Rusten in vrede – Mark Hoekstra

Via Bright Magazine, one of my favorite makers/hackers has passed away this past week.  With the help of Google translate, it sounds as if he had a sudden heart attack while riding his bike.  34 years is way too young to pass like this.  Mark ran the site Geek Technique.

Edit:  The irony is thick… his last track scrobbled on Last.fm was Instant Death by the Beastie Boys.  Geeks love irony

Rest in Peace Mark Hoekstra

VMware Fusion 2.0 released

I already blogged about the new VMware Studio product yesterday but somehow I missed the release of VMware Fusion 2.0 in the last week as well.  Fusion 2.0 rounds out the features to make this release more even with the features in Workstation 6.x on Linux and Windows.  New features include command line interface (vmrun), multiple snapshots (sorely missing from 1.0), and some general UI awesomeness.  If you have paid for Fusion 1.0 the upgrade is totally free and you can use your old serial number.

VMware Studio – Automated production of virtual machines

One of the more interesting things I have seen in recent weeks is the release of a product called VMware Studio.  There wasn’t much fanfare associated with the release, but this brings a lot of interesting potential for software developers.  Basically you get a pre-built virtual machine with a web application that lets you build templates and customizations for automating production of virtual machines for your own product. 

There are a lot of nice features to make use of, but I think one of the most compelling is that once your templates are built, you can build the virtual machines from the command line.  This means that you will actually be able to integrate the automated production of virtual machines into your software build.  I smell a maven plugin coming soon 

The product is not without its issues however.  Currently you must use VMware Server 1.0.x as the provisioning server and the Studio web application pushes the templates and scripts to this server to build the virtual machine.  Since I run ESX in my lab environment I don’t have a lot of bare hardware to spare for this task and I was unable to get VMware Server to run inside a VM (believe me, I tried).  It would be nice if they could get the tools used for provisioning to run separately from VMware Server so that you could install the entire thing on your build machine.  I suspect it is only a matter of time before this is a reality.  Give VMware Studio a shot.