As a big “thank you” to the Mac faithful making the trek to San Francisco for the Macworld Expo, the VMware Fusion team is hosting a user meetup at the Thirsty Bear just down the street from Moscone Center (map). 

The event starts at 5:30 and runs till 8:00 (or they kick us out!).

We’ll be supplying the appetizers, the Fusion team, the laptop and bumper stickers, and venue.  All you need to do is supply your smiling face and any of the libations you might want to partake in (we spend our budget on engineering!)

You can see more information here.

It’s been a big year for us since the last Macworld, as summed up nicely in this blog post by Pat Lee, Fusion’s former product manager, and VMware’s consumer products lead.

So come on our and celebrate with us!

And then stop by our booth on the show floor all throughout this week to learn more about Fusion, or just say hi.

Who: VMware Fusion users, fans, and friends.
What: Pre-Macworld VMware Fusion User Meetup
Where: Thirsty Bear Restaurant, 661 Howard, SF, CA (map)
When: 5:30-8:00 PM, Monday, January 5th, 2008
Why: Because you’re a friend of Fusion, and want to come hang out with the team!

I usually leave the Team Fusion blog to the more talented writers on our team including Peter Kazanjy and Eric Tung, but I wanted to share with our readers my thoughts on 2008.

The Beginning – Macworld Expo 2008

This time last year, we were preparing to attend our second Macworld Expo. The VMware Fusion team was riding high off winning the 2007 Macworld Editor’s Choice Award right before Macworld Expo and we were excited to come to Macworld to show off VMware Fusion 1.1.

There was also a flurry of activity getting ready a surprise for Macworld, a technology preview that demonstrated installing and running Mac OS X Server in a virtual machine on Apple hardware. It was an exciting milestone to be the first virtualization company to publically demonstrate installing Mac OS X Server into a VMware virtual machine directly from Apple’s shipping Mac OS X Server installation media, but since it was a “technology preview” we couldn’t commit to when it would be released though some users were begging us to let them steal a copy of the technology preview as is from on the show floor.

Listening to Our Users and the Switch to VMware Fusion Contest

VMware Fusion continues to get amazing reviews from the press, but just important we are getting amazing user reviews on the Apple Store, Amazon.com, VersionTracker, MacUpdate and on personal blogs.  The strong support from the Mac community telling us what we were doing right and areas we could improve is something we greatly appreciate.

Great user reviews allowed VMware Fusion 2 to be chosen as the Most Loved Software product on Amazon.com and users voted VMware Fusion to be the only Mac virtualization software in the 2008 TidBITS Gift Guide. So, thanks for you support in 2008!

We had heard a lot of users telling us their were switching from Boot Camp and Parallels to VMware Fusion, so we wanted to hear their stories. We sponsored a Switch to VMware Fusion video contest and we saw some great videos, though Cara Jean Mean’s winning video was absolutely incredible.

VMware Fusion 2 Announced and Enters Public Beta 

In May 2008, we announced VMware Fusion 2 and released VMware Fusion 2 Beta 1. The VMware Fusion 2 announcement was exciting as the team had been working six months on a great new product and all we could say publically since VMware Fusion 1.1 was “no comment, but we are constantly working on making VMware Fusion even better.”

We are big fans of public betas at VMware. Our public betas give our users the opportunity to see what we are working on and more importantly it gives us broader coverage to make sure when we release the product that it is ready for prime time. So, thanks to you our users for taking the time to give us valuable feedback on what we did right and what we did wrong, which allows us to ship even better products!

VMware Fusion 2 Launched

On September 15, 2008, we launched VMware Fusion 2 at VMworld in Las Vegas and at Apple Expo in Paris. VMware Fusion 2 has over 100 new features and improvements over VMware Fusion 1 and was FREE upgrade to for all VMware Fusion customers as our thanks to you for choosing VMware Fusion as your choice for running Windows on your Mac.

Awards and Reviews in 2008 

VMware Fusion 2 received many great reviews so far including three I want to call out:

Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal said "VMware Fusion is now the better choice for running Windows on the Mac virtually."

Rob Griffiths at Macworld said "If you want to run Windows, Linux, or other operating systems on your Intel-powered Mac, there’s no better choice than VMware Fusion 2."

Dave Girard at Ars Technica said "VMware, in my opinion, is just the better option at this point…It’s fast, extremely stable, supports 64-bit client operating system and up to four processors for VMs, has VMrun command-line access, and multiple snapshots: all server-level features in a consumer priced product."

In addition to the many great reviews, VMware Fusion has won some great awards in 2008 including our second Macworld Eddy Award in a row!

