Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

Workstation and Fusion Tech Previews!

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Both VMware Workstation and VMware Fusion just release tech preview versions. You can find them here:

What’s new for Workstation?

  • Installation and operation of VMware Workstation on Windows 8 and Windows Server 8
  • Installation and operation of Windows 8 consumer preview and Windows Server 8 in a virtual machine
  • Rendering and graphics correctness issues on all platforms and applications
  • Linux 3D desktop experience, particularly when using the Ubuntu 12.04 LTS Beta
  • Linux 3D application graphics correctness and performance
  • Stability in real-world scenarios including suspend/resume and display and device support
  • Nested Virtualization – running ESX and even trying Hyper-V* as a guest OS
  • VNC connection performance and stability

What’s new for Fusion?

  • Installation and operation of Windows 8 previews in a virtual machine
  • Running Mac OS X (Mountain Lion) in a virtual machine
  • Rendering and graphics correctness issues on all platforms and applications
  • Linux 3D desktop experience, particularly Ubuntu 12.04 LTS and recent OpenSUSE releases, which should work out-of-the-box
  • Linux 3D application graphics correctness and performance
  • Changing boot devices in Mac OS X virtual machines
  • Performance and stability of virtual machine power operations including suspend, resume, pause and restart
  • Stability in real-world scenarios including suspend/resume and display and device plugging on the Mac

The coolest new feature though of these two releases is what is now known as “WSX” and part of Workstation. This enables you to access your virtual machine in a regular browser… What? Yes indeed, access it in a regular browser window! How cool is that?! One of the Workstation developers wrote a nice blog article about it. I suggest reading it and providing him with direct feedback on use cases etc!

If I have some time on my hands next week I will definitely install the Tech Preview on my Linux desktop and enable WSX!

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Comments

  1. Agreed, WSX looks very interesting. I wonder how performance will ultimately compare to something like Citrix’s Receiver.

    Oh, and the VM description made me laugh 🙂

  3. So is this essentially an update to vmware workstation? The link just points to what looks like is a VMware Workstation installer. Too bad you can’t just update your vmware workstation.