VMWare 6.0 Features - Wow!
12/29/2006
I admit it, I am an avid WMWare user. On the server side there is stiff competition between Microsoft Virtual Server and VMWare server, but on the desktop VMWare is the hands down winner. And with VMWare 6's announced feature set, wow!
My Favorite Features
Of course it has Vista support and many things we all expected. However there are some amazing things that we've been asking for, and some things not even imagined but just as great.
- USB 2.0 - Yihaa! USB 1.1 was just way too slow. But considering VPC does not even have USB support, 1.1 was very welcome in the first place.
- Battery Information - Battery information from the host is now available in the guest. Not only is this useful for full screen users, but Windows Vista and Desktop search perform differently when on battery. This will now cause those programs to act properly to extend battery life of the host.
- Multiple Monitors - At the click of a button, the guest can now span monitors and also reflect the monitor topology — meaning that applications, task bars, and so on inside the guest appear as you would expect them to on a multi-monitor system. You can specify how many monitors a virtual machine can detect, regardless of how many monitors are attached to the host. This feature is especially useful if you plan to deploy the virtual machine to a different host after you create it. You can also specify what screen resolution to use and how much video memory to allocate.
- Automation via Expanded VIX 2.0 API - VIX API allows you to write scripts and programs to automate virtual machine operations. This release of the API is available in the C language. There are additional language bindings for Perl, COM, and shell scripts (vmrun). I'm hoping for .NET support as well, but I guess a wrapper can easily be made as well and hopefully some end user will make an assembly for this.
- Integrated Virtual Debuggers -With the new Workstation IDE plug-ins, software developers are provided with menu items and toolbar buttons in Visual Studio (Windows only) or Eclipse (Windows or Linux) to easily develop and debug programs in virtual machines.
VMWare 6.0 will be a definite upgrade for me. I've been a VMWare user since 1.0 and each release has truly contained major new features and has always been a must upgrade for me.
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