VMware Player is a free for personal use piece of software that can be used by anyone to run (or playback) virtual machines that were initially created with the Oracle Virtualbox or VMware Workstation applications and exported as appliances.
Features at a glance
The application has been designed from the ground up to allow users to quickly and easily take advantage of the security, flexibility, and portability of virtual machines. It can run any virtual machine, can revert a virtual machine to its previous state, as well as to access host PC devices.
Among other features, we can mention the ability to copy, paste, drag & drop, shared folders, configure networking options, support guest operating systems, adjustable memory, and configurable shutdown.
Additionally, it can also run restricted virtual machines that were created with the VMware Workstation or VMware Fusion Professional applications. It supports up to 16 virtual processors, up to 64GB of memory per virtual machine, and 8TB virtual disks.
Availability, usage and supported platforms
Supported operating systems include GNU/Linux and Microsoft Windows. On Linux, the project is distributed as two binary files, one for each of the supported hardware platforms (64-bit and 32-bit).
Each binary file includes the VMware Player and VMware Player Plus components. By default, users will be able to only use the first one, as the latter requires them to enter a license key.
Once the binary file has been downloaded, and the linux-headers (for module compilation) and gtkmm (for the graphical user interface) packages installed, you can start the installation from a terminal window using the chmod +x VMware-edition-version.release.architecture.bundle and ./VMware-edition-version.release.architecture.bundle commands (where version.release is the current version number of the product).
Bottom line
Summing up, VMware Player is a neat application that provides users with the best way possible to deliver managed desktops, run restricted virtual machines, recycle old hardware, and run Windows XP forever!
