Sweet, I did call it for being announced at the VMworld this weekend but with the launch of Fusion and Player 5 it's not a surprise that they released Workstation 9 today as well, it does make me wonder what they are going to launch at VMworld however (as we already know about vSphere 5.1).

Would be nice if they'd upgrade the ws8 licences for the vcp5's amongst us!

Hehe we have had a partner preview, but we are under an NDA.

This reminded me as am now downloading my free VMware workstation 7 software as I got the link and licence after passing the VCP 4 exam. The end game is to then see if I can get my greasy paws on version 9 through upgrade.

Well it would be cheap as well as compared to purchasing from scratch

£89 to upgrade I believe. Also you should be downloading Workstation 8 although the welcome letter mentions 7 it's actually 8 that you're given.

Thanks Simon, didn't know that I can download version 8 as I would give that a go in the morning

I was going to buy Workstation 9, but £169.50! I think I will stick to my single ESXI host for a bit longer

I had a popup today when I opened VMWare 8. That's excruciatingly expensive though, particularly when a large majority of the users are going to be doing relatively small-scale, localised stuff on it.

I'm really interested in the HTML5 based, touch friendly web interface they've built. It'd be really handy being able to log onto VMs using any HTML5 compatible device.

It's a shame they still haven't got a version for OS X. I'm sure that it wouldn't be a massive endeavour, seeing as they do have a Linux version of Workstation.

They needn't stop selling Fusion, it'd just be nice to have a fully blown version of Workstation (I'm not a full time Mac user, but I prefer software to be platform-agnostic).

Have a look at Fusion Pro.

VMware Fusion Professional: Apple Mac for Business & Enterprise gives you an idea of the differences between both versions of Fusion.

Oh, nice. I don't have a Mac right now but this might help me swing that way again one day.

I've been using VMWare Workstation 9 for a few days now and it's amazing. I've currently got 4 2008 R2 VMs running Exchange / AD / TMG and my system is barely batting an eyelid. That's probably got more to do with the fact I'm using an SSD with 16GB of RAM, but it's just amazing to have all that on my laptop.

On a side note, for anyone thinking of running VMWare on an SSD, use the feature of VMWare called 'linked clones'. I set up one 2008 R2 VM, patched it, and then cloned it this way. VMWare keeps a differential copy which saves loads of space and, because you're running an SSD, you don't notice the performance hit.

Gav: I have a similar setup here, 16GB ram and a 512GB SSD. Well, I'm actually running Hyper-V in Windows 8, but see no latency issues or the like when I have up to a dozen VM's open.

An SSD helps just so much versus an older mechanic HDD. This laptop used to run Hyper-V on Server 2008 R2 and anything heavy like patching would bog the entire system down if 2 VM's were at it. The difference is night and day, and Hyper-V on W8 is free (I thought VMware workstation was as well, or used to be, or is that just the VMware player?).