VMware Workstation 6 released
The latest edition of VMware Workstation is finally out of beta and available for download. Once again, VMware allows existing users of Workstation 5 to upgrade for a hundred bucks U.S.
In addition to the usual incremental improvements and official support for an even greater number of guest operating systems (including Windows Vista as both host and guest), this iteration of Workstation adds USB 2.0 support, session record/reply, and ability to run VMs without the console also running. See the full release notes for details.
There are only a few really useful new features I see:
- Ability to use all host memory (previous limit was 4GB) and up to 8GB per VM.
- Debugger integration with Eclipse and Visual Studio IDEs.
- Experimental support for para-virtualized kernels in Linux guests (“Virtual Machine Interface 3.0 enabled kernels”, according to the release notes).
- a new “ACE option pack” add-on that allows Workstation to create guests that can run stand-alone from portable media.
It’s not clear whether the guests created with the “option pack” are equally as protected from the host as they are with VMware ACE. Looks like I’ll find out soon… until May of 2006, VMware is offering the ACE option pack free both for new purchases and for users upgrading from Workstation 5.5.
It’s painful to think how we ever got anything done before VMware Workstation (and later VMware Server) became available. Five years ago for research, testing, and supporting clients we had several boxes with one or two removable hard drive caddies, and a closet full of drives containing flavors of Linux, BSD, Windows, and Solaris all ready to boot when needed. Dedicated servers ran the OSs we needed to access the most.
Now we have a library of images stored on one file server, ready to boot up under VMware Server or copy to a laptop to run under Workstation, and a couple of production VMs always running. We keep images of some client’s production servers on hand for support and for testing upgrades. No need to decide what to keep either… obsolete OS images get burned to DVD in case they’re ever needed again (I think we even have an image of SCO Unix in the vault).
It’s become fantastically easier (and cheaper) to get things done thanks to virtualization tools. The trade press concentrates heavily on “revolutionary” benefits of virtualization for consolidating physical servers, but I think the real revolution for most organizations has been in using tools like VMWare Workstation for research, development and support.
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