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Integration Watch: VMware Workstation v. 7 impresses

By Andrew Binstock

April 1, 2010 — (Page 1 of 3)
The current wave of interest in virtualization dates back to the release of VMware’s Workstation in 2001. The product was immediately embraced by developers who saw in it many opportunities, primarily for running Linux or UNIX code on Windows system. Other vendors had previously enabled similar transportability of code, but they relied primarily on emulation, cross-compilation and similar techniques.

The first release (numbered starting at v. 3, curiously) was not a thing of beauty. It had limited capability and ran very slowly. There was no way to confuse the Workstation experience of a virtualized desktop with the real thing.

However, as the years progressed, VMware steadily improved the product—goaded by internal need as well as the arrival of competitors, such as Microsoft’s VirtualPC and Xen, both of which can be obtained at no cost. (Virtual PC was originally developed by Connectix and released in 1997. So, in fact, it predates VMware’s product. However, VirtualPC was then universally seen as a niche product for running Windows apps on the Mac, and was not seen as a virtualization product. Outside of its intended niche, it received little, if any, notice.)

Late last year, VMware released v. 7 of Workstation. This version continues the company’s long commitment to the needs of developers. And while the product is no longer marketed as a programming aid, the features it contains are remarkably useful to us in the hacking business.

The first thing to note is that this release supports all major recent architectural changes. It can handle multiple processors with multiple cores (its graphics capabilities can finally handle the Aero interface in Windows Vista and Windows 7). In addition, it works fine both hosted on and running 64-bit operating systems. And finally, it supports the various forms of USB 2.0 devices. All this means that most of the current hardware technologies can be tested.

The developer-friendly features include the ability to record an activity and rerun it, stepping into and back out of bugs; Workstation also has the ability to interact directly with a VM from within leading IDEs.

Related Search Term(s): virtualization, VMware

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Comments

04/02/2010 01:14:39 PM EST

I agree that VMware Workstation is a tremendous product for development and testing. I've been using it for over 10 years. FYI, VMware Workstation 1.0 was actually released in 1999 and version 2.0 came out in 2000.

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