The final of VMware Workstation 6 is now available for download. Virtualization.info discusses the new features.

I am citing the part that is mostly interesting for my readers:

IT administrators can count on new automation capabilities, thanks to VIX APIs adoption (already seen in VMware Server 1.x) and new headlless mode (to run virtual machines in background without a running GUI), and on new management tools, thanks to introduction of VNC remote display protocol support at host level (no need to setup Microsoft RDP or other management solutions inside each virtual machine).

The VIX API allows you to write scripts to automate virtual machine operations. Of course there are many other new features. Most important for me is that VMware Workstation supports now up to 8 GB RAM. I am often testing software with multiple machines. Usually, you can’t have enough RAM for this.

I just had one minor issue with the upgrade. When I tried to upgrade VMware tools on a Longhorn server Beta 3, the setup hanged. I uninstalled the VMware tools, rebooted, and tried to install them again. But it stuck at the same point like before. Only on a freshly installed Longhorn server, I was able to install the VMware tools without any problems.

Thanks to readers of my blog, I was able to solve two problems I had before with VMware Workstation and Longhorn. So all in all, I am quite happy now with the new release.

By the way, virtualization.info also published an interesting feature comparison between VMware Workstation and VMware Server.

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