The next version of VMware Workstation to carry automation support, finally

Yes, it’s about time.  The lack of API support for VMware Workstation has been a complaint for many of us that push our VM’s to the limit for quite some time.  Well, you’ll all be happy to know that Vix, the Perl/COM API replacement, has been extended to the new VMware Workstation 6 product.  Of course with it still in beta it could be quite some time before we get our hands on this for production purposes.

Automation is not the only improvement to be found in the Workstation 6 release.  Vista host support is just one of the many additions to be found.  The one thing that’s been keeping me away from Vista thus far is the lack of VM support on a Vista host.  I can live with not being able to run Visual Studio on Vista for the time being simply because I do all of my development in virtual machines but not being able to run VM’s on a Vista host was a deal breaker.  No longer however now I’m running Vista with VMware Workstation 6 Build 36983.**

** I’m still puzzled by Microsoft’s decision/lack of action/screw up/whatever around the unfriendly atmosphere that Vista and VS 2005 create.  You just can’t use them together, or at least not without a great deal of pain.  To me… and this is just me talking, I would have made sure that the premiere development platform for Vista development would actually RUN on the platform itself.  Ah, I digress

Anyway, back to Vix.  For those of you who have read my book I touched upon leveraging Vix with VMware Server.  It’s a nice API, or at least it will be at some point.  Vix v1 had a tremendous amount of documentation errors as well as just flaky behavior.  It was of course a v1 product so I’ll cut them some slack.  Now we are moving into a v1.1 product and adding additional product support.  This should be interesting.

Over the next several days I’ll hack out a few Vix scripts that leverage a bit of the VMware Workstation 6 integration.  Let’s see how she handles.