Open letter to VMware Inc.

Dear Mr. President,
Come take a walk with me.
Let's pretend we're just two people and
You're not better than me.
I'd like to ask you some questions if we can speak honestly.

(Pink)

Some suggestions to make our time at VMTN more pleasant and to improve the support work we do here

Please read this as a frustrated rant of a long-term VMTN-member who is about to quit with VMTN
- but don't miss the constructive nature of all my suggestions - some of them can be implemented at once.

Thanks for reading it

Ulli (continuum)

Oliver (oreeh)
Roland (devzero)
Havard (skrodahl) easyvmx.com
Saxa (saxa)
Tom (tom howarth)
Dave (DaveP)
Liz (Liz)

" Agreed. Please address these issues soonest. Signed, kingneutron // Dave Bechtel "
// Vmware fanboi / paid-up Workstation 5x/6x user

(sign by posting here)

Reduce repetitive work

Enable interested folks to learn faster and so help better

Add some technical charts to the documentation

Encourage research beyond the known limits

Access to early betas

Rewards

Social forum

Moderators

Reduce repetitive work

We waste a lot of time by answering the same questions over and over again.

Sticky posts that cover the frequently asked question can be implemented at once.
These sticky posts should then later be replaced by a FAQ-section.
What about 100 reward-points for a in-depth explanation of a problem that makes it into such a FAQ ?

It would be a good idea to make statistics of the top-20 questions in each section.
The top-20-issues should then be treated as documentation-bugs.

A lot of the repetitive work is caused by "unwise" defaults when creating a new VM.

In my discussions with Juan - see PaloAlto posts - I realized that the GUI-designers
are not even aware of some of the traps they make the users run into:
please make them work with some users with real hands-on-practice and rewrite
some of the defaults so that they are more userfriendly.

A lot of the work is caused by users running into the same bugs over and over again.
This is not necessary.
As soon as a workaround exists - such bugs should be listed in a public buglist - together with the fix.

Some bugs - like the "absolute-pathbug" have so nasty results that users should be warned in advance.
I would also like to see a little tool that can be used to test a VM wether it is affected by that bug.

It always makes me "angry" when ever I see that a user again has messed up his VMs
because he simply wanted to copy it to a different location.
It also makes me "angry" when ever I see a user run into the "black-screen" bug - just because
the GUI doesn't display an appropriate message.

It would be nice if a user that finds a bug together with a fix would be credited in the "knowledgebase"
What about 200 reward-points for such an entry ?

Enable interested folks to learn faster and so help better

After Petr doesn't come anymore there is no VMware-employee present in the forum that
teaches procedures. I for example learned a good third of my disk-repair-skills
by listening to Petr when he dealt with similar issues. Petr never made a lot of words
but he often "leaked" information not covered by the manuals.
Please bring back guys like Petr and give them clearance to "leak" parameters when
they are useful to fix a special problem.
With Petr I often had the impression that he was unsure if "leaking parameters" would bring him into trouble.

I believe this could be a way for interested folks to learn about the vmx-parameter
without asking for a documentation of all parameters - which is hardly possible as I am well aware of.

In short terms: bring back teachers

Add some technical charts to the documentation

The current VMware documentation follows this approach:
to do this > click here
This maybe useful for a first setup and maybe enough for the majority of users.
For troubleshooting help it is not very useful.
Please tell your users that no matter what they set in the GUI - the real
configuraton is done by configuration-files.
For our troubleshooting work, Windows-user that do not even know how to find the config.ini are a nightmare.
Please educate your users so that we can tell them to edit 3 lines in a config-file -

now we got to tell them how to click through the GUI if they for example want to setup a CD-device for writing.
So please add vmx-file charts like for example this one for CD-settings or this one for network. to the documentation.

By the way - if you still believe in the "a failsafe GUI makes vmx-documentation optional" - idea - you need more buttons.
Or a simple wizzard together with an advanced wizzard.

Please ask users with hands-on-practice which buttons are missing.

Encourage research beyond the known limits

Please create something like a hackers bar at VMTN and encourage projects like those listed to be discussed there.
All of this projects are very useful for the VMware-user community and it would surely benefit the company if these projects
were pushed a little bit with insider knowhow - even if they are later flagged as unsupported.
Who knows - some of this research may be inside the program tomorrow if you find it useful.
Others will make our troubleshooting work much easier.

Patched Linux-version that allows to use any blockdevice as a rawdisk
Diskreport-tool
Logfile-analysis
Slax-LiveCD with VMware-workstation or VMplayer

Moa Windows LiveCD with VMwareprograms

VMbrowser

I also miss an address where such questions like "can I redistribute VMplayer as a BartPE-plugin" can be asked.
I am sure such things like VMserver-clients on a LiveCD would be available if we had an easier access to those guys that have to give their permissions ...

This hackers-bar should be part of VMTN but not be open to the public. Access on request or invitation only.
I would like to see FreeBSD-hackers hanging around there and discuss their problems with an UNSUPPORTED-port with Petr or other Linux-engineers ...
Or I would like to discuss a port of the Enterprise-converter to Moa with some VMware-WinPE-engineers ...
You could arrange a licence for all this co-laboration that prevents someone exploit results for commercial use ...

A hackers-bar would only make sense if you encourage your engineers to hang around there AND give them permission to leak information.
Once established anyone in need of a "beyond the manual-procedure" could post his needs as a request to the
hackers-bar - if he is lucky someone bites ...

Access to early betas

Please review your current policy regarding access to early Betas.
It hardly makes sense to give early Betas of Workstation to ESX-enterprise customers while those users like me

- that really would have something to say - are rejected.
That is frustrating for me and stupid for the company.

Rewards

Is it really necessary to give T-shirts to any hotshot ?
What about real useful things for real useful users ?
Or - why do I have to use pirated software to help supporting it ???

Social forum

A chit-chat / social forum would be nice
Sometimes we want to talk about other things as well (and we guess others too)

Moderators

- the moderator to forum ratio is a bit problematic
There are 15 moderators, of which only 2 (KevinG and RDPetruska) are active in the Hosted Products forum (petr
seems to no longer participate in the forums and magi concentrates on ACE).
This leads to some "ignorance" (I know this is the wrong word but I don't find a better one at the moment)
from the moderators regarding this forum.
The same goes for Master/Virtuoso/... to forum ratio (KevinG and RDPetruska are the obvious exceptions to this).
In addition all mods in the hosted forums are in the same timezone range.