During VMworld US 2019 there was also space for some “minor” products like Workstation and Fusion. “Minor”, but still important in the future of VMware… and really important in the past (first VMware’s product was VMware Workstation).
Also it’s good sign see that those products are still vital, considering that three year ago there were some rumors and doubts about the future of Workstation and Fusion products, due to the laying off some employees from the related teams.
But what are the news about VMware Workstation and Fusion?
The main branch will be VMware Workstation 15 and VMware Fusion 11, and on September there will be a new Fusion 11.5 and Workstation 15.5, both released as a free update!
Yes, this time will be a free release for existing customers of Workstation 12 (or greater) or Fusion 8 (or greater), without having to buy a full ‘new’ license.
New versions will bring new OS support:
- Windows 10 19H2
- Ubuntu 1910
- Debian 10.0
- RHEL 7.7
- macOS 10.15 Catalina (Fusion only)
Also, the new versions will add serveral new features:
- Jumbo Frame Support (Pro edition only)
- New pvscsi device support
- Local Kubernetes Clusters
- Network Config Preservation and export (Workstation only)
- Multi-Mon Shortcut Key (Workstation only)
- Dark Mode and Dark Mode Sync (Fusion only)
- Sidecar (requires Catalina host) (Fusion only)
And of course several bugfixes in performance and security aspects.
But probably the biggest news about those products at VMworld, was an interesting collaboration with Microsoft.
VMware has collaborating closely with Microsoft on the Windows Hypervisor Platform engineering team to make possible that Workstation can co-exist with Hyper-V enabled hosts. Read more about our collaboration here.
Why will be important? Because Hyper-V it’s also used as a client hypervisor. And not only to run VMs.
There are other main use cases of Hyper-V usage on a Windows machine:
- Running Windows Subsystem For Linux (v2)
- Implement Windows Server Containers
- Secure your client with Microsoft Virtualization-based Security (VBS)
And, in my opinion, is the second one the main aspect that will require this co-existance in a relative close future.
