Thursday, March 01, 2007

VMware: Record and Replay

About 3 hours before the event, I heard that VMware was going to be on-campus to recruit students. Big deal. IBM's ISS stopped by at our SIT meeting last week. Well, actually it was a big deal...and no, not because of the free pizza and soda, although I'm sure that's the only reason a fourth of the students were there. No, I was there because they were giving away free VMware Workstation licenses. You might say that VMware Server and Player are free, but they are missing some of the seriously bad@ss functionality that Workstation possesses.

For example, multiple snapshots. I REALLY wish the free server version supported this feature. I use VMware server a lot both for UF and freelance work. My Stack-o-Hack currently has four machines with Ubuntu 6.10 Server and VMware Server...but I digress.

So, at the meeting, the guy presenting talked about a new feature being released in VMware Workstation 6. It is called Record and Replay. What does it do? You hit the RECORD button and it records EVERYTHING about your virtual machine until you stop it. Of course, it takes up lots of space but it record CPU registers, memory and freaking network traffic! How wicked is that? Vulnerability researchers and exploit writers rejoice!

Take a look at the blog entry from VMware.

And, for you Intel Mac users that are testing VMware Fusion and are annoyed that snapshots are not officially supported, don't worry. Beta 2 next week will have it supported with pretty little "Take Snapshot" and "Revert to Snapshot" buttons. I saw it on a 17" Mac Book Pro that one of VMware employees had. I knew Jordan would be so excited about it, I took a picture with my phone and sent it to him!

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