! It appears VMWare has moved all the configuration to a .Net, windows-only application called "Infrastructure Client". I use a Mac, much of my team runs Linux. Why in the world would you take a web-based, platform independent configuration tool and move it to a .Net application?

So you ask why I need Parallels to run VMWare? That's why (I'm on a Mac, and need a Windows OS to configure VMWare). And it sucks. I think VMWare has a really great product and one that can help scale our infrastructure, but why focus the admin tools on just one OS? Seems the whole company is built around virtualization and cross-platform support, but has taken a step backwards with this change in 3.0. Hopefully VMWare will fix this issue by producing upcoming versions of Infrastructure Client by supporting it on different platforms.