VMware workstation 7 in public beta

Posted in News on October 4th, 2009 by Wil van Antwerpen – 2 Comments

Last friday the first VMware Workstation 7 Release Candidate has been made available to the public.

So finally the NDA on it is lifted and we can tell you how great this new version of workstation is and it is truly great :D

As is usually the case with VMware betas, the experience has been pretty stable during the private technical preview period.

So what has been added to Workstation 7?

Here’s the list from the communities page:

  • Aero support for Windows 7 and Vista Guests!
  • Windows 7 support (as a Host and Guest OS)
  • OpenGL and Shader Model 3.0 support for Windows guests
  • Create guests with Multi-core or 4-way CPUs and up to 32GB of Memory
  • Download VMware vSphere 4 and install ESX as a guest OS to try out the latest features.
  • Dynamically Download the latest VMware Tools package only when you need it.
  • Print from your VM without installing printer drivers. Virtual Printing courtesy of our friends at ThinPrint.
  • Automatically create snapshots on scheduled intervals with AutoProtect.
  • Secure your Virtual Machines with 256-bit encryption.
  • Remote Replay Debugging and other advanced development features
  • ALSA Sound support on Linux hosts enables multiple VMs to play “music” concurrently.
  • Instantly pause a VM to free up system resources or dedicate horsepower to other running VMs.
  • The Virtual Network Editor user interface has been redesigned for Windows users.

Pretty nice list eh? In my experiences the performance of aero was pretty amazing and I was able to get a performance index of 2.9 on my Vista virtual machine usig a pretty crappy NVidia 7000 series graphics card.

The ability to create virtual multi core CPU’s means that you can now use more as 2 cores on operating systems that are limited to two physical CPU’s like Windows XP for example.

The ESX as a guest OS support means that you no longer have to hand edit your vmx files in order to run ESX in a box as a testlab and best of all it will take your host capabilities, like special CPU features, into account.

With the new Workstation beta, you also get a new VMware Player, version 3.0, which now not only allows you to run any Virtual Machine for free, but is also enables to create virtual machines.

Another new feature for Player is that it downloads VMware Tools on demand, so no longer will you have to jump through hoops in order to get the latest VMware Tools installed in your guest.

So all in all, the new version of Workstation looks very promising.
The only bit I’m missing is OpenGL support for Linux, but well…. you can’t have it all I suppose.

Go get your beta and temporary license key here:

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 4th, 2009 at 11:28 am and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

  1. Chaz6 says:
    October 4, 2009 at 1:14 pm

    Great news!

    It has an interesting EULA for a public beta….

    EXHIBIT A

    1) Workstation (Highly Confidential Beta Software)

    2) ACE (Highly Confidential Beta Software)

    3) Player (Highly Confidential Beta Software)

  2. Jason Joel says:
    October 5, 2009 at 6:41 pm

    We will work on cleaning up the EULA…. OpenGL for Linux guests is high on my wishlist too!

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