VM /ETC

VMware Workstation 7 RC Now Available – ESX 4 Supported Guest OS

October 5th, 2009 |

The next version of VMware Workstation was made publicly available as a release candidate this past Friday (10/02/09). Jason Joel’s post titled Workstation 7 Release Candidate Available! on the Workstation Zealot Blog helped announced the new version now downloadable from http://communities.vmware.com/community/beta/workstation.

The community site also lists several new Workstation 7 features:

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.

As Vladan Seget points out in his post No more tweaks of VMX files. With VMware Workstation 7 you will be able to run ESX 4 with nested VMs without any tweaks, Workstation 7 lists ESX 4 as one of the supported guest operating systems making the process of configuring “ESX in a Box” an automated and much simpler procedure.

The version 7 release also coincides with new versions of VMware ACE and VMware Player as well.

Go to the communities page linked above for a serial number, download links, and documentation to get started with Workstation 7.