LarsBlog

I've been using VmWare 6.5's Unity mode in anger for the last week or so, running windows XP and 2000 guests on Vista x64.  All in all, I'm pretty impressed with how well it works!

For seamless windows, I consider it a more advanced solution than VirtualBox.  VirtualBox basically just makes your guest desktop transparent so that you can see your host desktop through it.  This approach is nice for some uses (you get to see your guest task-bar above your host task-bar) but it makes it means that any time you click on a guest window, all your guest windows come to the front.  It also doesn't scale as well for running multiple guests at once.  Vmware, on the other hand, have attempted to fully integrate guest windows into your host desktop.  See below for a screenshot:

There are few glitches that need to be worked out:

• The window icons for Windows 2000 guests come through garbled
• Sometimes when I alt-tab between windows and then try to type into the newly in-focus window, my text still appears in the old window - I have to click on the new window to force focus.
• Sometimes copy/paste between different windows in different VMs doesn't work.
• If I have 2 maximised windows in my guest, my Vista task-bar preview for both windows will always show an image of the most recently in-focus window (I assume this is because behind the scenes both windows are sharing the same guest desktop)
  

One thing I'd really like to see in the future is a way to limit which windows appear on your host via Unity.  Sometimes I want to run things in my guest that I don't want cluttering up my host task-bar.  Also, it would be great if, in the task bar, it was easy to distinguish between what is a guest window and what is a host window (saves confusion when I run say FireFox both in my guest and in my host!)

Still, I think VmWare have had a good stab at what is probably a pretty tricky task, and I'm going to keep using Unity.