Virtualization systems aren’t quite as compatible with, and transparent to, applications as Gibbs thought they were. Also GrandCentral accounts and disposable telephone numbers.
Following my recent column about Google’s GrandCentral telephone number sevice you sent a large number of requests asking for invitations to get GrandCentral accounts. Alas, this used to be a facility in GrandCentral but sometime after Google acquired the service the feature was removed. I’m afraid you’ll have to get an account the same way I did: Go to GrandCentral’s home page, click on the Reserve button, and keep your fingers crossed.
On a related note, check out Tossable Digits, a service that allows you to set up any number of phone numbers in just about any domestic or international area code and set them to ring on any phone and set the times of the day that you permit the numbers to ring and where. Here’s the cool thing: The numbers can be discarded anytime at no charge. Great for figuring out who is giving away your personal data and for removing a source of annoyance if they do. I will be discussing this when I get around to really beating it up.
So, this week I’m wondering about virtualization technologies and compatibility issues. Over the last couple of years I’ve written about several virtualization products and just recently I’ve noticed some of them aren’t quite as compatible with, and transparent to, applications as I thought they were.
I first noticed this issue some time after I reviewed a product called Storm Predator that lets you download weather data for your locality. I decided to move Storm Predator to a virtual machine so I could keep my Windows 2003 server as clean as possible. I installed the software under VMware without any hint of a problem and it ran fine for something over 16 hours. But when I checked the next day it had simply quit. No swirls, no flourishes, no error messages. . . . It was just gone!
Thinking that this was odd, I restarted Storm Predator and again the next day it was gone. After a couple more attempts I eventually convinced myself that this was really happening so I asked the guys who developed Storm Predator what the problem might be. They suggested the software might need more RAM, so I increased the VM’s memory allocation but the problem persisted. I then got distracted and forgot about the issue until last week.
Now, some time ago I reviewed WhatsUp Gold from Ipswitch (actually it was 2002!). With a new release of WhatsUp coming out that I’ll want to review, I thought I’d better check out the current release. I decided to install it in a virtual operating system under Parallels Virtuozzo Containers (reviewed a few weeks ago), which would allow me to throw away the installation when I got the new release.
When I ran the installer for WhatsUp Gold Premium v11.0.3 in a container under Parallels Virtuozzo Containers on Windows 2003 SE SP2, WhatsUp refused to install, claiming “ERROR: Printer and File Sharing Required.” As these were, in fact, installed there was obviously something else going on.
The problem seems to be that the virtualized environments have subtle gotchas. One of Ipswitch’s sales engineers sent me a lengthy discussion on the topic that started with, “I’m afraid that VM environments are not ‘supported’ by this version of WhatsUp Gold. That is not to say that they won’t work, we have many customers who do use them successfully. Just that there are many things that make them unique and cause minor difficulties along the way.” Interesting, but that rather raises more questions.
I’m now trying to find the time to delve into this further, but I’ve been held up by the Virtuozzo Containers Management Console, which, for no apparent reason, has started to refuse to connect to the container system! Bizarrely I can still use Remote Desktop Protocol to connect to the running containers, but I can’t manage them and start or stop them!
