January 26th, 2012Highlights 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.
November 21st, 2011Highlights of VMware Workstation 8.0.1 functionality include:
· Graphics performance and compatibility enhancements.
· Improvements in creating and using shared virtual machines and remote virtual machines.
· Ubuntu 11.10 is officially supported as a guest operating system.
· Disk and memory management issues have been addressed.
· Many customer-reported issues have been resolved.
The following list the resolved issues in VMware Workstation 8.0.1:
· Windows 7 guest installation failed after powering on the virtual machine with the error A required CD/DVD drive device driver is missing. If you have a driver floppy disk, CD, DVD, or USB flash drive, please insert it now.
· VMware Tools failed with the message VMware Tools unrecoverable error.
· VMware Tools failed to start in Fedora 15 guests.
· An Ubuntu 11.10 guest crashed with a signal 11 error if you installed or upgraded VMware Tools.
· On hosts with Nvidia GeForce and Quadro video cards, some of the clouds in the Unigine Heaven Benchmark application were drawn solid black.
· Easy Install did not properly function on Ubuntu 11.10.
· If remote virtual machines were open, you could not shut down the Windows hosts.
· When transitioning from Full Screen mode to Exclusive mode, the Full Screen toolbar sometimes failed to hide.
· Host memory reservation restrictions on Windows hosts are more relaxed in VMware Workstation 8.0.1 than in previous versions of VMware Workstation.
· CD/DVD mount Linux.iso failed while installing VMware Tools in Ubuntu 11.10 guests.
· The AltGr key was not working in an Ubuntu guest in Unity mode when the host and guest keyboards were both set to a layout that contained the AltGr key.
March 30th, 2011Security Fixes:
· Workstation 7.1.4 addresses a local privilege escalation in the vmrun utility
· VMware vmrun is a utility that is used to perform various tasks on virtual machines. The vmrun utility runs on any platform with VIX libraries installed. It is installed in Workstation by default. In non-standard filesystem configurations, an attacker with the ability to place files into a predefined library path could take execution control of vmrun. This issue is present only in the version of vmrun that runs on Linux
· The Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures project (cve.mitre.org) has assigned the name CVE-2011-1126 to this issue.
Other Resolved Issues:
· In Workstation 7.1, the default main memory VA cache size (mainMem.vaCacheSize) for 32-bit Windows guests was reduced to accommodate 3D emulation memory requirements. However, the reduced value resulted in performance loss. For 7.1.4, the default main memory VA cache size has been be increased to 1000 MB and performance is improved.
· Because Workstation failed to identify more than 10 USB host controllers in newer Windows guests, some USB devices did not appear in the Removable Devices menu. Now Workstation shows all USB devices in the Removable Devices menu as long as they are connected to the first identified 16 USB controllers.
· When using the Capture Movie option, the captured video stopped playing around the 1GB mark if the video file exceeded 1GB. Now you can capture and play video files that are greater than 1GB.
· The application vmware-modconfig UI could not start up in a KDE 4 session in a SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop (SLED) 11 environment.
· On Windows host systems that have more than 4GB of memory, Workstation sometimes crashed during cryptographic operations, for example, when performing disk encryption.
· VMware Tools upgrade could be started by a non-administrator user from the VMware Tools Control Panel in a Windows guest. In this release, only administrator users can start VMware Tools upgrade from the VMware Tools Control Panel. To prevent non-administrator users from starting VMware Tools upgrade from a guest by using other applications, set isolation.tools.autoinstall.disable to TRUE in the virtual machine configuration (.vmx) file.
· When a virtual machine running on a Windows host was used to access an Omron Industrial CP1L Programmable Logic Controller, Workstation generated an unrecoverable error.
· When using NAT virtual networking on Windows hosts, the traceroute command did not work when used within virtual machines.
· The Easy Install feature did not work for Fedora 14 guest operating systems.
