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

Chris­t­ian Mohn