VMware is Bringing Unity Feature to Workstation

Christian Hammond, a Senior Software Engineer with VMware, revealed on his personal blog that the next version of VMware Workstation will offer the incredibly successful Unity feature found in VMware’s Mac desktop virtualization product, VMware Fusion.

Workstation 6.5 has reached the ‘Friends and Family’ beta stage, and plans on introducing the Unity feature that has helped make virtualization on the Mac extremely popular. VMware brought this feature to Fusion with Unity, and Parallels introduced its Mac virtualization customers to basically the same technology called coherence.

If you haven’t been keeping up with Mac virtualization, the Unity feature can be thought of as a “seamless window” akin to Terminal Services or Citrix Presentation Server. In this way, rather than having to deal with the entire virtual desktop on your screen, the application windows themselves are displayed on the host machine directly. It keeps the clutter to a minimum and still allows you direct access to the applications on the virtual machine from your host environment. Now you get the idea of why this feature has gained so much popularity.

Christian details the following features as working in the latest beta build of VMware Workstation 6.5:

• Windows 2000/XP guest support

• Shaped windows

• Dragging windows

• Resizing windows

• Minimize/maximize

• Window stacking (Z-order)

• Custom mouse cursors

• Keyboard/mouse support

• Windows of the same application in the VM can appear as groups in the taskbar like any other app’s windows.

However, not everything is working and ready to go. He lists the following as items that are identified as not yet working:

• Virtual desktops do not work. If you move windows to other desktops, you’ll have problems.

• Multiple monitors may or may not work correctly.

• Alt-dragging or otherwise moving a window in a way other than by using the titlebar will cause things to get out of sync.

• If you attempt to drag a window off-screen, the window manager may block it, but the events will still be sent to the guest. This could cause the window to get ‘stuck’.

• Minimizing a window using the taskbar may cause visual oddities.

• Partially obscured windows may look wrong when in Compiz’s Expose mode or similar modes where all windows are displayed at once.

• There’s no proper start menu integration. Exit Unity mode to launch new applications or press the Windows key or Control-escape while in a guest application to bring up the guest start menu.