Everything-Virtual

VMware Workstation 8 Released

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Simon

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I have used VMware Workstation 7 for the last year or so and I have been really impressed with it (as a solution for virtualisation on my laptop rather than my in-house lab). So when VMware announced the release of VMware Workstation 8 today I immediately purchased the upgrade.

The upgrade purchase process was very easy and the upgrade site automatically populated the previous versions serial number which allowed me to purchase the upgrade product at the reduced price of $99 or £67.55 instead of the usual price of $199 or £135.50.

Installation took about 10 minutes on my Dell E6410 and unlike my Acronis upgrades didn’t require entering the previous product key to carry out the installation.

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Some of the blurb on the improved VMware Workstation product.

  • Run over 600 different operating systems right on your PC. Prove your mastery of the PC and run from DOS to Windows 7
  • Run the most demanding applications in a virtual machine with 8 virtual processors or 8 virtual cores, 2 TB virtual disks and up to 64 GB of memory per virtual machine
  • Move to the internal cloud. Build and test your virtual machines locally and then drag and drop to move them directly to VMware vSphere
  • Remotely connect to virtual machines running on VMware vSphere anywhere on your network to leverage not only your local PC but the internal cloud
  • Run as a server to share virtual machines with your team, department, or anyone in your organization with enterprise calibre control over user access
  • and much more.

    • Comments

    4 responses to “VMware Workstation 8 Released”

    1. dale avatar
      dale

      Workstation 8 is a great improvement over 7 in my opinion however I’m a little confused as to why they removed teams from v8 quite a bizarre decision I think.

      Reply
    2. Simon avatar
      Simon

      Dale,

      Taken from the VMware Workstation 8 Release Notes.

      What Happened to Teams?

      Although at first it might appear that the teams feature has been removed, you can add team attributes to any virtual machine in this version of Workstation.

      •The team structure has been converted to a simple folder of virtual machines.
      •A new advanced settings dialog box has been added for network adapters to let you throttle the bandwidth of incoming and outgoing transmissions and simulate packet loss.
      •You can perform power operations on several virtual machines at the same time by selecting virtual machines on the folder tab and pressing the power button on the toolbar. If all of the virtual machines in a folder are in the same power state, you can select the folder to perform a power operation on all of the virtual machines in the folder.
      •You use a global Workstation preference to configure the delay between powering on virtual machines.
      •To implement LAN segments, you can use traditional VMnets or put all of the virtual machines that you want to communicate on the same custom VMnet.

      More information can be found here (https://www.vmware.com/support/ws80/doc/releasenotes_workstation_80.html#teams_replacement)

      Reply
    3. dale avatar
      dale

      Thanks Simon, I spotted that after posting the above (decided to google it). Still think its a bit odd to go a bit backwards and call it folders, granted the abilities have improved but why not align the object name with vsphere and call it vApps or something similar.

      Guess I need to play with W8 a bit more to get a feel for it.

      Dale

      Reply
      1. Simon avatar
        Simon

        Dale, you’re expecting that the teams talk to each other 😉 look at the other major OS vendors out there with products that don’t follow the same naming conventions. It’s nothing new and it won’t change.

        I really like WS 8.01 and having OSX running on it proved to be very easy 🙂

        Reply

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