VMware has introduced a public beta test of ACE 2 Enterprise Edition, adding on many new features (including the ability to distribute virtual machines on any portable USB drive) over the previous release which allowed users to construct specific virtual machines and then distribute them. VMware Pocket ACE allows users to store any number of virtual machine images on USB drives, as long as the user includes the necessary free version of VMware Workstation 6.0, which is automatically installed and started when the machine image is run.
The Windows version is available as a hefty 273MB download. Preconfigured VMware ACE appliances for Windows 2003, Red Hat Linux, and SUSE Linux are also available to download, the latter two in .rpm binary formats. Also available is a 39MB download for the VMware ACE Management Server application, which administrators can use to tightly control how the ACE virtual machine images are used. Images can be managed from central server, and configured to be available only to certain users, limit the use of virtual ports and devices, encrypt the entire image for security and even specify expiry dates for the images.
News source: Ars Technica
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