This family of products is now in its 13th year, and I have quite the library of VMs built up over that period of time. Most of my VMs have been moved to my dedicated-for-virtualization vZilla Core i7 that's running ESXi 5.5 24x7, but there are still occasions where having VMware Workstation and/or the Player can be very handy. And migration between these virtualization platforms has become pretty seamless. Here's the detailed VMware blog post/announcement of this new Workstation release, with all the technical goodies explained: New Release of VMware Workstation 10 – Now Available! by Nicolas Rochard Sep 04 2013. Software development and testing with multiple monitor support, where winding back the clock of a running VM is quite handy, as are multiple displays, like on my desk.

Testing local boot devices, using USB 3.0 devices in a VM, faster than ESXi's limited USB 3.0 support, that I demonstrated here.įor far more detail and explanation of why the free VMware Player may be adequate for many users needs, see also VMware Player is a free way to play with VMs by Paul Braren Jan 02 2012. If you're not a developer and don't need snapshots, you'll probably be just fine with the free for non-commercial use VMware Player version, which still gives you the ability to both create and run VMs. VMware Player is free for personal non-commercial use. If you would like to learn about Virtual Machines or use them at home you are welcome to use VMware Player for Free. My./web/vmware/free#desktop_end_user_computing/vmware_player/6_0 support/player60/doc/player-60-release-notes.htmlĪvailable with a license key to allow corporate use, it's then called VMware Player 6 Plus, 'can run restricted virtual machines', and includes support, for $99 here:īut the software installer is available free, with no license key required (for non-corporate use), and doesn't time out or anything: Students and Faculty of accredited educational institutions can use VMware Player for free if they are members of the VMware Academic Program. It comes bundled with commercial-use license for VMware Player 6 Plus for PC: If you need a commercial license of VMware Player 6 Plus and you have a Mac, consider VMware Fusion 6 Professional, the $129 virtualization software for OS X.

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