VMware Workstation 7.1 vs. Oracle VirtualBox 3.2.4

by Cameron Sturdevant

With increased support for hardware-accelerated graphics capability, VMware Workstation easily handled AutoCAD 2011 workloads.

In Unity mode, it’s now possible to pin applications to the host system Windows taskbar. Here you see that I’ve pinned AutoCAD 2011, which is running in a VM, to the physical host system taskbar for easy access.

Workstation 7.1 added support for Ubuntu 10.04. However, advanced graphics capabilities are not yet available in Linux virtual machines, as they are for Microsoft Windows operating systems.

Workstation 7.1 now supports virtual machines with eight virtual processors or eight virtual cores. Here I created a Windows 7 VM with two virtual processors each with four virtual cores.

I used the new software updates feature to keep Workstation 7.1 updated. I especially like the fact that I was able to specify that my virtual machines would get the updated VMware Tools.

Workstation 7.1 can now import virtual appliances that are packaged in .OVF files. Here you see a Hercules load balancer with the import details just behind the virtual machine interface screen in the foreground.

Here you see (lower right) that I’ve added a CPU to my Windows Server 2008 R2 Data Center edition virtual machine. Windows Server 2008 has detected the change (message box upper right). You can see from Windows Task Manager (upper left) that the system was previously configured with two CPUs.

Here you see that the Windows Server 2008 guest is successfully running with three CPUs. Some Linux guests, including my CentOS 5.5 server, support the hot removal of CPUs, but not the Windows system.

Here you see Windows 7 64-bit Professional edition running in “seamless” mode. The underlying host operating system is also Windows 7. Although the two are running side-by-side, the effect is not as completely executed as competitive offerings.