Archives for posts with tag: Workstation 8

Network Simulation in VMware Workstation 8

September 15, 11 //
3

In the new VMware Work­sta­tion 8 release, VMware has added a rudi­men­tary net­work sim­u­la­tion set­ting where you can tweak band­width and packet loss for a given net­work card. Very use­ful when test­ing appli­ca­tions and servers and want to know how they react to net­work issues, or if you want to sim­u­late a WAN link. I know this was avail­able in Work­sta­tion 7 as well, but it used to be a team fea­ture. Now it’s per vNIC fea­ture, which makes it much more useable.

Con­fig­ur­ing it is very easy, but you need to know where to look to be able to find the feature.

Con­fig­ur­ing Net­work Adapter Advanced Set­tings in VMware Work­sta­tion 8

  • Find your VM, right click it and select set­tings
  • Select the Net­work Adapter and click on the “Advanced…” but­ton
  • This brings up the Net­work Adapter Advanced Set­tings win­dow, where you can tweak the net­work set­tings includ­ing inbound/outbound band­width and packet loss per­cent­age

    There are a num­ber of pre­de­fined set­tings for band­width, mak­ing it easy to sim­u­late var­i­ous sce­nar­ios like ISDN, cable, leased T3 and so on. You can even mod­ify the vir­tual net­work card MAC address in the same win­dow, if you need to do that.
  • Tweak the set­tings, and the new band­width and packet loss set­tings will imme­di­ately be applied to the VM

Con­fig­ur­ing Net­work Adapter Advanced Set­tings in VMware Work­sta­tion 8: Video Demo

Con­clu­sion

I love this. In my day job I’m often faced with sim­u­lat­ing how dif­fer­ent appli­ca­tions work over some rather wonky WAN lines, and build­ing this kind of fea­ture set into VMware Work­sta­tion 8 makes a lot of sense. I do hope they improve it in the future though, as I really would like to see it add tweak­able set­tings for latency as well, which often is the main killer in WAN envi­ron­ments. For now, I’ll have to stick to WANem for the latency sim­u­la­tion, at least until VMware adds latency tweak­ing to VMware Workstation.

Installing Windows 8 Developer Preview in VMware Workstation 8

September 14, 11 //
31

Installing Microsoft Win­dows 8 in a VMware Work­sta­tion 8 VM turned out to be a real piece of cake.

Fol­low the screen­shots for the pro­ce­dure I used, but basi­cally all I did was to cre­ate a new VM with the pre-configured “Win­dows 8 Server” pre­set and inserted the down­loaded ISO file.

Note: Win­dows 8 Server has been removed as a pre­set option in the final release of VMware Work­sta­tion 8, my screen­shots are from the beta ver­sion. If you want to install Win­dows 8 in the GA ver­sion of VMware Work­sta­tion 8, you’ll need to do a man­ual install (as opposed to Easy Install). Use the Win­dows 7 option as a baseline.

Win­dows 8 VM Con­fig­u­ra­tion Screenshots

Net­work­ing, sound and other vir­tual hard­ware issues were non-existing, every­thing just works right out of the box (or .iso as the case is). Adding more than 1GB mem­ory to the VM also helps a lot when it comes to it’s responsiveness.

Win­dows 8 in VMware Work­sta­tion 8 Instal­la­tion Video

Var­i­ous Win­dows 8 Screenshots

VMware Workstation 8 — What’s new?

September 7, 11 //
8

VMware is close (still in beta) to releas­ing the new major release of VMware Workstation.

Update 14. Sep­tem­ber 2011: VMware Work­sta­tion 8 has now offi­cially been released.

VMware Work­sta­tion 8 brings a lot of new fea­tures and enhance­ments to the table, and I’ve been lucky enough to play around with it in the beta program.

VMware Work­sta­tion 8 Sys­tem Requirements

To be able to install VMware Work­sta­tion, the host sys­tem proces­sor needs to meet the fol­low­ing requirements:

  • 64-bit x86 CPU
  • LAHF/SAHF sup­port in long mode



To deter­mine if your host sys­tem is 64-bit capa­ble, down­load CPU-Z to deter­mine the capa­bil­i­ties of your processor.

To be able to run nested 64bit guests, like VMware vSphere 5 hosts, the sys­tem needs addi­tional CPU features:

  • AMD CPU that has segment-limit sup­port in long mode.
  • Intel CPU that has VT-x sup­port. VT-x sup­port must be enabled in the host sys­tem BIOS.

For a list of Intel proces­sors that sup­port VT-x check Intel® Vir­tu­al­iza­tion Tech­nol­ogy List, or use CPU-Z to iden­tify that as well.

VMware Work­sta­tion 8 — New features

  • New User Inter­face
    The user inter­face has been updated with new menus, tool­bars, and an improved pref­er­ences screen.


  • Remote Con­nec­tions
    Con­nect to Server fea­ture allows remote con­nec­tions to hosts run­ning Work­sta­tion, ESX 4.x and Vir­tual Cen­ter. You can now use Work­sta­tion as a sin­gle inter­face to access all of the VMs you need regard­less of where they reside.


  • Upload to vSphere
    Inte­grated vSphere drag and drop inte­gra­tion. Auto­matic usage of OVFTool enables easy upload­ing of VMs from VMware Work­sta­tion to ESX hosts or vCen­ter. Move work­loads from local test envi­ron­ment into pro­duc­tion envi­ron­ment with a few mouse clicks.


  • Share your VMs
    This new fea­tures allows you to con­trol who access them from other instances of Work­sta­tion, great fea­ture for teams work­ing together or sin­gle admin­is­tra­tors that access the same VMs from mul­ti­ple com­put­ers. Also, a VM that is shared is started with the host OS with­out start­ing the VMware Work­sta­tion GUI, sim­i­lar to how VMware Server worked before it was discontinued.


  • New default key­board dri­ver
    To limit the num­ber of reboots required dur­ing installation/upgrade of VMware Work­sta­tion, the Enhanced Key­board func­tion­al­ity is no longer installed by default.
    Note: Upgrad­ing from VMware Work­sta­tion 7 to 8 keeps and upgrades the exist­ing dri­ver unless VMware Work­sta­tion 7 is unin­stalled before installing ver­sion 8.


  • Vir­tual VT-x/EPT or AMD-V/RVI
    This is a good one, at least for all of us that run lab envi­ron­ments on our desk­tops or lap­tops.
    This set­ting enables you to run 64bit guests inside nested hyper­vi­sors like VMware vSphere 5. To enable it, edit the vCPU set­tings for the par­tic­u­lar VM.


  • Bet­ter Teams

    Add team attrib­utes to any VM with­out any of the draw­backs. No longer forced to make a Team in order to man­age mul­ti­ple VMs together.


  • Improved graph­ics per­for­mance in guests


  • Improved vSMP


  • Other Vir­tual Hard­ware Improve­ments
    Mem­ory sup­port is now 64GB pr VM
    HD Audio is avail­able for Win­dows Vista, Win­dows 7, Win­dows 2008, and Win­dows 2008 R2 guests (Real­Tek ALC888 7.1 Chan­nel High Def­i­n­i­tion Audio Codec)
    USB 3.0 sup­port for Linux guests. (Not avail­able for Win­dows guests)
    Blue­tooth devices can be shared with Win­dows guests