How Is VMware Workstation Used?
The powerful and flexible virtualization properties and features of VMware Workstation enable a wide range of solutions for a diverse set of users. Individuals and organizations use VMware Workstation to:

• Streamline software development and testing operations. Create multiple development and testing environments as virtual machines on a single PC and use them to test "real world" multi-tier configurations, complex networks, and multiple operating systems and applications all on a single machine.

• Improve team collaboration. The portability and hardware-independent properties of virtual machines, coupled with new features in VMware Workstation, lets users easily share development environments and pre-packaged testing configurations without risk, and also facilitates collaboration between development and QA.

• Enhance the productivity of IT professionals. Allows system administrators and other enterprise IT professionals to test software, including new applications, application updates, and operating system patches, in virtual machines prior to deployment on physical PCs or servers in a production environment. IT help desk departments can create and reference a virtual library of end-user configurations to help them resolve problems more quickly.

• Introduce virtual infrastructure to your enterprise. Virtual machines created in Workstation can be deployed to the other desktop and server virtualization platforms offered by VMware. Introducing VMware Workstation virtualization to the desktop is an ideal first step to transforming your physical IT infrastructure into virtual infrastructure.

How Does VMware Workstation Work? VMware Workstation works by creating fully isolated, secure virtual machines that encapsulate an operating system and its applications. The VMware virtualization layer maps the physical hardware resources to the virtual machine's resources, so each virtual machine has its own CPU, memory, disks, and I/O devices, and is the full equivalent of a standard x86 machine. VMware Workstation installs onto the host operating system and provides broad hardware support by inheriting device support from the host.