As mentioned earlier, I’ve been running my Ubuntu Linux test machine in VMware 5.5.4, because I already had a license for that version and I didn’t care to upgrade to VMware 6.0 at that point. However, a few days ago I ran across a description of the new features in VMware 6.0, and they looked very appealing.

One of the new features that caught my eye was drag-and-drop support for Linux machines. I’ve long enjoyed using that with Windows VMs, and was quite put out that the earlier VMware version didn’t support it for Linux VMs… to exchange files between the Linux virtual machine and my Windows host machine, I had to either create network shares to exchange files, or use the host/guest shared directory system, neither of which was (in my opinion) quite as secure as the drag-and-drop system, because drag-and-drop required someone at the keyboard and couldn’t be done remotely from the virtual machine.

Another was multi-monitor support. I’ve been running dual monitors off and on for a decade now — it’s the best thing since sliced bread for a software developer, because you can edit code or take notes on one screen while you run the program on the other, even if it’s full-screen. It’s good for anyone who does a lot of heavy multitasking too, because you can put programs that you want to keep an eye on on the secondary monitor. For the last few weeks, I’ve been using it to run my Linux virtual machine on one monitor, full-screen, while my Windows machine is still easily available on the other one.

The second monitor is only available in my office, of course. When I have to go elsewhere, I only have the laptop’s built-in monitor. That’s fine for many things, but over the past few weeks I’ve discovered that when I’m running the Linux VM in full-screen mode, I can’t see the low-battery warnings unless I switch out of full-screen mode. VMware 6.0 has an answer for that too: you can now give the virtual machine access to the host machine’s battery information. 🙂

There was also an interesting feature called paravirtualization, which promised to give better performance for virtual machines that support it (the latest Ubuntu Linux being one of them).

Other useful-sounding features included USB 2.0 support (nice for my two external USB drives), “headless” VMs (meaning that you could close the VMware UI completely but still leave the virtual machine running), full Ubuntu 7.04 support, experimental 3D support, automatic upgrades of the VMware Tools package, and several other features that I didn’t need right now, but that might come in handy in the future.

The upgrade price was $99.00. Since I hadn’t had to spend anything on my Linux machine yet, I decided to go for it. I got a freebie with it too, something called the ACE option pack, which is supposed to allow for portable virtual machines. I wouldn’t have spent any money on it, but since it was free I decided to give it a shot. I haven’t installed it yet though.

The VMware Tools package no longer has the little annoyances that I dealt with earlier. It still has to be installed semi-manually in Ubuntu, but it all went much more smoothly this time. I also didn’t need to use AllTray, because the VMware Tools features don’t require me to run vmware-toolbox manually on startup anymore. Very nice.

The drag-and-drop option required that I enable an “experimental” feature when VMware Tools installed, something that wasn’t mentioned anywhere. Irritating, because I’d accepted the default option of not installing it at first, but easy enough to fix. It works quite well.

I’m not sure how the multiple monitor support for VMs is supposed to work. I haven’t seen any evidence of it in the Linux machine yet. The USB 2.0 and battery support seem to work flawlessly though, as does the “headless VM” stuff. The experimental 3D support, however, only supports Direct3D in Windows VMs, so it doesn’t do me any good.

The paravirtualization stuff required a reinstall of Ubuntu, which wasn’t as difficult as it sounds. I think I’ve gotten everything that I need reinstalled now, and I’ve given my backup system a thorough test now as well. I don’t see much difference yet, though there may well be some; I haven’t done anything to stress-test the Linux machine yet.

The mouse acts a little oddly now: windows seem to shake a lot while I’m dragging them around the virtual machine’s desktop. The mouse-wheel jumps about six lines every time I click it, instead of the three lines that I’m used to. And when I left-click things, it often acts like I’ve double-clicked them, though that seems to have vanished since I reinstalled the OS.

All in all, it seems like a pretty good upgrade. I don’t know whether it’s worth the price, but I’m satisfied with it.