The Palo Alto, California-based subsidiary of EMC Corp’s VMware Workstation product is designed for developers and systems administrators to make it easier to develop, test and deploy complex applications across multiple operating systems from a single desktop.
Version 4.5 of the product adds support for provisioning virtual machines over the network using PXE (pre-boot execution environment), the ability to track virtual machine performance using Microsoft Corp Windows Performance Monitor, and increased memory capacity of up to 4GB for all virtual machines and 3.6GB for individual virtual machines, enabling the use of server operating systems in a virtual machine.
The latest version also supports version 2.6 of the Linux kernel and offers early support for Windows enhancements due to be delivered in Longhorn, according to the company, as well as plug-and-play USB, and the ability to automatically check for product updates.
While VMware has multiple competitors in the server virtualization space, on the desktop it’s biggest challenger is Microsoft itself, with Virtual PC 2004, which was launched in late 2003 following the acquisition of Connectix Corp in February last year.
This article is based on material originally published by ComputerWire
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