New Features
Workstation 5 has further support for 64Bit host hardware. AMD64 Opteron, Athlon 64 and Intel IA-32e CPU (including "Nocona") have found enhanced support in version 5. Workstation 5 also supports new 64-bit host operating systems, including SuSE 9.1, Windows XP (64-bit edition), and Windows Server 2003 (64-bit edition).
Workstation 5 also includes the ability to clone a virtual machine. You are given the ability to fully clone a virtual machine, in which it is a fully independent virtual machine with its own virtual disk; or you can also have a linked clone. Linked clones are new virtual machines that share virtual disks with the original virtual machine, saving space.
A few new operating systems have found support under Workstation 5, including Solaris 9 and 10, Longhorn, and new Linux distributions running the 2.6 kernel. Also, support has been added to Workstation 5 beta for Java Desktop Systems.
Under Linux, Workstation 5 now installs Linux Tools under X and also features support for wireless networking.
A new feature which is sure to have Microsoft themselves impressed is the ability of Workstation 5 beta to convert a virtual machine created in Microsoft Virtual PC for use with VMWare Workstation. The new V2V assistant guides the user through the entire process. To test the new V2V assistant, I setup a virtual machine in Virtual PC and later converted the virtual machine to use with VMWare Workstation 5 Beta.
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Workstation 5.0 Beta also allows the user to capture and save more than a single snapshot. A snapshot manager was added to Workstation 5.0 Beta in which the user is presented with a chronological view of each saved snapshot. Capturing a snapshot in this Beta version did prove a bit time consuming. Workstation 5.0 Beta seemed to freeze and pause for a few seconds before starting again.
