Workstation 7 went live last night and it looks like it brings plenty of interesting things to the table.

• Windows 7 Support w/aero, OpenGl1.4 and SM3 hardware acceleration
• OpenGL2 support for Windows XP
• ESX Server Support

With a beefy enough workstation, you could setup a complete ESX cluster with shared storage and actual running 32 bit VM’s (it appears that VMware is still not making VT and AMD-V available to guest operating systems, which would prevent you from testing out Hyper-V.  Virtual Box purportedly supplies this functionality, but I have not tried it.)  That is pretty darn cool and a great resource given that a bunch of expensive hardware isn’t required to run through training labs, etc.

Windows 7 support is cool and I am sure it will continue to improve over the next couple minor releases.  It is also good to see that XP is still getting some love in the form of increased 3D support.  I wonder if that includes 64 bit XP guests?  Guess I’ll have to find out 🙂

This also means a new version of ACE, the image management tool, was released which I will be checking out…

–Nat