VMware Workstation is powerful desktop virtualization software for software developers/testers and IT professionals who want to streamline software development, testing and deployment in their enterprise.

VMware Workstation software allows the users to run multiple x86-based operating systems, including Linux, Windows, and NetWare, and their applications simultaneously on a single PC in fully networked, portable virtual machines no hard drive partitioning

Shipping for more than six years and winner of more than a dozen major product awards, VMware Workstation improves productivity and flexibility, and reduces costs so dramatically that it has become an indispensable tool for software development and IT professionals worldwide.

VMware Workstation works by creating fully isolated, secure virtual machines that encapsulate an operating system and its applications. The VMware virtualization layer maps the physical hardware resources to the virtual machine's resources, so each virtual machine has its own CPU, memory, disks, and I/O devices, and is the full equivalent of a standard x86 machine. VMware Workstation installs onto the host operating system and provides broad hardware support by inheriting device support from the host.


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Here are some key features of "VMWare Workstation":

Streamline software development and testing operations:

· Create multiple development and testing environments as virtual machines on a single PC and use them to test "real world" multi-tier configurations, complex networks, and multiple operating systems and applications all on a single machine.

Improve team collaboration:

· The portability and hardware-independent properties of virtual machines, coupled with new features in VMware Workstation, lets users easily share development environments and pre-packaged testing configurations without risk, and also facilitates collaboration between development and QA.

Enhance the productivity of IT professionals:

· Allows system administrators and other enterprise IT professionals to test software, including new applications, application updates, and operating system patches, in virtual machines prior to deployment on physical PCs or servers in a production environment. IT help desk departments can create and reference a virtual library of end-user configurations to help them resolve problems more quickly.

Introduce virtual infrastructure to your enterprise:

· Virtual machines created in Workstation can be deployed to the other desktop and server virtualization platforms offered by VMware. Introducing VMware Workstation virtualization to the desktop is an ideal first step to transforming your physical IT infrastructure into virtual infrastructure.

Limitations:

· 30-day evaluation

What's New in This Release: [ read full changelog ]

Highlights of VMware Workstation 8.0.2 functionality include:

· Ubuntu 11.10 is supported as a host.
· Fedora 16 is supported as a guest.
· Many customer-reported issues have been resolved.

Resolved Issues:

· The ACLs on the PID files needed improvement. VMware thanks Inode0 for bringing this to our attention.
· Releasing input from the guest to the host, for example, moving the cursor from the virtual machine window to the host screen, failed with an unrecoverable error.
· Copying and pasting from a guest to an Ubuntu 11.10 host failed.
· Shared folders did not work in Fedora 16 and OpenSuse 12.1 guests.
· In Ubuntu 11.10 hosts, key repeat was disabled after ungrabbing or quitting VMware Workstation.
· On a Windows host, a virtual machine configured to use a physical disk or partition failed to power on if the host had a volume backed by more than one physical disk, for example, a RAID system.
· On a machine with Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 SP1, vix-perl installation failed with dynamic link errors.