I installed VMWare 5 build 12206 after VMWare sent out the e-mail to try this version. I tried earlier builds as well but they did not work well on my machine.

What new features do I like?

Linked clones
The concept is simple enough. Take an existing VMWare image (e.g. Windows 2003 Server Enterprise) and use the Clone this virtual machine option. You are then presented with a wizard that asks you some questions. One of the questions is Linked Clone or Full Clone (see below).

Clone

The linked clone option will then put all the files needed in the folder you specify. The disk image will contain the differences from the original image. Of course, this saves a lot disk space, especially if you create all your images from the same base image. It is a bit more difficult to distribute your images because you need to include the base image and the linked clone. The .vmx file of the linked clone possibly contains a link to the base image using an absolute path so that needs to be edited. All things considered, it makes things a lot easier and saving disk space is always a bonus.

Notes:

  • This can be done in Virtual PC as well and could be done in earlier versions of VMWare but without the nice wizards.
  • Your base image needs to be in VMWare 5 format. Your older images will need to be upgrade. Use the menu VM —> Upgrade Virtual Hardware.
  • It is recommended to sysprep the base image to avoid identical SIDs and to have an easy way to specify the computer name.

Teams
Now this is something cool. A lot of times you have images that belong together. For example: a domain controller, a member server, a client, a router, etc… These often need to be started in a specific order . VMWare 5 lets you define a team as a number of virtual machines that start in a specific order and stop in the reverse order. In addition, you can specify the amount of seconds between each startup and the networks that connect these machines.

Click on the thumbnail below to see a screenshot of a team with four virtual machines.

Team

Click on the thumbnails below to see the configuration screens.

Screen1Screen2Screen3

As you can see, you can define LAN segments of a specific speed to simulate slow connections with packet loss. I did not test this yet but it is an interesting option.

Once your team is defined, you can start and stop all machines with one click. But more interestingly is the ability to suspend and resume all machines at the same time. By the way, suspend and resume speeds are faster than in previous VMWare versions.

Memory use
This versions uses less memory than before. I don’t know how they did it but my machine still runs smooth enough even with a domain controller, Exchange 2003 back-end, Exchange 2003 front-end, a Windows XP client and a router. And that is on a 1.7Ghz Pentium M notebook with 1 GB RAM. The VM’s run on an external Maxtor 250GB hard disk.

If you work with virtual machines a lot, I can recommend to try VMWare 5.