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