Fortysomething Geek

VMware just released Fusion 7 Pro with some major changes and updates. The most obvious are support for Yosemite OSX 10.10, improve performance, GPU upgrades.

However, if you are Mac based developer who is involved with ESXi or vSphere, this is an absolute must-have upgrade. This version definitely gives weight to the "Pro" denomination. The remote server integration makes it well worth the 80ドル upgrade and 150ドル full price.

So what is new?

I'm not going to rehashed some press release or product page. You can read that directly on VMware's own product page here:http://www.vmware.com/products/fusion-pro/ . Improved performance. Check! Improved Retina support. Check!

The "what's big" is the vSphere, ESXi support. This is only in the Pro version and it definitely makes it a big differentiator between the regular Fusion 7.

For those Mac developers who tirelessly worked for years with ESXi, your normal modus operandi was to install a Windows VM and run vSphere Client in a Windows' Guest. Now, a majority of those functions are built right into Fusion Pro.

In the screenshot below, I can see my local VMs and in the preview pane and I can now see the inventory of my remote Virtual Machines. I even get general stats on usage of the remote server.


Yep. Now you can start, stop, modify remote Virtual Machines, and even deploy OVFs right inside Fusion Pro.

Impressive indeed!

You simply, connect and you have some basic control. This is simply a killer feature.





Another benefit to this is you can now run Virtual Machines remotely. I have 6 and 8-core AMD ESXi white box servers running in my basement. They have 16 and 32GB of RAM with 3 terabyte of data storage. I don't need to even run my development VMs on my Macbook. Rather, I can control and run them remotely. Sure, you can VNC or RDP in but that method is often laggy and unpleasant. Nor can you enable features of the guest via traditional remote desktop connectivity.

Here, you can run and enable device features remotely. For example, I run a proxy server and have a stand-by failover VM on another server. Both are running with the same IP. When one fails, I simply enable the networking on the standby unit to take over. The guest will utilize whatever CPU and GPU processing power your remote host hypervisor has.


So if you have VMs on a ESXi, vSphere or Windows Workstation, you can now run your VM on beefier, remote boxes. The whole start-up and control process feels and acts if you are running locally. I am very impressed. You won't get unity or shared folders on remote VMs. Thus, you'd still need to run those VMs locally for those guests that need those features. However, for most console OSes (Linux apps servers), you can simply run them remotely.

Pictured below is an example. I dragged a local LAMP stack from my Macbook onto my remote ESXi server box and voila. Instant provisioning.


You can also export and download as well.


I must say, these Pro features are impressive. It doesn't have all the features of the Windows ESXi client but it covers most of the stuff I need on a day to day basis. The OVF export takes the hassle of tweaking VMDK and thin provisioning.

Now, let me comment on some of the other features of Fusion 7.

You can select what GPU you want to use if your Mac has a hybrid graphics card set-up. Before, I had to use some hacks to disable the NVDIA card but now, you can set it in the VM guest.


This will save battery power considerably for Macbooks with dual GPUs. Console based OS and older operating systems will no longer start the GPU if you don't want them to. My macbook no longer whizzes the fan when I want to fire up an old copy of Windows XP or CentOS.


They've also improved Retina support. For non HiDPI operating systems, the rendering doesn't look so bad anymore. Pictured above is Windows XP and it now looks fairly good without the nasty dithering blockiness found in earlier versions.

User interface wise, it is an clean, streamlined new look that will fit right in with Yosemite.



Overall, I am very impressed. I am definitely giving this upgrade a big thumbs up.

There are lots of software/solutions that turns computers, NAS, and other devices into Airplay compatible end receivers. Now, there is one like that for Chrome "casting." It is called Chromecatch. It is a 3ドル app on the MacStore and there is an iOS version that turns your iPad into a chromecaster.

What does all this mean? The same functionality of the 35ドル HDMI Google Chromecast dongle can be replicated on a computer. 3ドル sure beats 35ドル if you want to experiment with this functionality.

The Cast icon shows up on Chrome devices if you are on the same network. I tried it with both computer, iOS, and Android devices. Unfortunately, Google half baked Chrome casting so it isn't available on the Samsung Chromebook.



Here is my Samsung 7" Galaxy Tab casting youtube to a Macbook Pro Retina. The Galaxy tablet is handing off the youtube to the Macbook.

The title of this blog is very long, "Mount,read,write NTFS drives on Macs and do the same with HFS drives on Windows."

If you want to share and mount drives between Macs and PCs you can either use FAT32 or exFAT formatted drives.

exFAT works on OSX versions 10.6.8 and higher and is preferred over FAT32 for support of files larger than 4GB. I actually like exFAT because it is the fastest middle-road solution when you take account Linux usage.

For most purposes, exFAT works great. However, there are times you want to have access to the 'other' OS preferred filesystem such as NTFS on Windows and HFS + on OSX.

I have a few large RAID drives that I would like to occasionally see from either side of the fence.

Hence, I decided to fork out the cash and buy commercial drivers from Paragon system to mount, read and write NTFS volumes on Macs and do the same for HFS+ volumes on Windows.

