VMware Updates Its Free Offering, Includes Support for Windows Vista

VMware wants users to try its virtualization software on the house.

On Nov. 13, VMware will offer the beta version of its VMware Server 2, a free virtualization tool that allows users to partition a single physical server into multiple virtual machines. The software works both within Microsoft Windows and Linux environments.

VMware released the first version of its free software in February 2006, and the company estimates that more than 3 million copies of the software has been downloaded since then. The new beta is available for download Nov. 13 and will become generally available in the first half of 2008.


What's New

New features and enhancements in the VMware Server Beta 1 release:

• Web-based management interface: A new Web-based user interface provides a simple, flexible, intuitive and productive way for you to manage your virtual machines.
• Expanded operating system support: VMware Server now supports Windows Vista Business Edition and Ultimate Edition (guest only), Windows Server 2008 (Longhorn Server Beta 3), Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and Ubuntu 7.1, among others.
• Greater scalability: Take full advantage of high-end hardware with support for up to 8GB of RAM per virtual machine, up to two virtual SMP (vSMP) processors and up to 64 virtual machines per host.
• 64-bit guest operating system support: Run high-performance operating systems in virtual machines with support for Intel EM64T VT-enabled processors and AMD64 processors with segmentation support.
• Support for VIX API 1.2: This feature provides a programming interface for automating virtual machine and guest operations.
• Support for Virtual Machine Interface (VMI): This feature enables transparent paravirtualization, in which a single binary version of the operating system can run either on native hardware or in paravirtualized mode.
• Support for USB 2.0 devices: Transfer data at faster data rates from USB 2.0 devices.

Download: VMware Server 2.0 Beta
View Full Article: eWeek

Bah - still no love for Vista as a host OS. I'm not sure I grok why the heck not since Windows Server 2008 is built on top of essentially the same core. WTF? Maybe we'll see a Vista version when Longhorn Server and Vista SP1 synch up next spring.