VMware Workstation 5 Adds Features for Team Programming

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

While virtualization software maker VMware may currently dominate the X86 server market, the size of the company's PC and workstation installed base is many orders of magnitude larger than the 10,000 customers it has for its GSX Server and ESX Server products. VMware's server products made it a target for acquisition by parent company EMC, but the Workstation product line is what made VMware an expert at virtualization and a player in the IT market.

As is the case with the server products, VMware's Workstation product allows a single X86-based PC or workstation to support multiple and incompatible operating systems. Workstation does so by slicing up that machine into many virtual machine partitions, which each run their own operating system. Those operating systems are totally oblivious to the fact that they do not have absolute control of the PC or workstation and that they are not talking directly to the iron. VMware has shipped millions of Workstation licenses, and the software is very popular among application developers who often have to code programs that span many different platforms on the desktop and in the data center.

With Workstation 5, VMware is making improvements to help programmers create applications that span many platforms and to work together as they create those applications. The company says that Workstation 5 had 230,000 beta downloads, making it the biggest beta program to date for a VMware product.

A new feature called teams allows a single programmer to connect multiple virtual machines together on a desktop box to simulate and test n-tier applications. The teams feature, explains Srinivas Krishnamurti, senior product manager for the Workstation line at VMware, is configurable such that programmers can even throttle back network bandwidth to different tiers to accurately simulate the network latency and packet loss rates that real apps running across the network will experience. Programmers could, for instance, simulate the line speed of a 56K dialup modem--a lot of the world still gets to the Internet that way--to see how application behavior changes at such low speeds. The teams feature of Workstation 5 is also useful in another way, explains Krishnamurti. According to VMware's research, programmers coding n-tier applications usually have to share server and desktop resources with other programmers working on other projects, and they usually spend 25 to 30 percent of their time setting up configurations that they use for testing. Then, the next batch of programmers came along and installed a different OS and software stack on the test machines, taking up more time. Now, each programmer can have a simulated n-tier environment on his or her own workstation, and they don't have to share or reconfigure machines to do their work.

To help give the teams feature a relatively small memory footprint, Workstation 5 incorporates the page sharing feature of the top-end ESX Server, which allows the many VMs inside a development workstation to more efficiently share memory. With prior releases of Workstation, developers might have needed 3 GB or 4 GB of main memory to handle applications running in simulated multiple tiers. The new version of the virtualization software also includes other performance tweaks.

Workstation 5 also includes a feature that allows multiple, point-in-time snapshots of a virtual machine environment, allowing programmers to test code after tweaking operating system and middleware features, or to revert to a prior good state if they somehow muck up their software stack. While Workstation 4 and 4.5 allowed a snapshot, you could only take one. With Workstation 5, you can do multiple snapshots and manage them through a GUI interface. The new version also has a cloning feature, which allows a virtual machine instance, complete with its software stack, to be stored on a central server and accessed as a baseline, gold release for developers who use Workstation on their own machines. Developers can load this baseline software stack and clone it on their machines, and then machine whatever changes they want to it once it is on their machines.

The new version of Workstation also supports 64-bit X86 operating systems--including Microsoft Windows XP, Windows Server 2003 SP1; Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 and 4; and Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 8 and 9--running on Intel Pentium 4 and Xeon processors and AMD Opteron and Althon 64 processors, all of which support the 64-bit X86 extended memory, which AMD calls X86-64 and which Intel calls EM64T. VMware has also added support for some new 32-bit operating systems as new guest and host environments: Red Hat's Advanced Server 3 and Enterprise Linux 4; Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9, Linux Professional 9.2, and Linux Desktop 9; Mandriva's Linux 10; and Sun Microsystems' Java Desktop System (which is based on SUSE Linux).

Workstation 5 is available now for Windows and Linux host operating systems, and it costs the same as Workstation 4.5 at $199 for the boxed version and $189 for the electronic version. Customers who bought Workstation 4.5 after December 15 can get a free upgrade to Workstation 5 by downloading the electronic version; customers who bought Workstation 3, 4, or 4.5 before December 15 can get able to upgrade for $99.