VMware yesterday released a new version of VMware Fusion, their virtualization solution for the Apple operating system. You can download the version at the download website. Fusion 3.1 has a huge number of new features which can found in the “What’s new section”. Additionally to the new features their are improvements for graphics, boot camp and pc migrations. Also Fusion 3.1 supports 10 more operating systems.

Back in the days of View 3.0 the USB redirection was done over a virtual channel in the RDP protocol. This changed with View 3.1 as of this release there were a second way of USB data transportation added. You can still use the RDP virtual channels and it is used as a fallback if the preferred option, a TCP connection is not available. The TCP connection is listening on port 32111 in the guest. The configuration can be seen in the virtual desktops Windows Registry at HKLM\Software\VMware, Inc.\VMware VDM\Agent\Configuration\Listener. The parameter FRAMEWORKCHANNEL defines the port number which is 32111 as default. Both connections, the virtual channels and also the TCP connection can be tunnelled via the VMware View Security Server. With the USB Redirection you can use USB device filters on a class, hardware ID a specific device basis. The Registry keys for those are:

HKLM\Software\Vmware, Inc.\VMware VDM\USB\ClassFilters

HKLM\Software\Vmware, Inc.\VMware VDM\USB\ HardwareIDFilters

HKLM\Software\Vmware, Inc.\VMware VDM \USB\AllowHardwareIDs

The format of each entry in HEX is: Vid_xxxx&Pid_xxxx  -> xxxx. If a device is excluded by the class, you can specifically include it again by the hardware ID. The ClassGUID’s and hardware ID’s ca be found in the machine log file on each client.

To learn more about HID devices with VMware View please check one of my older articles. This article also gives you a quick overview of the USB log file entries.

Maybe you’ve seen the VMware & Google announcement from earlier this week? The new Spring Roo release 1.1.0.M1 does already support Google Web Toolkit and Google App Engine integration. I’ve found a nice article today at SpringSource’s website which describes how to configure the SpringSource Tool Suite to deploy your applications directly to the Google App Engine.

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Update: I want to clarify that I of course know that network connections all over the world are different in speed, latency and packet loss. My video only shows that my ad-hoc connection from Europe to the West Coast just works well and the video/website mentioned in this article could give the readers/watchers/listeners are wrong impression of PCoIP.

This week I was really surprised about an blog article I saw linked on Twitter. In the article/videos the author shows a virtual desktop connected over PCoIP from San Francisco to Ottawa. For more details on the scenario please check the article and also listen to the speaker in video. He said: “Definitely much much worse than ICA was…”. Well the “real world” scenario as he describes it looks really strange to me. Ok, he’s connecting from a hotel internet connection (which is mostly crap, but in SF?) via VPN to his data centre but only on one continent with a distance of approximately 5100km (Maybe the cable is going a longer way…). I know PCoIP and is has definitely a much better performance on the WAN and I checked it. This is my real world example: My connection is from my home office’s DSL line through the VPN to the data centre in California.

A ping from my local workstation to the View Manager Server looks like that: (Doh! 382ms)

64 bytes from xx.xxx.xx.xx: icmp_seq=2 ttl=242 time=382.313 ms
64 bytes from xx.xxx.xx.xx: icmp_seq=3 ttl=242 time=382.777 ms
64 bytes from xx.xxx.xx.xx: icmp_seq=4 ttl=242 time=382.545 ms
64 bytes from xx.xxx.xx.xx: icmp_seq=5 ttl=242 time=382.215 ms

And the result looks like that:

I think this is great for an overseas connection and watching a video, hah? Sometimes it hangs for a short time but 382ms!

Back in my Desktop Specialist days I’ve created several beginner videos which explain the different functions in ThinApp. For example they are about AppLink, Entry Points, ThinReg, sbmerge and also about the isolation modes and the virtual file system. Unfortunately they are only available in the German language but if someone speaks it, please enjoy. You’ll find the videos in my Vimeo ThinApp group at: http://www.vimeo.com/groups/thinapp

For quite a while now I’ve tried to get Zimbra Desktop working with my Zimbra Collaboration Server (ZCS) but I couldn’t get it running. I’ve always received an error message saying: account.INVALID_ATTR_VALUE: zimbraPrefForwardIncludeOriginalText must be one of: …” for me just something like: $&%°!%!" so I left it for a while. But again I thought there must be a way to get it running and I investigated the issue.

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Due to some limitations with the Zimbra ZCS Open Source edition, especially the missing ActiveSync protocol feature I’ve decided to update my mail server to Zimbra Collaboration Suite Network Edition. The upgrade was easy going, just start the ./install.sh script and let it go. The installer asks you for holding the configuration data and after 10-15 minutes my server was running the commercial version with a much better feature set. ActiveSync and mobile devices support are not the only features which I wanted. Also the integrated backup and software updating function was a good enhancement as I see today. I love the software update check which can be configured on a daily, hourly or minutely basis. It will inform you directly when a new release of the collaboration server is available. Great for me because I’m always forgetting to update my services to the newest release.

The good thing is that the update feature is not automatically upgrading your server when a new version is available. You can just configure ZCS to send you an email if a new update is available at the Zimbra website.

Also the backup is great. In the Open Source edition I had to write a script and run a Cron job to backup my server but now, with the Network Edition this is implemented in the admin console. Just selecting the Backup link offers me the option to do a full or an incremental backup of my server.

It’s also possible to do an easy restore for all accounts or just the accounts which have maybe a corrupt database or the users having deleted their data by mistake.

I think Zimbra ZCS Network Edition is a great competition for other collaboration solutions. It’s great that Zimbra can run in either the private or public cloud. If you haven’t  seen Zimbra yet, you should definitely  check it out at www.zimbra.com.

Today VMware announced to start a series of technology collaborations with Google for delivering solutions that help enterprise software developers to be more efficient at building and deploying their applications. Both companies are collaborating in multiple cases to make cloud applications more productive, portable and flexible. Google is announcing support for Spring Java Applications on the Google App Engine. Using the Eclipse-based SpringSource Toolkit Suite, developers can build and deploy applications in their VMware vSphere environments, at VMware vCloud partners or directly to the Google App Engine. VMware and Google are also working together with Spring Roo, a rapid application development tool and the Google Web Toolkit (GWT). Finally teh companies are collaborating with their performance tracing technologies. You can find the Google I/O live webcast at Youtube. There is also a blog post from Steve Herrod at his blog.

Three weeks ago I bought an iPad and of course it’s an expensive gadget but I’m using it more and more in my business day. The Wyse Pocket Cloud application is just one example of great apps which are available for the iPad. Today I used the Cisco WebEx app for iPad for the first time and I’m really impressed to be honest. Normally I’m using WebEx on my Mac but what annoys me is the fullscreen mode which is automatically  started when the applications starts up. Then you can only hardly change to Outlook or other applications during a running WebEx session. Using WebEx on the iPad is cool because you can just work on your computer as usual and the display is big enough to show the presentation. A great feature is the call-back function where the WebEx systems needs your phone number and then gives you a call back. In this case your name is shown in the WebEx when you are talking. Just great, love it!

Starting today everyone who owns an VMworld account can vote for the session they would like to see at this years VMworld in San Francisco (US) and/or Copenhagen (Europe). Voting will be possible until 26th of May. Take your chance and vote for the topics you’re interested in. And of course please vote for my session.

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