Unity

I remember the day I interviewed at VMware. I was asked what I would do to improve Workstation, and one of the things I said was that it would be nice to make a VM go rootless. That is, pull application windows out of the VM and make them integrate well with the operating system.

I wasn’t the only one. A lot of people wanted this type of feature. It’s been discussed for years, but it’s always been hard to find the manpower to do it. But competition is good, and we finally got some people on this feature. And it turned out spectacularly.

Check it out.

Kudos to the people who have spent many nights practically living here. They’ve pulled off an amazing feature. And we’re not done yet.

I know I’m going to be asked if we’re doing this on Linux or Windows. It’s too early to say what our feature list is like for the next major product. So feel free to just speculate 😉

Update: They moved the link on Digg, so updated my link.

7 thoughts on “Unity”

  1. Oh please, support bringing the Windows applications from VM running on top of Linux rootlessly to the user! Getting Office 2007 and Windows Live Messenger really “run on Linux” would make my day!

  2. If this will be in Fusion soon (as the video says), but not in some update to Workstation 6, then I’m going to be seriously upset 🙁 This is something really useful and while you can get similar effect with 2X Server or SeamlessRDP, it’s nowhere near as nicely integrated as the way you did it in Fusion…

  3. Not that I use VMware or OSX or a combination of those, but still this certainly looks like some very impressive integration work! Hats off!

  4. Zon: Don’t be upset. It’s a new feature, and a major one at that, and Workstation 6 is already released. Just because it’s in Fusion now doesn’t mean it’ll never go into any other products in the future.

  5. Mindblowing. Just … mindblowing. If this works with Ubuntu in a VM I’ll be closest to the happiest pig in a mixed-unix world 🙂 Either way: congrats to the VMWare Team!

  6. What’s the big deal? Parallels can already do this, and has other generally-nicer-than-vmware features too.

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