VMware Workstation 7 review

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.