VMWare Player 3.0.1 relaesed

Airbot · 23 Feb 2010

February 18, 2010

VMWare Player 3.0.1 is available.

Information

VMware Player 3.0.1 is a maintenance release that resolves some known issues. This release of VMware Player adds the following new support:

Operating System

Host and Guest Support

Windows 2008 R2 Host and guest
Windows Vista SP2 Host and guest
Ubuntu 9.10 Host and guest
RHEL 5.4 Host and guest
CentOS 5.4 Guest
Oracle Enterprise Linux 5.4 Guest

Resolved Issues

On VMware Player 3.0, multiple core vCPU support does not work on Windows 7. As a result, Windows 7 Home Premium, Home Basic, and Starter editions which support a single CPU with multiple core can not use more than one vCPU in the virtual machine.
Importing a Windows 7 XP Mode virtual machine fails if you install VMware Player in a directory path that contains non-ASCII characters.
In some instances, if you choose not to download VMware Tools automatically, the virtual machine becomes unresponsive when you install VMware Tools manually using VM > Install VMware Tools.
In some instances on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3 hosts, when you create a virtual machine the Next button in the Select a Disk Type dialog box is disabled.
On Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3 guests, printers configured on the host do not appear in the guest.

Release Notes/Known issues
VMware Player 3.0

Get it here if you don't want to sign up at the main site.
Download VMware Player 3.0.1

jimbo45 · 23 Feb 2010

Hi there
just adding to this for those that have used vmware player in the past

You can now also CREATE Virtual machines with vmware player (since 3.0) . Formerly you could only use vmware player to power on EXISTING VM's -- there was a way around the limitation using QEMU but was a pain.

Vmware player 3.0 / 3.01 is well worth considering now the CREATE limitation has been removed - especially for those cases

1) your computer doesn't have the VT feature
2) You need something a bit more flexible than XP Mode
3) You want to run Virtual machines but only have W7 Home premium installed.

IMO vmware is STILL the leader in Desktop / workstation type virtualisation -- VBOX is "coming up on the rails" but vmware still has it currently.

(BTW vmware player 3.0 and above also supports some 3-D features in its graphics allowing full aero in W7 / W2008 server virtual machines. - Note a lot of games / DVD playing and TV cards aren't yet currently supported however in Virtual machines).

Cheers
jimbo

pparks1 · 23 Feb 2010

I use VMWare Player since version 3.0. The only real feature that I really want them to add to the product is snapshot support. At least 1 snapshot. It's something that vmware server 2.0 could do which was also free....so I don't think it really takes away much from their workstation product.

jimbo45 · 23 Feb 2010

Hi there pparks1.

Vmware player is designed basically for people who want to use a FREE SIMPLE VM piece of software to run legacy apps in their Virtual Machines (I am still using MINIDISC recorders -- these won't even work with VISTA BTW).

For developers etc where "Snapshots", Linking and "Teams" are useful as well as doing a lot of software testing and deployement in different scenarios then vmware server or the commercial vmware workstation products are of course available.

Vmware player isn't designed to replace these - but for what it does and for FREE it's a great piece of software.

Vmware server whilst good is not so simple to set up if you don't have a lot of experience with virtual machines and doesn't currently support 3D so no aero in W7 Virtual machines. It (release 2.0 and higher) also uses a web based (i.e browser) interface to control and access Virtual machines -- not everybody's favourite idea.

Cheers
jimbo

pparks1 · 23 Feb 2010

Jimbo,

I understand all of that...however Sun VirtualBox is for home use as well and it supports multiple snapshots. And with Virtual PC, it supports differencing discs and such which accomplish similar functionality to snapshots.

I'm just saying that if it could support at least 1 snapshot, that would be nice. Right now, it's just a matter of backing up the .vmdk file in the event that I am going to try something that I might want to recover from. Certainly not a showstopper.

I used to use VMWare Server 2.0 in our Dev/QA lab area. Now, I use ESXi (both 3.5 and 4.0). In my production environments, we use ESX and are moving to Vsphere 4.0 U1 in the next 2 weeks.