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First, there's the very prominent Enable ACE Features link in the Commands panel of the VM's settings page. Clicking this causes a host of new UI elements to appear, including an additional Settings tab containing a long list of ACE configuration options. You can later disable the tab via the standard VM Options dialog if you find it distracting. It's a lot for a new user to digest, but overall it's a vast improvement over the separate, poorly integrated ACE Option Pack for Workstation.
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The Easy Install option is nice but not mandatory. When I pointed it to an ISO image of a Windows XP installation CD, Workstation 6.5 immediately recognized the OS and offered to enable the Easy Install features. I chose to continue that route, though I could have just as easily bypassed it by de-selecting that option in the dialog. After that, it was a simple matter of entering my XP product key, typing in a NetBIOS machine name for the image, and providing a new administrator password. I then sat back and watched while Workstation 6.5 formatted the virtual partition, installed the OS, and dropped me at the login prompt when it was finished. It even completed the end-to-end tour by automatically installing the VMware Tools suite once I'd logged in.
Easy Install is a feature I'll likely use a lot in my own day-to-day testing and development work. It takes much of the tedium out of creating and provisioning new VMs. Unfortunately, not every Workstation 6.5 feature was as fully baked as Easy Install.
They call it beta code
Take the Unity feature, for example. By setting the focus on a particular guest OS application and selecting Unity from the
Workstation 6.5 VM menu, I was able to view the application seamlessly on my host OS desktop. Unfortunately, this integration
came with some limitations, not to mention some oddly disturbing ancillary behaviors.
First, the window repainting logic was frustratingly slow. Each resize or shift of the window created a great deal of video shearing, causing me to hesitate as I waited for the repaint operations to catch up with my movements. Also, even though the guest OS desktop was now hidden, Workstation 6.5 insisted on displaying each new Notification Area pop-up. Worse still, these pop-ups appeared over the host OS Notification Area, creating a kind of orphaned pop-up effect that had me scratching my head until I figured out just what was going on.
Workstation 6.5's new accelerated video support was also a mixed bag. Though I was able to perform some basic tests – for example, running the Direct3D tests in the DirectX Diagnostics (dxdiag) utility – repeated test cycles caused the VM to become unresponsive and eventually crash. And the few games I did try under Workstation 6.5 failed to load for (as yet) undetermined reasons.
In the end, it's important to temper the above observations by reiterating that Workstation 6.5 is still in the earliest beta stages. Given VMware's solid track record with Workstation, I'm confident these issues will be resolved prior to shipping. In the meantime, there's a lot to look forward to with VMware Workstation 6.5. Workstation users can all be thankful that VMware doesn’t have the good sense to take a breather while it’s ahead.
Randall C. Kennedy is a contributing editor of the InfoWorld Test Center, and he writes the Enterprise Desktop blog.
