How does VMware Workstation Pro work? VMware Workstation Pro works by creating fully isolated, secure virtual machines that encapsulate an operating system and its applications. The VMware virtualization layer maps the physical hardware resources to the virtual machine's resources, so each virtual machine has its own CPU, memory, disks, and I/O devices, and is the full equivalent of a standard x86 machine. VMware Workstation Pro installs onto the host operating system and provides broad hardware support by inheriting device support from the host. What types of applications can I run in a virtual machine?
Any application that will run on a standard PC will run inside a virtual machine on VMware Workstation Pro. VMware Workstation Pro is the equivalent of a full PC, with full networking and devices — each virtual machine has its own CPU, memory, disks, I/O devices, etc. This allows you to run any application that runs on the supported guest operating systems, including Microsoft Office, Adobe Photoshop, Apache Web Server, Microsoft Visual Studio, Kernel debuggers, Firewalls, VPN software and much more. What kind of hardware do I need to run VMware Workstation Pro?
VMware Workstation and VMware Fusion: Mac, Windows and Linux Virtualization Personal Desktop virtualization solutions from VMware provide IT pros, developers and businesses alike with an easy way to deliver, protect and manage Windows, Linux and Mac desktops and applications on premises or in the cloud.
VMware Workstation Pro runs on most standard x86-based hardware with 64-bit Intel and AMD processors and on 64-bit Windows or Linux host operating systems. Please review the before purchase, as some older CPU’s are no longer compatible. VMware recommends 1.2 GB of available disk space for the application. Additional hard disk space required for each virtual machine. Please refer to vendors recommended disk space for specific guest operating systems.
Can I convert my trial license to a permanent license? After the evaluation period has expired, you will be prompted to enter a license key. If you have purchased the product you will have received a new license key. Enter the purchased license key when prompted to unlock the full 'unlimited' version of the software. To take advantage of complimentary email support for up to 30 days, your license key must be registered. If you purchased the product from the VMware Online store, your license key is automatically registered.
If you purchased from a reseller, you need to manually register your license key in My VMware. Please consult this for detailed instructions on license key registration.
High Availability VMware HA provides protection against hardware failures. The HA service always monitors your virtual machines and can restart failed VMs on alternative host servers to reduce application downtime.
VMotion Move virtual machines running on one host to another with one click. There’s no service downtime as your VM’s active memory and operating status are transferred immediately. End-users are not affected (unlike typical scheduled maintenance on bare metal hardware), as the network is also virtualized and the virtual machines retain their network identity and connections. VNetwork Distributed Switch Centralize the provisioning, administration and monitoring of your virtual machines, using a network cluster combination. The vNetwork Distributed Switch ensures quality of service (QoS) to different VMware network features by allocating the maximum bandwidth wherever needed. VSphere API for Automation The vSphere API is exposed as a Web service, running on VMware vSphere server systems. The API provides access to the vSphere management components—the managed objects that you can use to manage, monitor, and control life-cycle operations of virtual machines and other virtual infrastructure components (data centers, datastores, networks, and so on).
Site Recovery Manager VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager is a disaster recovery solution that provides automated orchestration and non-disruptive testing of centralized recovery plans for all virtualized applications. MacStadium offers geographically-diverse for site-to-site replication of private cloud environments. Distributed Resource Scheduler Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) optimizes your private cloud infrastructure without any human intervention required. Whatever activity peaks you may have, this feature will spread the load of your virtual machines evenly across the nodes in your private cloud. This enables you to easily deploy multiple virtual machines while keeping costs down. Snapshots A snapshot captures the entire state of a VM at the time the snapshot is taken. Snapshots are useful when you need to repeatedly revert to the same state, but you don't want to create multiple virtual machines.
Linked Clones LinkedClones are virtual machine copies created from the snapshot of a single parent VM. They share virtual disks with the parent VM in an ongoing manner, which conserves disk space and allows multiple VMs to use the same OS. Linked clones allow for faster creation of virtual machines by using the exact files on the parent VM at the time of snapshot and allow a VM to look and feel more like a container. It’s an excellent method of creating a short-lived ephemeral VMs. Storage vMotion Move your virtual machine disk files between various storage spaces without interruption. VMotion guarantees the integrity of these operations so the service remains available during scheduled storage maintenance. This feature is also very useful for migrating to new files.
Thin Provisioning Your storage requirements are decreased through dynamic allocation of disk space. Your virtual machines will have the right amount of disk space without their performance being affected. Your investment and operating costs will also be reduced due to lower storage requirements.
VSphere Replication Continually replicate running virtual machines to geographically-diverse locations. Replication creates a copy of a virtual machines that can be stored locally within a cluster or at another site, providing a data source to rapidly restore a virtual machine within minutes. Network & Storage I/O Control Configure rules and strategies for every virtual machine and application to enable permanent availability. As soon as congestion is detected, resources are automatically allocated to high priority applications. Hot Add Usage won’t put a strain on your projects any more thanks to Hot Add. This feature enables you to increase processor and memory resources allocated to your virtual machines.
The operation is carried out instantly—without service disruption. Creating VMs from the Marketplace or OVF Compress and share virtual machines using the VMware Marketplace exchange platform. Find hundreds of preconfigured VMs ready to be deployed. VMware.ovf files can be executed immediately for easy deployment in development and testing environments.