Smoothwall Firewall project

Friday 19 March 2010

VMware Workstation 7.1 beta

I have just started beta testing VMware workstation 7.1 on Ubuntu 9.10 and have found that performance is not all that it should be. To be fair several other better testers have also discovered this , and the VMware team have started the investigation to get this fixed.

I have successfully installed the Alpha 3 version of Ubuntu 10.04 to test this release, and although some of the VMware tools did not work perfectly, I was able to bring up the virtual machine and have an initial look at the new OS.

Anyway, here is a list of the changes that are taking place for the new release.


The VMware Workstation 7.1 Beta includes several new features and hundreds of minor improvements. Some release highlights include:

OpenGL 2.1 support for Windows 7 and Vista guests: The addition of hardware accelerated OpenGL 2.1 support to the WDDM driver enables many more graphics applications to run inside of your virtual machines.

Improved graphics performance: Significant enhancements have been made to the VMware WDDM driver that have produced benchmark results that are up to 80% faster. The updated driver also produces smoother video playback and addresses many reported rendering issues. Of course games run better as well!

8-way SMP support plus virtual disks up to 2TB in size: The virtual hardware continues to become more powerful to meet the needs of Workstation customers who are running server class applications.

OVF 1.0 support: Including the OVF Tool with this release enables users to easily import or export virtual machines and vApps and move them to vSphere or up into the cloud.

Direct Launch: Blur the distinction between running native and virtual applications by launching an application installed in a virtual machine directly from the start menu or taskbar of the host system.

Automatic software updates: These VMware applications can now detect when a new version is released and are able to update at the click of a button.

Fedora 12 virtual machines: We are excited about finally offering support for running one of the most popular Linux distributions on the planet!

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