New VMware Workstation 11 Supports Windows 10 Technical Preview -- Redmondmag.com

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New VMware Workstation 11 Supports Windows 10 Technical Preview

In its bid to replace the traditional Windows and client environment with virtual desktops, VMware will release major new upgrades of its VMware Workstation and VMware Player desktop virtualization offerings in December. Both will offer support for the latest software and hardware architectures and cloud services.

The new VMware Workstation 11, the company's complete virtual desktop offering and the company's flagship product launched 15 years ago, is widely used by IT administrators, developers and QA teams. VMware Workstation 11 will support the new Windows 10 Technical Preview for enterprise and commercial IT testers and developers who want to put Microsoft's latest PC operating system through the paces in a virtual desktop environment.

Built with nested virtualization, VMware Workstation can run other hypervisors inside the VM, including Microsoft's Hyper-V and VMware's own vSphere and ESXi. In addition to running the new Windows 10 Technical Preview, VMware Workstation 11 will add support for other operating systems including Windows 2012 R2 for servers, Ubuntu 14.10, RHEL 7, CentOS 7, Fedora 20, Debian 7.6 and more than 200 others, the company said.

Also new in VMware Workstation 11 is support for the most current 64-bit x86 processors including Intel's Haswell (released late last year). VMware claims that based on its own testing, using Haswell's new microprocessor architecture with VMware Workstation 11 will offer up to a 45 percent performance improvement for functions such as encryption and multimedia. It will let IT pros and developers build VMs with up to 16 vCPUs, 8TB virtual disks and up to 64GB of memory. It will also connect to vSphere and the vCloud Air public cloud.

For more mainstream users is the new VMware Player 7. Since it's targeted at everyday users rather than just IT pros and administrators, it has fewer of the bells and whistles, but it gains support for the current Windows 8.1 operating system, as well as offering continued support for Windows XP and Windows 7 in desktop virtual environments. "Our goal is to have zero-base support," said William Myrhang, senior product marketing manager at VMware.

VMware Player 7 adds support for the latest crop of PCs and tablets and will be able to run restricted VMs, which, as the name implies, are secure clients that are encrypted, password restricted and can shut off USB access. VMware said the restricted VMs, which can be built with VMware Workstation 11 or VMware Fusion 7 Pro, run in isolation between host and guest operating systems and can have time limits built in.

Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 10/08/2014 at 2:25 PM

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