blog.scottlowe.org

The recently announced beta for VMware Workstation 6.5 includes support for Unity, a technology that was originally introduced with VMware Fusion. Unity allows for seamless windowing of VMs; that is, windows from VMs and windows from the host can be seamlessly intermingled so that the distinction between the virtualized OS and the host OS almost disappears. This is the continued emergence of the application agnosticism I discussed near the end of 2006 and furthers the possibility of collections of VMs becoming our new working environments.

It’s very cool technology, and it’s also very exciting to see VMware bringing this technology to VMware Workstation. I hope that VMware also takes some of the new Unity features—like the badge that helps identify which windows belong to a VM and to which VM they belong—and backport that to future versions of Fusion as well. Of course, I’d love to see all of Workstation’s functionality ported over to Fusion, but that’s just me.

There’s more information on Workstation’s new Unity functionality from Christian Hammond, a VMware developer, on his blog.