Publisher's description of VMware Workstation 7.1.4
Run multiple operating systems on one computer
VMware Workstation is powerful desktop virtualization software for software developers/testers and enterprise IT professionals that runs multiple operating systems simultaneously on a single PC. Users can run Windows, Linux, NetWare, or Solaris x86 in fully networked, portable virtual machines - no rebooting or hard drive partitioning required.
VMware Workstation delivers excellent performance and advanced features such as memory optimization and the ability to manage multi-tier configurations. Essential features such as virtual networking, live snapshots, drag and drop and shared folders, and PXE support make VMware Workstation the most powerful and indispensable tool for enterprise IT developers and system administrators.
With millions of customers and dozens of major product awards over the last six years, VMware Workstation is a proven technology that improves productivity and flexibility. An indispensable tool for software developers and IT professionals worldwide.
VMware Workstation works by enabling multiple operating systems and their applications to run concurrently on a single physical machine. These operating systems and applications are isolated in secure virtual machines that co-exist on a single piece of hardware. The VMware virtualization layer maps the physical hardware resources to the virtual machine's resources, so each virtual machine has its own CPU, memory, disks, I/O devices, etc. Virtual machines are the full equivalent of a standard x86 machine.
Key features for "VMware Workstation 7.1.4"
• Configure and test multi-tier applications, application updates, and operating system patches on a single PC
• Easily restore or share archived test environments, reducing repetitive configuration and set-up time
• Streamline computer-based training by allowing students to always start from a "clean" state and experiment with multiple operating systems, applications, and tools in secure, isolated virtual machines
• Run software demos of complex or multi-tier configurations on a single laptop
• Accelerate help desk resolution of end-user problems with a library of pre-configured virtual machines
What is new in version 7.1.4:
• Adds support for Windows 7 SP1 and Ubuntu 10.10 guest and host operating systems.
Security Fixes:
Workstation 7.1.4 addresses a local privilege escalation in the vmrun utility:
• VMware vmrun is a utility that is used to perform various tasks on virtual machines. The vmrun utility runs on any platform with VIX libraries installed. It is installed in Workstation by default. In non-standard filesystem configurations, an attacker with the ability to place files into a predefined library path could take execution control of vmrun. This issue is present only in the version of vmrun that runs on Linux
Other Resolved Issues:
• In Workstation 7.1, the default main memory VA cache size (mainMem.vaCacheSize) for 32-bit Windows guests was reduced to accommodate 3D emulation memory requirements. However, the reduced value resulted in performance loss. For 7.1.4, the default main memory VA cache size has been be increased to 1000 MB and performance is improved.
• Because Workstation failed to identify more than 10 USB host controllers in newer Windows guests, some USB devices did not appear in the Removable Devices menu. Now Workstation shows all USB devices in the Removable Devices menu as long as they are connected to the first identified 16 USB controllers.
• When using the Capture Movie option, the captured video stopped playing around the 1GB mark if the video file exceeded 1GB. Now you can capture and play video files that are greater than 1GB.
• The application vmware-modconfig UI could not start up in a KDE 4 session in a SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop (SLED) 11 environment.
• On Windows host systems that have more than 4GB of memory, Workstation sometimes crashed during cryptographic operations, for example, when performing disk encryption.
• VMware Tools upgrade could be started by a non-administrator user from the VMware Tools Control Panel in a Windows guest. In this release, only administrator users can start VMware Tools upgrade from the VMware Tools Control Panel. To prevent non-administrator users from starting VMware Tools upgrade from a guest by using other applications, set isolation.tools.autoinstall.disable to TRUE in the virtual machine configuration (.vmx) file.
• When a virtual machine running on a Windows host was used to access an Omron Industrial CP1L Programmable Logic Controller, Workstation generated an unrecoverable error.
• When using NAT virtual networking on Windows hosts, the traceroute command did not work when used within virtual machines.
• The Easy Install feature did not work for Fedora 14 guest operating systems.
• During VMware Tools installation on a Fedora 14 64-bit guest operating system, the following warning message was generated while building the vsock module: case value '255' not in enumerated type 'socket_state'.
• Workstation crashed with an access violation when a user tried to open the sidebar after closing all tabs in Quick Switch mode.
• The Easy Install feature did not work for Red Hat Linux 6 guest operating systems.
• The VMware Tools HGFS provider DLL caused a deadlock when making calls to the WNetAddConnection2 function from an application such as eEye Rentina in a Windows guest operating system.
• There was no option to disable guest time sync when a host resumes. Now you can set time.synchronize.resume.host to FALSE in the virtual machine configuration (.vmx) file to disable guest time sync when a host resumes. See VMware Knowledge Base Article 1189 for other time sync options.
• Setting a hidden attribute on a file in a shared folder from a Windows guest on a Linux host failed with an error. This problem caused applications such as SVN checkout to fail when checking out to shared folders on Linux hosts from Windows guests.
