Vmware Workstation 6.5 Beta 1 With Unity Released
Saturday, 05 April 2008 by Michel Roth
VMware made the fist public beta of Vmware Workstation 6.5 available. Vmware Workstation 6.5 is the first version of VMware workstation on Windows that supports the Unity feature and other cool improvements.

What is Unity again? Unity is for VMware Workstation what seamless windows are for Presentation Server. With Unity you can run virtual machines seamless, meaning that you only see the application you start, in stead on the entire virtual machine. The resemblance with seamless windows is striking. With seamless windows in Presentation Server you see just the application, not the entire (Windows 2003 "physical") desktop.

To me Unity is a confirmation to something I have felt strongly about ever since VDI became popular. SBC and VDI are not that different. It would make perfect sense for the Unity feature to make it into future versions of ESX. That would be very interesting. VDI is maturing rapidly. First there was Citrix that allowed for creating seamless applications, then there came Provision Networks (now Quest) that took this one step further and allowed you to create a published application from an application installed onto a (virtual) Windows XP desktop. Now there's VMware that allows you to publish that same application using Unity. The line is starting to blur. What's next?

Anyway, there's a demo online of Unity in beta 1 of Vmware Workstation 6.5 from Gabe's Virtual World. Check it out:


Also there's a small screenshot gallery of some of the changes in beta 1 of Vmware Workstation 6.5 over here. (the site is in Dutch but you can take a peek at the screenies)


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