The trend with virtualisation is for vendors to support the running of virtual machines on the same PC at no extra cost, but there are exceptions.

One is VMware Workstation, which isn’t free but enables you to virtualise just about any guest operating system you want, adding extra network simulation, debugging and other professional tools for use by developers, system testers and support staff.

Unlike some virtualisation tools, VMware Workstation simply runs as an application on the host PC with versions available for both Windows (desktop or server) and Linux. It supports two-way virtual SMP and up to 8MB of memory per virtual machine and can run a wide range of 32-bit and 64-bit guest operating systems, including most versions of Windows and Linux plus Solaris and Netware.

Among a long list of enhancements in Workstation 6, you now get full support for guests running Windows Vista, together with multi-monitor capabilities, including options to address two screens from one VM or show different virtual machines on each display. Virtual machines can also be run in ‘headless’ mode, the VM running in the background without a display at all until such time as it’s selected. Plus you can connect using VNC remote control clients without having to install separate VNC servers, even when a VM is running in the background.

USB2 support is another useful new feature, providing the option to access Apple iPods. Plus we no longer had to tweak the host setup on our Novell Linux test PC to get the USB interface to work.

The VMware Tools installed can be updated automatically when a VM starts in Workstation 6 and there’s also a new option pack to allow for integration with the VMware ACE application to build secure virtual desktops.

The downside is that many of the new features require a change to a new virtual machine format, losing compatibility with older implementations.

Already extremely popular as a test bed for application developers, VMware further extends that appeal by adding support for Microsoft Visual Studio and Eclipse, the open source integrated development environment (IDE). Plus it’s now possible to convert a physical PC to a virtual machine (P2V) directly from Workstation 6 and automate procedures using a custom API (VIX API 2.0).

A couple of experimental options have also been added which, although not fully supported, could prove very useful. These include the ability to record and replay the execution of a virtual machine. This enables you to rewind and rerun events to further help with debugging and problem solving, although it’s not without its limitations, most notably a lack of USB support and slower execution times.

There’s experimental support, too, for para-virtualised Linux guests using VMware’s Virtual Machine Interface (VMI). In theory this should improve performance when running such guests, but few vendors support it at present.

Finally, on the management front little has changed in Workstation 6, other than the addition of new menu options and icons plus a little tweaking here and there. Which is fine because it works well and offers all the tools required to create, copy and clone virtual machines, configure them into teams, take and recover snapshots plus fiddle with network bandwidth and other settings.