· During VMware Tools installation on a Fedora 14 64-bit guest operating system, the following warning message was generated while building the vsock module: case value '255' not in enumerated type 'socket_state'.
· Workstation crashed with an access violation when a user tried to open the sidebar after closing all tabs in Quick Switch mode.
· The Easy Install feature did not work for Red Hat Linux 6 guest operating systems.
· The VMware Tools HGFS provider DLL caused a deadlock when making calls to the WNetAddConnection2 function from an application such as eEye Rentina in a Windows guest operating system.
· There was no option to disable guest time sync when a host resumes. Now you can set time.synchronize.resume.host to FALSE in the virtual machine configuration (.vmx) file to disable guest time sync when a host resumes. See VMware Knowledge Base Article 1189 for other time sync options.
· Setting a hidden attribute on a file in a shared folder from a Windows guest on a Linux host failed with an error. This problem caused applications such as SVN checkout to fail when checking out to shared folders on Linux hosts from Windows guests.
November 22nd, 2010· When you install VMware Workstation on an operating system that uses a post-2.6.34 Linux kernel, the vmmon module fails to compile.
· The vmxnet and vsock guest modules fail to compile on operating systems that use post-2.6.32 Linux kernels.
· When you install VMware Tools on an operating system that uses a post-2.6.34 Linux kernel, the vsock.ko module fails to build.
· Unity mode does not work with an Ubuntu 10.10 64-bit guest operating system.
· An unrecoverable error occurs when you select the Novell NetWare, Sun Solaris, or Other guest operating system type in the New Virtual Machine wizard.
· When you run bulkDeploy.exe to deploy a Pocket ACE package into one or more locations, it crashes with the error SSL Wrapper: invoked uninitilized function AES_set_encrypt_key!.
September 27th, 2010· Added Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 support for Integrated Virtual Debugger´s live debugging mode.
· Many issues with running Windows 7 SP1 Beta, RHEL 6.0 Beta, and Fedora 13 in a virtual machine have been addressed. Each of these Operating System versions are still in development and have known issues, therefore they are not fully supported.
· NAT networking includes several performance improvements.
· VMware Workstation 7.1.2 has been tested with the new free standalone VMware vCenter Converter 4.3. VMware vCenter Converter can convert a single machine or an entire datacenter into virtual machines and it supports Windows 7. For more information on VMware vCenter Converter, see https://www.vmware.com/tryvmware/?p=converter.
· Easy Install now supports older versions of CentOS.
· Added Windows 2008R2 and Apache Server 2.2.15 support for ACE Management Server
Installation, Upgrade, and Compatibility:
· In some cases copying an index.html file into the same directory as the VMware Workstation 7.1.1 installer executable on Windows hosts might cause the VMware Workstation installer user interface to fail.
· On Linux hosts, if the screen saver becomes active during the VMware Workstation software update process, the update might fail.
· When downloading software updates via a slow Internet connection, you might receive a timeout error resulting in an unsuccessful download.
Display:
· To improve user experience when using Unity mode on Windows Vista and Windows 7 virtual machines, VMware Workstation disables Aero when entering Unity mode and re-enables it when you exit Unity mode. To override the disabling of Aero, open the vmx configuration file and add unity.allowCompositingInGuest="TRUE".
· Rebooting an Ubuntu 10.04 host after installing VMware Workstation, might cause the System Tools option under the Application menu to disappear.
· Attempting to power on a Windows 7 virtual machine named using non-ASCII characters on Ubuntu 10.04 hosts might cause display issues in the Unity Start menu.
· Enabling Aero on hosts with Intel Integrated Graphics processing unit might cause display issues in a virtual machine.
· On Windows hosts, you might experience some usability issues while attempting to interact with Fedora 13 virtual machine applications in Unity mode.
· On Fedora 13 virtual machines, dragging guest applications along the edges of the guest display might cause the mouse functions to become unresponsive.
