All the latest UK technology news, reviews and analysis
|
|
|
04 Jan 2010
A very solid and well conceived update to the popular VMware Workstation product, Workstation 7 offers full support for Windows 7 as a host and guest OS, together with a raft of new features including the ability to pause live VMs and use host printers without the need to install guest drivers. 2D and 3D graphics support is raised to a new level, and general performance has been given a boost with support for four-way SMP and 32GB of memory per VM. Plus there are enhancements to the virtual networking and debugging tools, which will be of real value to software developers and support professionals.
Pros:
Official support for Windows 7 hosts/guests; virtual machine pause;
four-way SMP; 32GB per VM; virtual printing; support for ESX hypervisor as a guest OS.
Cons:
Big consumer of host processor and memory resources; poor documentation in places.
Price: £143.78 + VAT
Manufacturer: VMware
Server hypervisors may be all the rage, but personal virtualisation tools such as VMware Workstation still have their place. Designed to host virtual machines on a desktop PC, VMware's desktop product is a firm favourite with software developers, support staff and other professional users, with even more of interest in the new version 7 release.
We're a big user of VMware Workstation, mainly to test new software products, so were very interested in what the new release had to offer. As with our existing 6.5 implementation it's available for Windows or Linux and can be used to host virtual machines running both platforms, with support for a long list of 32-bit and 64-bit implementations one of the key attractions.
It was also one of the first virtualisation products to support virtual SMP, and that's now further enhanced to four virtual processors or cores per virtual machine (VM), double the previous limit. Memory support is similarly updated so that you can now configure up to 32GB per virtual machine with no maximum on the host other than what you can physically fit inside.
In common with other virtualisation tools, you need real physical cores, RAM and disk space to support VM resources. Moreover, as with previous releases, we found performance significantly constrained unless we supplied processors and memory in abundance, especially when we wanted to run more than a couple of VMs simultaneously.
Still that's to be expected and easily catered for, by throwing money at the hardware. In addition you can now pause running VMs, to instantly release their resources, something we found incredibly useful when we needed to start a new VM without bringing the host PC and other guests to a near halt.
Official support for Windows 7 is another welcome addition, both as a host and guest OS. At first this seemed a little superfluous as we've been running Workstation 6.5 on Windows 7 for some time, and hosting Windows 7 guests. However, the new version is much better integrated, with, for example, full support for Aero Peek on the host PC so that when hovering over the VMware icon on the taskbar we could see live miniature displays from each of our VMs.
There's better support too for Windows 7 as a guest OS, thanks to a new Windows Display Driver Model designed to handle the Aero interface on both Windows 7 and Vista virtual machines. 3D support is enhanced too, again for Windows 7 and Vista, but also for older XP VMs.
Host PC requires a 32/64bit x86 processor (Intel or AMD), hardware virtualisation is optional although 64-bit guest VMs require Intel VT or AMD‐V support. Minimum of 1GB or RAM required although 2GB or more recommended. IDE and SCSI hard disk both supported, minimum of 1GB required per VM. Support for an extensive list of Windows, Linux and other guest operating systems, 32-bit and 64-bit.
Review categories
Laptops (112) | Tablets (65) | Mobile Phones (169) |
Dell XPS 13 review | Asus Transformer Pad TF300 video review | Samsung Galaxy S3 video review |
Other product categories
V3 examines the key strengths and weaknesses of Samsung's latest iPhone killer
Connect with V3.co.uk
Social networking is almost ubiquitous. This white paper examines the benefits and risks and it looks at the different ways companies can reconcile them
The importance of understanding your infrastructure
Java, J2EE Agile Senior Developer, Warrington, Cheshire...
Location: Geneva Client: A well established world...
Location: Geneva Client : A well known company Job...
Location: Lausanne Client: A well established world...
Keep up to date with the latest products, services and technologies from the world's leading IT companies. IThound.com brings you over 2,000 white papers, case studies and analyst reports.
Do you agree?
Other alternative Virtual Workstation products
Whilst on the subject, are you planning on doing a side by side (and hopefully in depth) comparison between the various flavours of Virtual Workstation products? I would like to see this type of article as I use Suns VirtualBox which works incredibly well and have user VMware Workstation previously.
Posted by: Binesh 08 Jan 2010