In my last post about Workstation 5.5 I mentioned 3 cool new features coming:

• Full support for 64-bit host and guest OSes
• Experimental support for 2-ways Virtual SMP
• Convertless support for Microsoft VMs

Now VMware opened the new beta build 16325 to everybody and I can talk about the enhanced features and the main new ones:

• Experimental 2-ways Virtual SMP confirmed for any dual-core CPU (in this case VMware doesn't warn about any performance degradation, as they did for HyperThreading CPUs)
• The Virtual Machine Importer is now integrated with VMware Workstation and can import also Symantec LiveState and Ghost images
• Snapshot can now be created and managed by command line interface (this means we can start producing backup scripts easily)
• Virtual hardware autodetection is now extended to floppy, sound adapter, parallel and serial port

You can read other release notes here: http://www.vmware.com/support/ws55/doc/releasenotes_ws55.html