VMware Player 3.1.4 Released

March 30, 2011

VMware Player 3.1.4 is available. Changelog below.

   Information

VMware Player 3.1.4 is a maintenance release that resolves some known issues. It also adds support for Windows 7 SP1 and Ubuntu 10.10 guest and host operating systems.

The following issues are resolved in VMware Player 3.1.4.

• In Player 3.1, the default main memory VA cache size (mainMem.vaCacheSize) for 32-bit Windows guests was reduced to accommodate 3D emulation memory requirements. However, the reduced value resulted in performance loss. For 3.1.4, the default main memory VA cache size has been be increased to 1000 MB and performance is improved.
• Because Player failed to identify more than 10 USB host controllers in newer Windows guests, some USB devices did not appear in the Removable Devices menu. Now Player shows all USB devices in the Removable Devices menu as long as they are connected to the first identified 16 USB controllers.
• The application vmware-modconfig UI could not start up in a KDE 4 session in a SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop (SLED) 11 environment.
• VMware Tools upgrade could be started by a non-administrator user from the VMware Tools Control Panel in a Windows guest. In this release, only administrator users can start VMware Tools upgrade from the VMware Tools Control Panel. To prevent non-administrator users from starting VMware Tools upgrade from a guest by using other applications, set isolation.tools.autoinstall.disable to TRUE in the virtual machine configuration (.vmx) file.
• When a virtual machine running on a Windows host was used to access an Omron Industrial CP1L Programmable Logic Controller, Player generated an unrecoverable error.
• When using NAT virtual networking on Windows hosts, the traceroute command did not work when used within virtual machines.
• The Easy Install feature did not work for Fedora 14 guest operating systems.
• During VMware Tools installation on a Fedora 14 64-bit guest operating system, the following warning message was generated while building the vsock module: case value '255' not in enumerated type 'socket_state'.
• The Easy Install feature did not work for Red Hat Linux 6 guest operating systems.
• The VMware Tools HGFS provider DLL caused a deadlock when making calls to the WNetAddConnection2 function from an application such as eEye Rentina in a Windows guest operating system.
• There was no option to disable guest time sync when a host resumes. Now you can set time.synchronize.resume.host to FALSE in the virtual machine configuration (.vmx) file to disable guest time sync when a host resumes. See VMware Knowledge Base Article 1189 for other time sync options.
• Setting a hidden attribute on a file in a shared folder from a Windows guest on a Linux host failed with an error. This problem caused applications such as SVN checkout to fail when checking out to shared folders on Linux hosts from Windows guests.

VMware Player 3.1.4
VMware Player 3.1.4 Release Notes

Alt. d/l link: FileHippo.com

I will be contacting the VMWare developers - the installation of the latest upgrade of VMWare player is a joke.

From a running VMWare Player, it informs that the update is available, and would you like to install it?

OK, it does a little download and says it cannot continue with the installation, because you are running an instance of VMWare, and would you like to close it down. OK fair enough.

The installation then detects that there is a copy of VMWare installed, and would you like to remove it, since the installation cannot continue unless you do.

Affirmative. Then it sets about uninstalling the old copy.

Eventually it finishes the uninstallation, and needs to reboot the system to continue.

Part 2. On restarting Windows, I'm sure it asked if I would like to install the new VMWare Player. Yes.

Did I want an icon in the start menu, on the desktop and on the Launch Bar toolbar? An intelligent question except it could have kept the same preferences I had before with just a little sensitive programming, and it could have tested to see if I was actually using a Launch Bar toolbar any more, couldn't it?

What if I had said yes?

Must have taken another 20 minutes before it informed me that it needed to restart again, and take the whole of Windows with it. Are VMWare's server products like this, leading to an effective hour of downtime just for a code patch and a few xml files?

Windows 7 setup takes less time. (not SP1, tho' )

I wonder if the equivalent Linux upgrade version is available. I'd bet it takes about one twelfth of the time, without a single reboot. I'll try later.

That's pretty much been the install process for VMWare player for quite some time. Although, mine takes nowhere near 20 minutes to install and get to the second reboot.

Their enterprise products, like ESXi, are Linux based, install in about 3 minutes on bare metal hardware. They take up 30MB of space.