I've tried other products including various free ones but performance was lacking. I was pleasantly surprised with both piece of software from Paragon.

So today, I will do a dual review on both products as a single end-user.


HFS + for Windows
http://www.paragon-software.com/home/hfs-windows/
and
NTFS for Mac OSX10
http://www.paragon-software.com/home/ntfs-mac/

Pretty much install and reboot. There is nothing to configure on Windows as I can tell. On the Mac, you have a System Preference pane.

First of all, I did not notice any significant speed handicaps. The drive access seemed as fast as native on both Mac and PC. I've used other filesystem drivers such as NTFS-3G on Mac, Fuse on Linux and they all seemed very, very slow. Here, it is blazing fast. 7GB files took about a minute to copy and copy reliably.





Benchmarks on both pc and mac seem to indicate no performance penalty but the real test was real-world copies which appeared normal to me.

Both screenshots below are benchmarks of drives that were 60% full with operating systems on them.


USB 3, eSATA and Thunderbolt are both supported. Thunderbolt was not disclosed in their marketing but as you can see from the Windows screenshot above, a Samsung 830 SSD via a Seagate Thunderbolt adapter on a Gigabyte motherboard does indeed work. I was also able to connect a HFS formatted Drobo 5D via USB 3.0. All the USB 3.0 sticks and external drives I have in my possession work on both.

I run 64 bit on both OS so it is safe to say it works otherwise this review would not exist. I am running the latest Mountain Lion 10.8.2 and no problems to report.

Next, I tested them both by making and copying large encrypted Truecrypt container files. TrueCrypt (for my mac readers) is an encrypted file container like an encrypted DMG that works cross platforms on Windows, Mac, Linux. Think of it as open source, open platform DMG that is encrypted.

I made my truecrypt containers 7GB to see if there was any corruption. I then copied a clone disk image of a fresh Mountain Lion install. I made the container on my Windows system NTFS drive on the Mac and copied the DMG into the container. I then booted into Windows , mounted and copy the container to various HFS and NTFS drives. I was able to mount and copy, restore the clone image reliably.





It is safe to say, mounting TrueCrypted volumes on either platform works. For example, a HFS truecrypt container created on a mac will mount on the Windows side.


Next, in Windows, you can toggle hidden directories in the explorer. It was very nice. No more ._files or .DS_Store files.

See below. The first image is with the default Explorer view. Clean and tidy. The second image is after I enabled hidden file view in the Explorer preference.




The cons are:
Neither will see software raids created by the opposing OS. For example, I plugged my Thunderbolt LaCie into Windows (which works via Thunderbolt) and I can see the drives in the Device Manager but not the RAID volume.

Neither will see encrypted file systems created by the other.
For example, you can't see a FileVault HFS+ on Windows. To me, this is considered to be a good thing because I keep my work on encrypted volumes.

There are other issues as well. For example, symlinks, permissions, and extended attributes are not preserved on the Windows side when dealing with HFS drives. Certain mac files still use resource forks (which contain extended meta-data) and labels. If you copy them on Windows using HFS+ (copy HFS to HFS), they will not be preserved.

Below is an example. The script folder is highlighted in red label on OSX. Those attributes get stripped when you copy under Windows. Same with the broken link icon on files that have resource forks.





The meta-data, resource forks , symlinks are preserved on the mac side when working with NTFS drives. Meaning, if you copy specials files on OSX onto NTFS drives, you will be fine.
You just can't do that on the Windows side.

Apparently you can set an NTFS as a startup disk on OSX. I did no test this.
This is a minor inconvenience but it is something to know. It is also disclosed in the manual.
You wont be able to use Windows cloning software to clone a Mac Drive. If you need anything that maintains permissions or meta-data, copy the files in the native operating system. The resource forks and labels are relics from the classic Mac past. I love my colored labels but this is not a show stopper.

Overall, I am pleasantly surprised. Both app drivers are 20ドル and you have the option of getting multi computer home licenses.

I am often asked if the iPad can be used for real work. The iPad has been called a "recreational" tablet and it lacks a real productivity suite according to many detractors. Well, I don't use Microsoft Office in my day-to-day work activities so the appeal of a Surface RT like device does not appeal to me.
However, I do use an iPad because of its great connectivity features: LTE 4G, the ability to access Cisco IPSEC VPN, great remote access apps in the form of SSH, SFTP, X11, RDP, and VNC.
I use it in my data center to diagnose database servers, apache web servers, write code, fix problems in our network infrastructure. It has become part of my work tools.

Is an iPad a replacement for a laptop? It depends on what you use it for. I can attest to the great ability to quickly login remotely and fix something be it configuring a firewall, updating a MySQL database remotely, or executing a bash script. In short, it is definitely a tool in my arsenal I use for work. And quite frankly, I don't think there are much compromises.

Today, I am going to share some of those apps I use. I am going to concentrate on some great web development apps.


