These days it has become hard to keep track of all VMware’s Product Launches, upgrades, hotfixes and new releases.

To make things simpler VMware launched a new program called VMware Software Manager, that can help you track which is the most recent release of its products and more, download them while checking the integrity of them. It is a free product that dramatically simplifies the download of VMware suites and products.

VMware Download Manager was announced at the same time when vSphere 6.0 was announced and it is still in its early phase (version 1.0) and the download catalog is currently limited to the following Datacenter and Cloud infrastructure products:

• VMware vCloud Suite 6.0, 5.8, and 5.5
• VMware vSphere w/ Operations Management 6.0 and 5.5
• VMware vSphere 6.0, 5.5, and 5.1

Advantage of using Software manager over general downloading method:

Easy to Use

Provides an easy to use interface to find, select & download the content needed to install or upgrade a VMware suite with the push of a button

File Integrity Check

Verifies the suite was downloaded without corruption

New Release Detection

Automatically detects the release of new VMware suites, products and versions

System Requirements

To be able to install and use Download Service, you must ensure that your system meets specific operating system and Web browser requirements.

Windows Versions Supported

• Windows 8.1 64-bit
• Windows 7 64-bit SP2
• Windows Server 2012 64-bit R2
• Windows Server 2008 64-bit R2 SP1

Browsers Supported

• Internet Explorer 10 and 11
• Firefox 34 and 35
• Google Chrome 39 and 40

Disk Space Required

• VSM Installer MSI is 17MB
• VSM itself consumes 34MB of disk space
• Depot – actual disk space required is dependent on the number of suites downloaded, recommended minimum is 80GB (vCloud Suite 5.8 Enterprise Edition consumes 68.2GB)

How to Install

Installation of VMware Software Manager is pretty straight forward like any other windows application where you launch the application and just click next ->next -> finish. However you can customize a thing or so during installation.

For E.G you can choose your own directory where all your downloads will be going when you decide to download a product using software manager. Default location is C:depot

Once the installation is completed the installer will ask you to open software manager web application.

Once you click finish it will open a page like as shown below. You have to login to this page using your vmware.com credentials. Once you enter your credentials hit connect.

After successful connection the default welcome page will be shown to you where you can browse for different VMware products.

You can browse the page for the product you are looking for and click on the arrow button to start download it as shown below:

After a while the product which you selected will be start downloading.

You can customize the search if you are looking for any specific version or edition of the software as shown below.

You can download this product from VMware Product Download Page.

Seems a nice software. Worth giving try.