VMware release team meeting, Friday 28 March 2008 at 11 in N42-286
Guests: Patrick Whitney and Dave Kalendarian for TSM and
Paul Heffernan for Licensing
Licensing Q&A with Paul Heffernan
Discussion of concern that students will understand that VMware images
count against the count of permitted installations. Heather Anne has
crafted a blanket statement to remind users that Virtual Machines have
issues to which they should pay attention.
Microsoft permits licensing under VMware. Each VM image is considered a
separate computer requiring individual licensing and activation.
Apple does not permit running MacOS in a virtual machine.
Red Hat Linux is site-licensed to MIT, but the pricing is subject to
re-negotiation if our usage gets much bigger than 2000 active
registrations. Every unique host name registering for RH9 is counted.
Because Red Hat allows up to 4 virtual guests on a server, multiple
registrations of the same host id increment the count every multiple of
4 registrations.
Documentation issues:
- itinfo is having a content freeze between April 1 and April 7.
- The install docs are drafted. Review them if you've not done so
already. - Vendor docs seem pretty good at describing how to create virtual
machines, so we don't need to craft such docs with screen images. We
will provide just the MIT-specific information. - Some vendor docs change quickly, and so we should point to vendor docs
instead of keeping our own cached copies. - Vendor Getting Started docs seem to change infrequently, and so we
will keep MIT-local copies of these docs.
Decisions Made:
- Heather Anne is excluded from the team rotation of taking meeting
minutes because she is actively working on the documentation through the
meeting discussions.
Team decisions on best practices:
- back up: TSM
1. Install TSM in the virtual machine to back up files.
2. As a rule, exclude the virtual machine images from the periodic
backup of the host system.
3. Virtual machines themselves that need backup for disaster
recovery, should be backed up explicitly.
- virusscan
Recommend installing and running virusscan in VM guests.
- anti spyware (ms defender)
Same recommendation we offer for non-virtual machines.
"Treat your virtual machine the same as any other machine for security
purposes."
- auto update configurations
Yes we should keep auto-update enabled of VMware.
Yes users should enable auto update of VMware guests.
Action Items:
bowser: continuing to work on getting a support contact.
alexp: Contact network security to find out what to tell customers who
get viruses in a virtual image.
all: Review known issues and report any presently undocumented ones.
Updated/Resolved action items:
mcneal: Verify Apple position on running MacOS in a virtual machine.
Update:
Patrick stated that Apple does not allow Mac OS X Client to be virtualized. Mac OS X
Server can be run virtually, but only on Apple-labeled hardware.
You'll need an additional Server license for each virtualized server,
in addition to the license for the host OS.
More info at:
http://db.tidbits.com/article/9277
bowser: Will work with VMware to find out how updates are supposed to
work. (Windows seems to detect availability, and to install them.
Linux does not detect the update.)
Update: I sent email to vmware representative who forwarded it to Theresa Regan. I will discuss this issue further with Theresa this week.
Alexp: Contacted Net Security team about virus/security issues in VMware images, requested that they write up some recommendations/best practices for us.
No meeting next week. Email Check-in only.
Next meeting: Friday 11 April 2008 at 11 in N42-286