Caution: Articles written for technical not grammatical accuracy, If poor grammar offends you proceed with caution ;-)
VMware Workstation 7 RC is available now. A while back, I posted about how to disable debug mode and quickly made it private because I was under NDA. Well, as of October 2nd, it is in RC and available to the public.
Since I changed jobs, I am back to a Winders laptop as my primary host. Its very convenient to spark up an Ubuntu VM to allow me the *NIX native commands I use when working with ESX Servers, like scp and ssh. I know I can do it with things like Putty, but I am more comfortable using Linux for these tasks. It makes editing bash and kickstart scripts a little easier too. It seems that Microsoft has made an OS that sucks less than Vista (Winders 7), but many of the simple .Net tools, like the vSphere Client, won’t work without stoopid tricks. So, I also have a stripped down XP VM that I keep updated with all of the kewl tools, like the VMware Clients, PowerCLI, vSphere CLI, The VESI, Converter, Capacity Planner, RVTools and the Host Update Utility. I actually created the VM back when Ubuntu was my primary laptop OS and it is nice to have the ability(and security) to take a snapshot before upgrading any of the tools or programs that I use. Someone once said that it adds extra layers when I am trying to do my job. But think about this: If my laptop takes a nosedive, regardless of the OS, I can just jump on any machine – even a netbook – and run the VM using VMware Player from a USB Stick.
Some interesting notes about Workstation 7 RC:
- Ability to create a VM that will run ESX 3.5 or ESX 4
- This was “allowed” in WS 6.5, but you had to manually edit the .vmx to make it work. Now you can tell the wizard that the guest OS is ESX Server.
- Great for testing scripts, etc.
- Seems to support all Enterprise Plus features except Fault Tolerance
- Better Network Configuration GUI for Winders hosts
- The are using the Virtual Network Editor GUI that we have used on Linux hosts for a while.
- Seems that Winders hosts will only allow a single NAT network. I always had three or four on my Linux hosts.
- Better ALSA sound support for Linux hosts
- No sound output conflicts
- Driverless printing via ThinPrint
- Very convenient!
They don’t say how long it will be in RC status and I would speculate that pricing will be similar to WS 6.x pricing. What are you waiting for? Go git some!