VMware Workstation 7 RC Now Available – ESX 4 Supported Guest OS
October 5th, 2009 | 
Author: 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.
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Nothing real earth shattering for me in this release. The new printing function sounds neat and all Terminal Services like. Aero support – hooray! Now I can… Windows tab my VM desktop
I'm actually really enjoying the AutoProtect. In general Win7 has been a bit more snappy as well.
Jason, Cody,
I like the dynamic VMTools download as well. ESX 4 as a supported OS makes testing / learning labs easy too.
Jason, Cody,
I like the dynamic VMTools download as well. ESX 4 as a supported OS makes testing / learning labs easy too.