VMWare Workstation 8 - how awesome?

[Splash]

I know that Virtualbox has come on in leaps and bounds, but having finally gotten around to doing anything bar build a Win8 machine in it I'm pretty chuffed - if the $199 USD cost translates well on the UK market (ie not £199) I think I'll be buying a copy in the next week or 2.

Seriously, the drag and drop functionality to move a machine to a vSphere server is awesome.

Anyone else indulged yet?

[aidanjt]

I've downloaded it to have a crack at it, but I haven't had a go at it just yet.

[shaithis]

It doesn't seem to be that huge compared to what v7 brought (EFI VMs and Unity were the 2 huge ones for me) tbh but it is an incredibly awesome piece of software that I cannot live without any more. Even had a bit of fun with it.......showing people a dual monitor setup which has Win7 on one screen and OS X on the other is normally enough to confuse them.....then you drag a file from the Mac desktop onto the Windows desktop and it really bakes their noodle

It's also becoming cheaper to run thanks to how cheap cores and RAM are currently.

[lodore]

Im sorta tempted to get VMware workstation as well.
you change change the currency on the wmware website to UK Pounds. it costs £135.50
I like virtualbox but I always seem to have a few crashes when new versions come out and I have heard from other forums that VMWare workstation is ultra stable and to me thats a very good reason to use it. I like the idea of the snapsnots and automated snapshots. I will probably wait for some discount thou.
I checked the vmware blog and last year they had some discounts in the end of november and december 25% and 30%.

[badass]

I've made the mistake of installing workstation 8 when I only have a license for workstation 7
Guess I should work hard and get a VCP 5 sharpish
It seems pretty good on first impression though.

[aidanjt]

I gave civ5 a run on it, it actually works very well, nowhere near as pretty as host rendering, but still very playable, all the same substance to the game is still there obviously.

[Pazza]

I use esxi free version for the server and works fine - workstation 8 sounds pretty interesting so will have a look into this

[aidanjt]

I gave ut3 a crack with it too, it ran perfect, finally! virtualisation can provide a reasonably sane gaming environment! Wohoo!

[badass]

I gave ut3 a crack with it too, it ran perfect, finally! virtualisation can provide a reasonably sane gaming environment! Wohoo!

That excites me more than it should TBH

[aidanjt]

That excites me more than it should TBH

Yeah, it likely still wont work with stupid games which add if(gpu.vendor=="ATi" || gpu.vendor=="nVidia") checks, but it's an awesome step in the right direction.

[Moby-Dick]

It was a "must have" upgrade for me as I can now virtualise hyper-v either directly under Workstation or within nested ESX5 - the connectivity with vSphere is handy too.

one of the guys I podcast with did a nice little post when he was on the WS8 beta.
http://vninja.net/virtualization/vmw...n-8-whats-new/

[badass]

It was a "must have" upgrade for me as I can now virtualise hyper-v either directly under Workstation or within nested ESX5 - the connectivity with vSphere is handy too.

one of the guys I podcast with did a nice little post when he was on the WS8 beta.
http://vninja.net/virtualization/vmw...n-8-whats-new/

My Core 2 Quad doesn't support EPT. Just VT-x
No easy peasy nested virtualisation for me

[Moby-Dick]

thats a pity - though EPT never seemed to be listed on CPUID when I checked both my i7's out.

time to upgrade

[badass]

thats a pity - though EPT never seemed to be listed on CPUID when I checked both my i7's out.

time to upgrade

I'm going to see if I can think up a business case for work first. My CPU's still plenty fast enough for everything -It's just I've maxed out the RAM a couple of years ago with 8GB and now it's missing a little virtualisation optimisation.
A Core i5 2500k is less than twice as fast - I was hoping that either bulldozer would be awesome or I wouldn't find anything I need to upgrade for before ivy bridge. I quite like the idea of being able to shoehorn 64GB of RAM into my computer in the future

[Moby-Dick]

the more RAM the better - I'm finding 16Gb isn't enough in my "lab-top"

[pakendsuw]

I will probably wait for some discount thou.
I checked the vmware blog and last year they had some discounts in the end of november and december 25% and 30%.

i just bought a copy and testing out windows 8 dev preview right now

i think vmware generally gives out discounts all through the year, if we only know where to look.

i found this and i got some nice discount http://www.davidtan.org/vmware-softw...on-code-promo/