VMware Workstation 14 is a free virtual machine for running all kinds of Operating systems. Guest and host machines (Operating Systems) in VMware Workstation 14 are configured based on your needs. These machine desktops can be extended or combined either together or with other remote hosts for a more functional experience.
When developing various projects, developers might want to run two or more operating systems at the same time. In order to do this, they can create another virtual system inside a virtual machine. With Workstation 14’s ability to run these concurrent systems, developers can now switch between them with ease as well.
Complete Overview of VMware Workstation 14
VMware Workstation 14 comes complete with a drag-and-drop ability to load your virtual machines in an easy way, as well as the handy ability to incorporate cloud servers. Makes it possible to extend your desktop and combine other remote VMware hosts for a more functional experience. It also comes with VMware flings – VMware’s pre-release software. VMware Flings let users test out new VMware products and give VMware feedback from their trials.
The VMware Workstation Fling is now a VMware product, and it allows VMware users to download pre-beta software and tests it on various VMware platforms. With this VMware Fling. Introduces support for using Remote machines over RDP connections (Remote Desktop Protocol) in the vGPU type remote machines configuration file used by it.
Virtualization Based Security
It allows the creation of virtual machines for running both Windows and Linux-based applications, VMware Tools makes it possible to use VMware Workstation as a secure sandbox in which untrusted code can be executed. It comes with VMware Tools 10.1.5, where numerous security fixes and enhancements have been made available to further tighten up the platform security posture of VMware Workstation:
A vulnerability in VMware Tools has been found by Cedric Cochin that could lead to arbitrary code execution when VMware tools are running on an x86 or x64 Linux host operating system with SMAP (Supervisor Mode Access Prevention) enabled. The issue stems from a race condition between the read operation from process memory.
Compatible TPM
It is VMware’s first VMware Workstation where it has been enabled using VMware TPM 2.0. It now comes with a virtual serial port which allows you to access the VM console of VMware ESX Servers
VMware Remote Console is an HTML5-powered VMware console that encapsulates VMware ESXi’s or vSphere’s VMware Remote Console (VMRC) into a browser plugin that it installs on your system. VMware WS users do not need to buy the VMware Horizon View Client license if they are running ESXi/vSphere 5.x with embedded VMs as long as they are connected to VMware vCenter Server or VMware Infrastructure Navigator and subscribed for VMware licenses.
Linux Virtual Machines
There are new features inside VMware Workstation 14 such as the ability to use up to 4 CPUs, 1023 MB of RAM, and USB 3.0 support along with Linux kernels version 2.6 kernel at release time (more coming
VMware USB Arbitrator Driver
This new feature is used for controlling VMware-specific USB devices like the Pico Display Adapter or the VMware Remote Console. The other VMware-compatible USB Devices are still being controlled by the VMPNPV Bus driver provided by Microsoft in Windows 8 and later versions.
Unity Touch support inside Virtual Machines
You can now use your touch screen while working on a guest OS. In this version and older versions, it was only possible to use a VMware Workstation Unity Touch-enabled VM on VMware Workstation Player 12 and VMware Horizon View Client 3.2
VMware Remote Console
It now comes with VMware Remote Console which allows you to run your Virtual Machines inside VMware vSphere or VMware ESXi without having to purchase VMware Horizon View client license for every server supporting it. Before it, this feature was available only inside VMware Fusion 7 and VMware vSphere / ESXI 5. x.
Also, try VMware Workstation 12 Free Download
Auto Disks Clean Up
It includes an option to automatically remove disks that are no longer used by any virtual machines, either because they were cloned to a new disk or the original virtual machine was deleted. This is a great space-saving feature and one where VMware can continue to innovate in this area further.
This can be enabled in it using: Settings > Options > General Tab
When VMware Workstation detects that a virtual machine has been cloned, it will attempt to remove the old disk from the list of disks in VMware Workstation Viewer. If VMware Workstation cannot safely remove the disk, for example, if there are other files open on the disk at the time VMware Workstation tries to delete it.
NVMe Storage Controller
It now supports DirectPath I/O. This is known as NVMe Storage Controller. VMware has already a VMware workstation tool called VMware vSphere, A VMware administrator can create a new virtual machine on VMware vSphere and enable the features. This allows accessing the storage device directly by bypassing the VMware ESXi host layer which is quite different from VMware Workstation to share physical disks.
The main advantage of this setup is that it enables high performance for low-latency applications like SQL servers or other web applications that are expected to be executed in the Windows platform. In order to use this new feature VMware workstation user needs to make sure that his system meets one of these requirements:
How do you create an NVMe disk
It provides a VMware vSphere version that you can access the VMware vCenter which allows the creation of a new Virtual Machine. In the VMware workstation console select New Virtual machine > Create > Enter the Name Vm1 and click next.
With this VMware vSphere will create two networks one is a management network that uses a VMXNET3 adapter to connect virtual machines with the VMware workstation host computer and the second network is a VMotion network adapter which helps to migrate the running guest operating system from one VMware workstation host computer to another VMware workstation host computer. The following figure shows what this newly created NVMe disk will look like.
Enhanced IPv6 support
VMware Workstation is VMware’s desktop virtualization solution. It now comes with IPv6 support which will allow you to create and run an operating system that has been enabled for IPv6 communication. It can also be used to connect to VMware ESXi 6.0 servers over IPv6, as well as VMware vCloud Air™ instances with IPv6 networking available, giving end users the ability to run applications in it across both on-premises infrastructure or public cloud environments without sacrificing access to modern networking capabilities.
As for VMware Virtual Network Editor (VNET) plug-in, it allows you to manage the entire VMware Hypervisor Network environment using VMware NSX virtual Networks including the extensions of physical VMware vSphere and VMware NSX networks into it. As for VMware Virtual SAN advanced networking plug-in (VvSAN), it allows you to manage multi-host and hybrid cloud compute environments with an advanced level of networking services that can be used at each stage of the development process and deployed in a production environment.
VMware has also announced new support for OpenStack (2004) which will enrich VMware’s existing Cloud Services Providers Program portfolio, providing validated support for other open source technologies such as OpenStack that are increasingly being adopted by Service Providers today.
New Features in VMware Workstation 14
- Fastest PC virtualization performance yet.
- It now utilizes VMware’s latest VMware Photon Platform™ which results in faster application load times and greater memory efficiency resulting in more responsive PCs running Windows 8.1 or 10 guest operating systems within the VMware Workstation virtual machine.
- New User Interface.
- It has a new VMware Photon Platform™ based VMware Workstation User Interface.
- VMware Photon Platform™ is VMware’s lightweight, native application platform for the cloud and virtualized edge devices.
- VMware Photon Platform™ applications are snappy, responsive, highly scalable, and portable across all major operating systems – Windows® (7+), Linux®, and macOS® (10.11+).
- The workstation supports DirectX 10 and OpenGL 3D graphics on Windows 7 or later 32-bit or 64-bit guest operating systems.
- Improve 3D graphics performance by up to 100% compared to it.
- Seamless Hardware Integration.
- It enables seamless hardware integration when running with VMware vSphere 6.
System Requirements for VMware Workstation 14
- Operating System: Windows 7/8/8.1/10.
- Processor: Intel Dual Core processor or Core i3.
- Memory (RAM): 1GB of RAM is required.
- Hard Disk Space: 5 GB of free space required