VMware Workstation 6.5 and PerfectDisk 2008 for VMware

Yesterday I talked about software that I keep installed on my Windows Vista machine. Today, I’m going to break out a couple of those applications for a closer look than what I went into yesterday.

VMware Workstation 6.5 brings several new features to the table. I’m not going to be doing a full fledged review here, or even a comprehensive overview of all of the features of VMware Workstation. I am however, going to highlight what I feel are some awesome features that are new to the 6.5 version.

The first feature I noticed was the “Easy Install” feature. So far, I’ve only created two virtual machines – an Ubuntu Hardy (8.04) and a Windows XP Pro. Each time I installed from a .iso file and each time VMware detected what OS I was installing automatically. In each case, it asked me basic questions such as what did I want my username and password to be, and for Windows I could pre-enter my Product key. After the OS was installed, VMware automatically set out installing VMware tools, and let me know when it was finished and I could use the machine.

Here are a few screenshots of my XP “easy install” in progress:

Here is the New Machine Wizard where it asked for your preliminary info:

Here are a couple of Easy Install in action – Installing the OS and installing VMware Tools:

Once installed, as you can see, there doesn’t seem to be much different from VMware Workstation 6.0.x:

Besides the traditional Console, Full-Screen and Full-Screen Exclusive modes, there is a new mode called Unity which first appeared in VMware Fusion for Macintosh. This allows you to pull an application out of the Virtual Machine, and integrate it into your host desktop. Here is an example of Unity mode in action:

Another new feature worth mentioning is the ability to “record” and “play back” VM sessions. I can already see this being useful, and you can find this functionality by locating this set of icons in the toolbar: 

I also wanted to mention that VMware Workstation 6.5 also chooses SCSI as the default Hard Disk type for XP, and automatically loads the required driver when doing an Easy Install. This greatly increases the I/O performance of the Virtual Machine over the IDE setting:

While not selected by default when creating an Ubuntu Virtual Machine (possibly since it’s only been supported since 7.04 and users may be installing an older version), VMware Workstation 6.5, like 6.0.x supports Paravirtualization for Linux guests with that ability compiled into the kernel. This can greatly increase performance of you Linux virutal machines, so be sure to enable it if your distro supports it. Most modern distro’s support this, and it can be enabled after the OS is installed. To find out if it’s installed search your kernel config file for the string “VMI” to find out if it is set to “on”. Here is where the setting is within VMware:

I also mentioned yesterday that I use Raxco PerfectDisk 2008 for VMware. I won’t go into a lot of detail here, as you can read yesterday’s post for more detail about PerfectDisk 2008, but I wanted to highlight the VMware functionality here.

If you have PerfectDisk for VMware installed, head over to the “Virtual Computer” tab. Here you can click “Add” to point it to your Virtual Machines. This first screenshot is before optimization, and you can see that my XP VM is using 1.6GB of space (also note at this point, VMware Workstation complained when shutting down the XP VM that the virtual disk was defragmented):

After optimization, not only has the disk shrunk down to 1.4 GB (small difference, but hey, smaller is smaller), and VMware didn’t complain about the Virtual Disk being defragmented:

Also, if you do not own PerfectDisk, and you would like to defragment your Virtual Hard Drives, VMware Workstation also has a utility built in to do this as well (without the PerfectDisk optimizations). To find this bring up the settings for your virtual machine and click on the Utilities drop-down and you will see the defragment option:

In conclusion, I’m very impressed with the new features of VMware Workstation 6.5 and I’m looking forward to discovering more new features, and expanding on the functionality of those highlighted here!