VMware Inc has released VMware Workstation 11, a major update for the powerful hypervisor, along with its companion tool VMware Player 7 Pro.

The company claims new support for Haswell CPU extensions delivers up to a 45% speed increase for CPU-intensive applications.

Graphics operations could now be faster, too, with a new ability to allocate up to 2GB of video RAM per virtual machine.

VMware vCloud Air integration means you’re able to upload, view and run cloud-based virtual machines directly from the Workstation interface.

There’s now direct support for running Windows 10 in a VM

There’s also direct support for running Windows 10 Technical Preview, along with the latest Linux distributions: Ubuntu 14.10, RHEL 7, CentOS 7, Fedora 20, Debian 7.6 and more.

All this extra power means the package now requires 64-bit Windows and a 64-bit processor (of course 32-bit operating systems still work inside virtual machines).

Anyone who purchased VMware Workstation 10 between October and December 2014 will get a free upgrade to the new release. Upgrades from version 9.x and 10.x are priced at $149.99, while the regular VMware Workstation 11 list price is $249.99.

VMware Workstation 11 and VMware Player 7 Pro trial builds are available now.