We couldn’t be more excited about the VMware Workstation 8 release and our timing couldn’t have been more perfect if we had planned it!
Yesterday, VMware released Workstation 8 within hours of Microsoft releasing a developer preview of Windows 8.
I am currently at the Microsoft Build conference along with a team of VMware engineers and we were delighted to get our hands on a copy of Windows 8 yesterday afternoon. We immediately tried running Windows 8 in a VM on VMware Workstation 8 and VMware Fusion 4 and were ecstatic that it worked great!
We had plans to go out for a team dinner but instead ended up sitting on the floor of the Anaheim Convention Center for 6-7 hours – fueled by caffeinated beverages and really bad pizza!
I was up until 4am playing with Windows 8 and trying all of the new features – I suspect that the rest of the development team was doing the same. We plan to spend the rest of the week learning everything we can about Windows 8 – including developing for the new Metro UI, multi-touch and pen based input devices, graphics driver enhancements, UEFI boot capabilities, power management, the Windows application store etc. all of which will be considred for the next release of VMware
Workstation.
Yes, I will probably spend a little time trying Hyper-V as well…
(Update 9/15/2011) –
We have found that Workstation INSTALLED on Windows 8 requires a slight configuration change in order to run virtual machines.
After installing Workstation 8 on Windows 8 you can do any one of the following:
1. Add your user to the to __vmware__ group
2. Run Workstation 8 in compatibility mode for Windows XP SP3 – (right click on the desktop icon, click on Properties, select the compatibility tab and check the compatibility mode box)
3. Run Workstation 8 as an administrator – (right click on the desktop icon and select Run as Administrator)
Please download and try VMware Workstation 8 today! http://www.vmware.com/workstation
We look forward to your feedback in the Workstation Community Forums!
