Virtual machine users rejoice!!  No longer do you have to use one virtual machine tool at work and another at home.  Now VMWare has released a version of its free VMWare player that actually allows creation of virtual machines.  Some may recall that I previously posted about Virtual Box–Sun’s open source tool that you could use to create virtual machines.  While that was a good tool, the fact is that most of the virtual machines I was interested in using were created with VMWare so I had to have one virtual machine for work and one for home.  That meant learning how to use two tools and spending time creating virtual machines twice.

For a while I tried to use VMWare’s Server tool which allowed you to create virtual machines but it had this weird web interface that wasn’t very intuitive.  And since it ran from a web browser it was kind of slow.  Needless to say, that experiment was short lived.

But no more!!!  Now you can download a tool that will allow you to create virtual machines and/or use the ones you already have.  Just copy the virtual machine from work onto a portable drive and when you get home fire up VMWare Player and pick up right where you left off.    Not to mention that VMWare offers a whole boat load of pre-built virtual appliances so if you don’t want to spend time creating a virtual machine you can just download one from their site.

A really neat thing about this tool is the Unity feature.  It allows the windows you have open in your virtual machine to show up on your host desktop as if they were running native.  For example, today I had a browser and a terminal window open inside a Linux virtual machine.  When I enabled the Unity feature the virtual machine desktop minimized and both the browser and the terminal window appeared as regular windows on my Windows host machine.  Wayyyyyyy cool.  Of course that feature works once you install VMWare tools on the virtual machine.  I’ll post more on that later since it can take a bit of work.

For now, download and install this cool new tool and start creating machines to your heart’s content.  Happy vm-ing!!

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