vmwarez.com: VMware Player Released from Beta.

Tuesday, December 13, 2005

VMware Player Released from Beta.

At long last, VMware has released its Player product. Like Microsoft lets people download their free viewers for Word or Excel, VMware Player is sort of a "viewer" for virtual machines.

You can download it here:

http://www.vmware.com/download/player/

It comes as a windows .exe or a linux rpm or tarball.

The windows installer is about 28mb.

Features:

Runs any VMware virtual machine (ESX, GSX, Workstation), any MS virtual machines and also Symantec's LiveState Recovery disks
Accesses the Host's hardware - USB devices, NICs, CD/DVD drives
Copy & Paste between host and guest
Drag and drop between host and guest
Flexible networking - can use a virtual NAT'd network, complete isolation or bridge w/ the host's NIC.
run 32 & 64bit OSs at the same time on the same host. 64bit OSs that work include certain MS Windows, Red Hat, SuSE & FreeBSD.
Adjustable memory configuration...
Shutdown options include automatic suspend or power off.
and get this... integrated google search! that one came out of no-where.

This is a great way to get into the vm world... Many prebuilt OSs are going to be made available at http://www.vmware.com/vmtn/vm/ Besides commercial ones, there's a new "Community Virtual Machines" section where users can submit their own VMs for download. I'll have one up there soon, I hope.

You can also create your own VM for use with player by going to any of the following websites:
http://www.consolevision.com/members/dcgrendel/vmxform.html
http://petruska.stardock.net/software/vmware/
http://sanbarrow.com/vmxbuilder.html