Quick Look at VMware Player 2.50
Posted on November 18, 2008
5 Comments
A couple months ago I discovered VirtualBox and its seamless mode. If you’re going to spend a lot of time in a virtual machine client, stuff like seamless mode makes it so much “smoother” in my opinion. Gives a nice integrated experience.
In the comments to that VirtualBox article Alisha had mentioned that VMware Workstation has something called unity mode and then she linked me the VMware Player 2.5 release notes. I finally found the time to check that out. I think you’ll find it is worth a look.
As a reminder, VMware Player is free from VMware and is used to play virtual machine images. You can’t create them or do much tweaking, but it plays them well. Since I have VMware Server (also free) at work, I used it to create a test XP VM and installed the VMware client additions.
Side note: You don’t have to have VMware Server to create new images — there are alternatives. For instance, this Ubuntu Doc mentions some options that are worth checking out. I also mentioned a work-around a couple years ago. You can also grab pre-built VMware Applicances as well.
There are three “major new” features with this release of VMware Player and I checked out each.
Unity view — Integrate your favorite guest applications with your host. Open the application window, enter Unity view, and the VMware Player window is automatically minimized. The guest application windows look just like host application windows, but with color-coded borders. You can access the virtual machine’s Start menu (for Windows virtual machines) or Applications menu (for Linux virtual machines) by placing the mouse pointer over the host’s Start or Applications menu, or by using a key combination. Unity view is supported only experimentally for Linux guests.
Unity view is, of course, what started this whole journey. It works well and, as currently implemented, I must say I don’t care for it very much…
I’m running Ubuntu 8.10 and built an XP VM client. When I put XP machine in unity view it looks good. The Windows apps run smoothly on my Ubuntu desktop, no issues there. But I completely lose my XP status bar and tray. To get the Windows Start menu, I must hover my mouse over the Ubuntu start menu, then this little menu will pop up:
That’s really not that bad, but I have two small issues with it:
- Hovering over the ubuntu menu doesn’t always cause this guy to show up. Sometimes I have to go click a Windows window and then try again. In the picture above, you can see that I’ve “pinned” it to always show the menu.
- I miss my tray!
Those aside, I’m sure I can adapt.
Installer bundle for Linux hosts — Installing VMware Player on Linux hosts just got a lot easier. The new bundle format provides a graphical UI wizard for most Linux operating systems. With a few mouse clicks, VMware Player is installed. For users who want a custom installation, a command-line interface provides complete control.
Works great, easiest VMware install on a Linux machine that I’ve ever done. By far.
Accelerated 3-D graphics on Windows XP guests — VMware Player 2.5 virtual machines now work with applications that use DirectX 9 accelerated graphics with shaders up through Shader Model 2.0 on Windows XP guests. Hosts can be running Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Vista, or Linux.
Here we go — this is what got me all excited to give VMware Player a try. 3D graphics in a virtual machine? Awesome!
Unfortunately, I’ve not yet quite managed to get it to work with EverQuest so the jury is still out on this feature. DxDiag.exe shows things are there and the tests run OK though. I have more work to do before I throw in the towel though.
(Updated: I’m closer now — key seems to be to run EQ in windowed mode… After each attempt be sure to run dxdiag and ensure it still sees a 3d device. If not, shut down the client and restart Player to get it back)
There are some other nice features of Player. Running the VM in a window and want to change resolution? Just stretch out the window to whatever size you want it. No longer do you need to diddle between 1024×768 and 1280×1024 (for example). Infinite options! Another cool thing I noticed first in unity mode and then confirmed when running the VM in a window is that dragging and dropping files between the host and guest OS works really well. I like that feature too. Saves messing around with network shares.
(Updated: In the interest of fairness, I just noticed that VirtualBox supports the flexible resolution settings as well. I’d just never tried it before!)
Compared to VirtualBox, my stuff in VMware Player seems to run just a wee bit quicker. However, compared to VirtualBox, my VMware Player uses [much] more memory. And, of course, you can easily create new Vm clients with VirtualBox without resorting to any hacks or work-arounds…
Which is better? That’s for you to decide, both certainly have their strong points. I have more experimenting to do, but right now I’d lean towards VirtualBox for machines with “lesser” resources and VMware for the others. It definitely helps to have a VMware server setup to create new clients.
Tags: Everquest, Ubuntu, VirtualBox, virtualization, vmware, VMWare-Player
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5 Responses to “Quick Look at VMware Player 2.50”
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[...] following up from the today’s earlier post on VMware Player 2.50, here are a couple more useful resources to have [...]
I haven’t had problems with the little menu button appearing, but I do find it annoying sometimes. Unity in VMWare Player may behave slightly different than in Workstation.
It would be great if it would just show the main taskbar and then I could set it to auto-hide like in VirtualBox. But for the most part, I usually have most applications open that I need before I enable Unity mode.
If I could run the .NET application for work that I mentioned in my comment from your other post, I would probably switch from VMWare to VirtualBox in a second!
As you said, both of them have their strong points. For work I’ll stick with VMWare, and VirtualBox for testing things.
hey Alisha, thanks for the comments.
For me, I’d sure love it if we could even optionally chose to show the taskbar in windows clients… that would rock.
Hi, Stumbled across your blog from Google. Can you confirm that the Unity mode DOES NOT work with a Windows XP guest running under a Windows XP Host?
Nope, I can not confirm that.