In a previous post, I recommended VMware Workstation 7 for performing network proof-of-concept testing. The Teams feature allows users to easily configure virtual labs with multiple tiers. I was very disappointed to learn that the Team feature is removed in VMware 8.
VMware explains why Teams was removed in a blog post.
In VMware Workstation 8 the concept of a Team has been removed from the user interface, but all of the functionality has been preserved. We did this because we believe that our implementation had serious limitations that both our users and our developers were going to great lengths to work around.
For instance, thumbnail views, bulk power operations, bandwidth throttling, packet loss, and LAN segments were all artificially restricted to only work within a team. It was also becoming increasingly difficult to add features to our product because we had to write conditional code to handle when a virtual machine was operating in a Team.
Leaving the functionality but removing it from the user interface makes little sense to me. It seems to me like VMware is discouraging the use of Teams in Workstation 8 by making their creation more time-consuming. But what do I know? I don’t have experience with massive software efforts.
I tried VMware 8. There are no features or enhancements that would convince me to give up the ability to create subnets for a team from the Team Settings menu. If you are using VMware Workstation for testing networking code, stick with Workstation 7.
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