Review: VMware Workstation 6.5

VMware Workstation 6.5, launched in early October, is a mature package, but significant new features will make it especially appealing to IT managers wishing to roll out manageable virtual machines to out-of-office staff, or in-house guest contractors and partners.

The headline features are enhanced VMware Assured Computing Environment (ACE) authoring, and a so-called Unity mode allowing users to better integrate their favourite guest applications with the host system.

VMware Workstation lets users install and run guest operating systems on desktops and laptops running Windows or Linux as the main or host operating system. There are many advantages to this, principally the ability to run older, unsupported operating systems with legacy applications not supported on newer operating systems.

Better security is also available through VMware's snapshot capability, which allows users quickly to roll back to a previously safe state if a virus or other piece of malware is inadvertently picked up.

VMware's ACE gives IT managers the ability to build a virtual operating system which can be securely locked down and then distributed to end users, subject to particular licence constraints and other IT manager-definable policies. For example, authentication can be set to a simple password, or a custom authentication method executed through a script file.

VMware said that ACE's authoring features are now fully integrated in Workstation 6.5, and that no special ACE Edition is required.

We downloaded and installed a trial version of ACE Management Server 2.5 on a Windows Server 2003 Standard Edition to run alongside our Workstation 6.5 install. This version of ACE uses Apache HTTP Server version 2.0.59, and users are warned to uninstall Internet Information Services before installing ACE, or change the ports it may be using (80, 443 and 8000) so as not to interfere with Apache.

The ACE Management Server was easy to set up and we could start managing our packaged virtual machines quickly and easily.

We installed Workstation 6.5 on a desktop system running Windows Vista Enterprise and a laptop running XP Professional. Version 6.5 is just as easy to use as earlier versions, and we installed Windows 2000, XP and Vista, along with several Linux distributions, including Oracle Enterprise Linux v5.2, Community ENTerprise Operating System 5.2 and openSUSE 11.0 enterprise desktop.

We also installed several new Microsoft Server operating systems, including Windows Essential Business Server 2008 and the R2 version of Microsoft's flagship Windows Server 2008, all with no problems.

Once an operating system is running to the user's satisfaction, an instance of that system could be packaged for deployment after settings and policies have been configured. For instance, we could specify how long the virtual operating system could be used, the usernames and which domain the system can join.

In the policies section IT managers can restrict which removable devices will function, and can restrict network access to specific virtual private networks and IP subnets.

Current problems with data leakage due to users being able to plug any removable device into the system can be reduced by setting a policy to disallow access to floppy and optical drives. USB devices can also be restricted, either by disallowing general device classes like Bluetooth adapters, digital cameras or just standard USB Flash drives.

Setting all the parameters for this is a slightly involved process and there was the odd minor niggle which tripped us up initially, like where to put the Microsoft sysprep tool when executing the virtual operating system packaging process.

After the policies were set up we could package an instance of our installed virtual machine. For example we could create a virtual machine of an XP Professional system with SP3 installed. Microsoft's sysprep tools have to be in the correct VMware resource directory, and the latest version of VMware Tools will need to be installed.

After that it was plain sailing and we could create our package either as a network image or a DVD. The package we made ran on similar hardware to that we used to run Workstation without problems.

The other major new feature is Unity mode, which allows guest applications to be integrated with the host operating system. The colour-coded borders identify a guest application window, albeit only when sized correctly. So that old legacy application running on Windows 98 can be made to occupy the full screen. Moving the mouse pointer over the host Start menu pops up the virtual machine guest start menu.

As a check on how well Unity performed we installed VideoLAN's cross platform VLC media player on our guest operating system, and ran a few large Flash format video files over the system. Resizing the guest window when playing the file did leave ghost images on the main guest window for the duration of the resizing, but otherwise there were no problems.

Firms using Workstation in a test and development environment will probably use a high-end system with over 2GB of system memory and multiple processors. As an example, when running Workstation 6.5 on systems with 512MB or less, we were constantly having to reduce the memory usable by our guest operating system.

Guest operating system installs are limited to two processors, a maximum of 8GB of system memory and a maximum of 10 network adapters. Compatibility with VMware's ESX server is limited to version 4.xx and below of Workstation.

VMware has now made it possible for users to stream a virtual machine from a web server and power it on before the download completes, but this feature does not currently work with ACE-authored virtual machines.

Another new feature less likely to be important to IT managers, but which could interest consumers, is an accelerated 3D graphics mode using DirectX 9 shaders when using Windows XP Professional guest operating systems.