VMWare are working on 2 new beta products, VMWare Fusion, which will be a 1.0 release, which allows running of Windows (and pretty much any X86 or x64 operating system) on a Mac, and VMWare Workstation 6, which, obviously, will be a 6.0 release, and has some interesting features. So, what features are “Interesting”. Well, on the workstation side of things, the features i am liking the most are:

  • VM Record/Replay – Use this feature to record VM activities and be guaranteed to reproduce the exact VM state 100% of the time
  • Integrated Virtual Debugger
    – Workstation integrates with Visual Studio and Eclipse so you can
    deploy, run, and debug programs in a VM directly from your preferred IDE
  • Automation APIs (VIX API 2.0) – You can write scripts and programs to automate VM testing

(these where copied directly from the VMWare 6 BETA Site). So, here is why i like these. the Virtual Debugger is something that would definatly be handy. This would work the same way as the Pocket PC or Smartphone emulators work when building Windows Mobile applications. the record/replay would be handy for building the test bed systems for testing your apps, and the automation APIs would be handy for automatically building, deploying and testing your VMs for your test environment.

Probably the most interesting feature of the Fusion beta is the 3D graphics support. Full (ish) DirectX 8.1 support. nice feature, and hopefully will get into Windows versions of the product soon.  

I am currently installing a Windows 2003 Server on my Mac pro under VMWare Fusion, and i like the fact i can give it 2 processors. Nice feature. I will follow up more on these later.