· In some instances, virtual machines suspended in VMware Workstation 7.x might not resume in Workstation 6.0 or earlier versions.
· On Japanese version of Windows, using non-ASCII characters to name the host might cause the Start menu to not show in Unity mode.
Miscellaneous:
· The DNS server information might not refresh when the virtual machine switches between multiple NICs, such as wired and wireless. Thus leading to a failure in looking up hosts with their DNS names when guest is using NAT.
· If your host system has three parallel ports you might not be able map these non-sequentially.
· On Ubuntu guests, the vmware-user component of VMware Tools might become unresponsive after Autologon is enabled on the guest and cause drag and drop or copy and paste operations to fail.
· USB devices with vendor ID 0x1366 might be identified as being manufactured by Asahi KASEI instead of SEGGER.
· Pressing the Ctrl+Alt+Enter keys on an ACE virtual machine running in kiosk mode might cause the keyboard to become unresponsive.
· PCI devices cannot be added back into encrypted ACE virtual machines if removed accidentally by non-ACE Administrators. To fix this issue, only ACE Administrators can add or remove PCI devices to ACE virtual machines after entering the Admin mode password.
· Dragon Medical 10.1 from Nuance might not run with more than one core on Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit guests.
· On Windows 7 guests, you must run a New Hardware scan from the Device Manager menu for Logitech USB audio devices to be recognized. USB devices disconnected from the guest might still appear to be connected in the guest, and the guest might not allow you to reconnect them.
· On some Windows guests, the volume control keys and a few other multimedia keys might not work in a virtual machine.
· Error in NetBIOS forwarding in NAT leads to incorrect resolution of WINS name of the virtual machine.
· Recording or replaying some 3D applications with record/replay might cause memory allocation failures.
· On Linux hosts, launching a virtual machine application shortcut that includes either non-ASCII characters or a long path might not work on the first attempt.
May 27th, 2010· Support for 8 virtual processors (or 8 virtual cores) and 2 TB virtual disks.
· Support for OpenGL 2.1 for Windows Vista and Windows 7 guests.
· Greatly improved DirectX 9.0 graphics performance for Windows Vista and Windows 7 guests. Up to 2x faster than Workstation 7.
· Launch virtualized applications directly from the Windows 7 taskbar to create a seamless experience between applications in your virtual machines and the desktop.
· Optimized performance for Intel's Core i3, i5, i7 processor family for faster virtual machine encryption and decryption.
· Support for more Host and Guest Operating Systems, including: Hosts: Windows 2008 R2, Ubuntu 10.04, RHEL 5.4, and more Guests: Fedora 12, Ubuntu 10.04, RHEL 5.4, SEL 11 SP1, and more.
· Now includes built in Automatic Updates feature to check, download, and install VMware Workstation updates.
· Ability to import and export Open Virtualization Format (OVF 1.0) packaged virtual machines and upload directly to VMware vSphere, the industry's best platform for building cloud infrastructures.
April 3rd, 2009VMware provides support for the following operating systems for Workstation 6.5.2:
· Windows Vista Service Pack 1 and Service Pack 2
· Asianux Server 3.0 Service Pack 1
· openSUSE 11.1
· Ubuntu 8.10
· Ubuntu 8.04 LTS
VMware provides experimental support to the following operating systems for Workstation:
· Fedora 11
· FreeBSD 7.1
· Mandriva Linux 2009
· Novell SLE11.0
· Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3
· Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.8
· Sun Solaris 10 Update 6
· Ubuntu 9.04
September 27th, 2008· Many enhancements were made, including support for several new operating systems, integration of ACE authoring features, the ability to start VMs in streaming mode, an installation wizard GUI with an alternative command line mode, an "Easy Install" option for unattended installation of several Windows OSs and Linux distributions, Unity mode, accelerated 3D graphics for Windows XP guests, a graphical virtual network editor for Linux hosts, enhancement of VM record and replay, virtual hardware updates for hot-plugging, and more.
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