A sneak peek into the future of VMware Workstation
The VMware Workstation team is very excited to announce the VMware Workstation Technology Preview 2018 is available now! This release includes many great new features that we’ve been working on and we would love to hear your feedback in our Tech Preview Community.
Cut to the chase and download the latest bits from our Tech Preview Community:
VMware Workstation Technology Preview 2018 community.
Or from MyVMware directly:
https://my.vmware.com/group/vmware/get-download?downloadGroup=WKST-TP-2018
What’s New
DirectX 10.1 – We are excited to introduce DirectX 10.1 support with Workstation 2018 Tech Preview. DX10.1 introduces several subtle differences over 10.0
DirectX 10.1 delivers the following graphics improvements:
- Full MSAA (Multisample anti-aliasing) support
- Shader Model 4.1 support
- Cubemap array support
This enhancement allows users to run games that require DirectX 10.1, and improves performance for DX10.0 games and apps. Test it out and let us know how what you think about the graphics quality and performance.
This feature is for both Windows and Linux hosts.
REST API – Workstation Tech Preview 2018 delivers a brand new RESTful API interface for automating virtual machines management. With the REST API you can perform VM operations like VM inventory management, VM power management, cloning, networking, IP and MAC address gathering, and more.
Use the API to include Workstation in your development pipeline to rapidly clone, configure, spin up and run automated tests within your VMs, and then destroy them when finished to repeat the process from your desired state.
Note: This is currently available for Windows host only.
How to test:
- Install VMware Workstation Tech Preview 2018 on your host.
- Workstation REST API follows exactly the same standard as Fusion REST API. Check out William Lam’s blog for details how to config and use the API. https://www.virtuallyghetto.com/2017/07/vmware-fusion-2017-tech-preview-adds-rest-api-support.html
Windows 10 High DPI support – We have improved our support for High DPI configurations from both a Host and a Guest perspective:
- Host level high DPI support. Workstation UI will auto detect the host level DPI and auto adjust the layout to meet this DPI. For example, if the original DPI scaling of your host display is 100% and you change it to 200%, Workstation UI will automatically update its layout.
- This is extremely useful for multimonitor scenarios, when you have different DPI settings for each monitor, when you move Workstation UI from one monitor to another monitor with different DPI, the UI will automatically adapt to DPI of the monitor it’s being drawn on.
- Guest DPI sync with host. When there is DPI change on the host side, the guest OS will be able to adjust its DPI to match the host DPI.
This feature requires both host and guest to be Windows 10.
ESXi Host/cluster view when connecting to vCenter – We’ve add a new Hosts and Clusters view when using Workstation to connect to a vCenter Server from Workstation. Users now have visibility to navigate to non-VM objects (ESXi hosts, Resource Pool and vApp) and their respective relationship hierarchy (i.e. Datacenter > Cluster > Resource Pool > vApp). Users can also switch back to the ‘flat’ VM view with a single click.
USB Auto Connect to virtual machine – Workstation 2018 Tech Preview provides a long-requested feature for managing USB device access. When users plug in an USB device, (a USB storage device for example) this USB device can be automatically connected to a powered on virtual machine without having to manually add the device. This is currently available only to Windows hosts.
Linux Host Wayland Support – Workstation can now run on Linux hosts using the new Wayland desktop architecture. We expect full coverage here, so we encourage users to try this out and let us know in the Tech Preview community if you experience any issues.
Installation Notice
To run this Technology Preview, users should uninstall previous versions of Workstation before installing this software. Note that the drivers included in this preview have NOT been signed (we only get our release build drivers signed), so Windows will prompt you accordingly during installation.
The system requirements for this Technology Preview remain the same as VMware Workstation Pro 14. See this VMware Workstation Document for more detailed system requirements.
This Technology Preview includes changes to the underlying virtualization platform, which is under active development. There are no guarantees that changes in this preview will be forward-compatible with other VMware software, nor that these changes will be present in future supported releases of VMware Workstation.
Uninstallation Notice
To uninstall the VMware Workstation Technology Preview:
- 1. Uninstall VMware Tools from each virtual machine used with the Technology Preview
- 2. Ensure that all virtual machines are downgraded to be compatible with an earlier version of VMware Workstation (VM > Manage > Change Hardware Compatibility…)
- 3. Exit VMware Workstation Technology Preview 2018
- 4. Remove VMware Workstation Technology Preview 2018 via the standard application uninstallation procedure
Resolved Issues:
The virtual machine console displays a black screen
After you upgrade from VMware Workstation 12.x Pro to VMware Workstation14 Pro and power on a virtual machine, the virtual machine might display a black screen.
This issue is now resolved.
Some VM tabs are missing and need to be manually reopened each time VMware Workstation Pro is relaunched
When multiple VM tabs have been opened and Workstation is relaunched, some VM tabs are missing. Each missing tab must then be opened manually.
This issue is now resolved.
Import of a virtual machine with a VMware Paravirtual SCSI disk adapter type might fail
When you use VMware Workstation or VMware Fusion to import a virtual machine with a VMware Paravirtual SCSI (PVSCSI) disk adapter type, the import operation might fail with the following error:
Invalid target disk adapter type: pvscsi
This issue is now resolved.
We really appreciate your help testing this software. Please share your feedback in our VMware Workstation Technology Preview 2018 community. We will try to answer any questions that you may have, and we’ll investigate any issues that are raised. We also encourage users to also share other thoughts about how we can improve or enhancements that you would like to see in future releases.
Thank you!
– The VMware Workstation Team
