Back in 2005 I needed VMWare to be able to test a piece of software on multiple separate installations so I went and bought VMWare Workstation 5.5.x for Linux. One of the annoying things with Workstation 5.5 was its complete lack of support for USB 2.0 and somewhat arcane configuration which occasionally necessitated ini file acrobatics for several ‘non-standard’ systems. Other than that, however, it was an excellent application well worth its ‘hefty’ price tag. In any case, back then there were no decent alternatives for linux, save Qemu, which — honestly — didn’t really compete with VMWare.

Earlier this year VMWare Workstation 6.0 was released. Of course a lot of water has gone under the bridge since 2005 and many things have changed with virtualisation. First of all, it is not just EMC’s/VMWare’s turf anymore. Everyone from Microsoft, to Intel, to Sun, to the Linux Kernel, to Xen to [add your favourite company, project here] is talking about and working on virtualisation. Virtualisation is a buzzword, both in the enterprise world, but also among consumers. The oldest players around have not stood still and VMWare could not be an exception: VMWare has released the free VMWare Player and VMWare Server which are pretty decent pieces of software that — while lacking the appeal of Workstation or the Enterprise solutions — are perfectly adequate for the casual user. With little expense you can keep your whole corporate, web serving or database ecosystem on a single machine, or have it distributed among many, creating physical server resource pools.

Nevertheless some days after it came out and since I was eligible for the $99 upgrade on my Workstation copy, I decided to take the plunge and get the latest version of VMWare Workstation. These are my first impressions of it.
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