I am going to concentrate on these apps:
iSSH, Gusto, Textastic, MySQL Mobile Database Client, and iMockups


There are many other great apps but I only want to cover 5 for brevity. In fact, one can choose other mySQL clients, mockup and diagramming apps but I wanted to show apps that take advantage of the iPad's real estate. I've seen many other apps on other platforms that are simply "blown-up" phone apps and that is not the way to go on a tablet.

iSSH

If there is only one app I have to rely on, it would be iSSH. I have used it for many years and it has saved my butt on many occasions. It is an awesome SSH client (and can even be used as an X11 client). I've been called up in the middle of the night to reboot servers or restart dead daemon services. In short, it simply works. You can even use SSH keys. But the killer feature is the transparent keyboard and floating multi-gesture pop-up programmable cursors for use in the shell.

Like I said, if there was only one app to choose, this would be it. All I need is console access with VIM and nano and I'm set. I cannot stress how important the multi-gesture buttons are. When you are typing on a screen soft keyboard, you can quickly tab or arrow-up in an instant. It helps when you need to type really quickly in the console. For example, typing in service stop, I can quickly arrow up to repeat the command and service start. That is intuitive for someone who uses the shell and is acclimated to using arrow buttons on a keyboard.




Text Editors/IDE: Gusto & Textastic

Next, there are two text editors you should look at for the iPad. Gusto and Textastic. I originally used Textastic because it was the first text editor to support SFTP. This is important because all my servers are *NIX based (Linux/FreeBSD). Both have their strengths and weaknesses. Gusto now supports SFTP which gives it feature parity.

If you ever used Sublime 2 or themed your text editor in the Guber/Solarize themes, you will love both apps. Both can color code to make it extremely pleasant to read and edit code.

Both apps give you a full screen view and a file explorer panel view. Textastic is easier to swap views whereas the switch in Gusto is hidden in a modal dialog setting.

Here are screenshots of Gusto.



Here are Texstatic screenshots:






With Firebug and a web inspector, you can analyze console javascript errors and evaluate DOM objects.

With Texstatic, you can pretty much use the iPad as a standalone device to develop HTML5/Javascript apps.
You only need access to a remote server in the case of developing Ruby/Python or PHP web apps. And the connectivity options will ensure you can connect easily to any Linux or VPS *NIX servers.
With an external keyboard, this makes the iPad an incredibly powerful and productive device.

Both apps with have their fans. Both are good at updating remote code when you need to.

For uber cross-platform geeks, both apps are easily accessible by Linux distros. This is pretty important when compared to other devices on the market that have problems in Linux due to MTP. The iPad was pretty much plug-n-play on Ubuntu and Linux Mint. Dropping, copying, and synching files between Ubuntu and iOS 6 is a sweet.




The only thing that would both these two competing apps complete would be to include a version control mechanism. It would be awesome to have GIT capabilities in either apps.

MySQL Clients

There are countless number of good MySQL clients on the iTunes app store. I can't list them all so you need to test and try the one you like best.

MySQL Mobile Database Client is a fairly decent one that works pretty well. I often use just iSSH and access MySQL in the terminal but I understand people like GUI clients.

Once again, this apps shows the strength of iOS in terms of tablets specific apps. This app intuitively takes advantage of the screen instead of just blowing up a single column smartphone view/layout I've seen on Android.

You can quickly select tables, view individual rows and edit them. You can also manually make queries to your heart content. I've used this apps several times when clients call me in the middle of lunch to manually over-ride or update a record.




Mockup Apps; iMockups

Lastly, there are many apps to help you visualize and markup ideas. There are dozen of great apps to allow you to flow-chart, diagram ideas. I often use TouchDraw (it was cheap) and then there some apps that go beyond flow-charting and making UML diagrams. One of those apps is iMockups.

iMockups won't make you a fancy flow-chart but it will let you quickly prototype your ideas in an interactive presentation for client approvals. This app can be used to visualize web and iOS mobile apps.

You simply drag elements of a web view and define their interaction. You can use this quickly visual a HTML form or database recordset results. Or you can design a navigation toolbar and it will actually be interactive and go to the page/slide you want to show next. I've seen many web producers use tools like Powerpoint and Keynote to do this but it ends up taking longer. With this apps, you simply drag the page elements and is actually very productive.




All these apps cost money. That is one of the major difference against other ecosystem. I am certain you can find some free equivalents. Great quality apps tend to cost money and I am more than willing to pay if it helps me. I can pretty much say many of these apps have already paid themselves off in emergencies. The ability to enjoy my lunch at a restaurant without rushing back to the office to make a SQL update is priceless. The ability to add a host deny rule using iSSH on my servers in the middle of a D-O-S (denial of service) attack is another priceless example.

There you have it. Some great apps for your recreational tablet to do some work. I will write some more articles like this for other use cases. So the next time someone says the iPad can't be use for work, these apps can prove them wrong. These apps also show the strengths of the iPad vis-a-vis their competitors. Tablet specific and tablet design apps make a big difference.

If you do a search on the Microsoft Metro store for the Surface RT as of this writing, good luck finding a SFTP/SSH client.

Once again, the links to these apps:
iSSH, Gusto, Textastic, MySQL Mobile Database Client, and iMockups