VMware 5.5 workstation beta out

VMWARE JUST ANNOUNCED the beta for VMware Workstation 5.5, and you can conveniently find it here. The new version is full of virtual goodness, and a lot of it is quite useful, not to mention simply neat.

The first thing is full 64-bit support for any operating system that comes in that width, including experimental Solaris 10 support. This was a long time coming, and will be welcomed by most. More important is VT support. When the chips hit the street, there will be something you can use with it, even if it is still in beta. Presumably there is Pacifica support there also.

There's also an experimental virtual SMP setup. You can not only emulate a bunch of single CPU boxes on a single real CPU, but now you can emulate a bunch of dual CPU boxes on a single CPU. While this is a neat trick, very neat, we can't see it as all that useful in the real world. Anything that needs that much CPU is probably not a good candidate for virtualisation.

The other way around, having a single VM run on two CPUs makes much more sense, but if you need more than a single CPU full time, you are still not a good virtualisation candidate.

The virtual machine importer is also really beefed up, with one feature that made me sit up and say wow. The older versions could convert Symantec Ghost images to VMs, but this new one goes a step further. Version 5.5 can run a Ghost image directly, so if you have a bunch of images stored on a central server, you can open them up easily and muck around with them. This could be astoundingly useful for admins in large corporations.

The last part is a greatly enhanced snapshot capability. The new version can take multiple snapshots, show you them all, and jump around or revert to an older one. This has some interesting possibilities for many things from hack repair to backup to patch gone bad fixes. While it is nothing you couldn't do before with a little effort, the newer snapshot functionality looks to make a common task easier for the average admin.

VMware 5.5 is looking like a much bigger upgrade than the mere half a point version bump suggests. Several of the new features are simply must haves, VT support and 64-bit are tops there, while others are just nice. It looks like they did a very good job, and delivered almost all the most wanted features in a single upgrade. Look for the fully fledged VMware 5.5 Workstation before the end of the year. µ