Anyone Following VMWare Workstation 6.5?

dynamik · April 2008

Particularly:

VMWare wrote:

Unity mode — Integrate your favorite guest applications with your host. Open the application window, enter unity mode, and then minimize the Workstation window. The guest application windows look just like host application windows. You can access the virtual machine's Start menu (for Windows virtual machines) or Applications menu (for Linux virtual machines) by placing the mouse pointer over the host's Start or Applications menu.

Accelerated 3-D graphics on Windows XP guests — Workstation 6.5 virtual machine now support applications that use DirectX 9 accelerated graphics with shaders up through Shader Model 2.0 on Windows XP guests. Hosts can be running Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Vista, or Linux.

http://www.vmware.com/products/beta/ws/releasenotes_ws65_beta.html

The Unity feature looks sick. I guess it's been out in Fusion for the Mac for awhile, but this is the first I've heard of it (I don't use Macs). I didn't completely understand what it was just from their description, but once I looked into it, I got pretty excited.

http://www.chipx86.com/blog/?p=237

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JIApJMzGzDQ

edit: Here's some 6.5 beta videos:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hnI00gTUwI8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQ8CT_rokHA

JDMurray · April 2008

It looks like Unity Mode gives a VMWare guest OS window kiosk-like functionality. A single app will run as if it's a shell of that window. You could, for example, run cmd.exe in Unity Mode in a guest OS and it would look just like a cmd.exe window running directly in the host OS. This is an excellent feature for VMWare appliances and VM-based games, where you want the user to only use the app and not have (full) access to the guest OS.

hetty · April 2008

dynamik wrote:

The Unity feature looks sick. I guess it's been out in Fusion for the Mac for awhile, but this is the first I've heard of it (I don't use Macs). I didn't completely understand what it was just from their description, but once I looked into it, I got pretty excited.

Aero support for Vista now, but thats the only place ill be using Vista for a while at least. Nothing against it, I just dont want to reinstall my machine.

I didnt understand what Unity was from the description either, that video was sweet though. A picture paints a thousand words. Big plus for linux and macs that they can run (see) windows apps. Virtualisation is making things very interesting, could see some interesting solutions in the field with this feature.

Anyone Following VMWare Workstation 6.5?

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