PC World’s Top 100 Products of 2008

2008 Macworld Editor's Choice Award

Amazon's Best Software of 2008

Thank You

2008 was an amazing success for the VMware Fusion team thanks to your support. We can't thank the Mac community enough for how you have embraced VMware Fusion to date and we look forward to making 2009 an even better year for Mac users running Windows and other operating systems on their Mac.

Please come by our Macworld booth to meet me, Pete, David, and other members of the VMware Fusion team, we are in Booth 2202 in Moscone South.

Macworld’s just around the corner, and the VMware Fusion team is going to be there demoing our hearts out, talking to users, and doing our best to engage with the Mac faithful.

Come Say Hi!

Firstly, location.  We’ll be located in Booth 2202 in Moscone South.  This is the hall where Apple is located, and we’re on the right as you enter the hall.  Just turn right as you enter, and look for the big VMware banners hanging from the ceiling…

Or, just look at this map:

What We’ll Be Up To

We’ll be demoing VMware Fusion 2 on five demo stations, handing out “My Mac Loves VMware” laptop and bumper stickers, and doing presentations in our theater.

Even better, we’ll have some special guests in our theater.  Every day at 2PM, Joe Kissell from Take Control Publishing, will be presenting tips and tricks from his awesome book “Take Control of VMware Fusion 2”, the quintessential power user’s guide to VMware Fusion 2.

So if you would like to come say hi, whether you’re a curious would-be user, a current customer, press, partner, or so on, our booth is the place to be.  We’ll have something for everyone.

RSVP Pretty Please

If you’re planning on coming by our booth, do us a favor and drop us a note in the comments, or RSVP for our Facebook event.

Also, if you’re in town on Monday night, we’ll be sponsoring a user meetup at The Thirsty Bear restaurant, providing some good company and some tasty appetizers for Friends of Fusion before the show starts. 

Again, please RSVP so we know how many people to expect!

We’ll see you in San Francisco!

Brian Roy published a fun video blog today with some tips for how to do really easy web application development using VMware Fusion on your Mac.

Brian is a web developer, and he does a lot of development using PHP, which ultimately runs in a LAMP stack.  In his case, a lot of his work runs in the Amazon EC2 cloud.

Brian uses VMware Fusion as a way to have a virtual machine instance of Fedora (which is what Amazon runs in its EC2 cloud) on his Mac, in which VM he has created a shared folder that points out onto his Mac, where his PHP and HTML code resides.

Brian likes to code using the text editor Smultron, on his Mac, and so when he saves off what he’s doing in Smultron somewhere in his Mac Documents folder, he can immediately pop over to his Fedora VM on Fusion, and test run that code over the shared folder.

That is to say, Apache, running in that Fedora VM, can execute that PHP code, via the shared folder, which looks out onto Brian’s Mac.

You can watch Brian’s video below, and below that, there’s one of our handy tutorials that talks about shared folders.  Enjoy!

Video: VMware Fusion Developer Tips and Apple after Steve Jobs from Brian Roy on Vimeo.

 

And here’s that video tutorial on using Shared Folders:

I was checking out my Google Alerts the other day, and came across this great blog post about running AutoCAD on the Mac with VMware Fusion. 

I’ve seen posts like this before, of course, but what really made me happy this time around was that it was an official Autodesk blog talking about it!  How’s that for validation?

In the post, Shaan Hurley talks about the niceties of running AutoCAD on a Mac, and the various way to do it, including both Boot Camp and virtualization, fairly mentioning both us and our primary competition in the field.

But what really made me smile was this part:

We showed AutoCAD 2009 running on a Mac using VMware Fusion last week at Autodesk University 2008 in the General Design booth.

Yup, that’s right.  When the rubber really hits the road, at a tradeshow, where you want to put your best foot forward, and make sure everything “just works,” the AutoCAD team selected VMware Fusion 2.  Check out the great picture of them at the booth.  

We on the Fusion team haven’t done any specific demo videos showing off AutoCAD, but I did some quick YouTube research, and lo and behold, there are handful of helpful videos out there showing off VMware Fusion 2 (you know, the one with the enhanced 3D acceleration features? Yeah, that one. ) running AutoCAD.

Here are the videos I found (with Spanish captions, no less!):

The first one shows off how to disable the “Optimize Mouse for Gaming” feature to get the best performance.

And this one shows off Unity, Single Windows, and Full Screen views:

And here’s everyone’s favorite “OMG! 3D acceleration is in Fusion 2” demo (in which I got to play Gears of War at work…nice eh?)

Yesterday Apple released Mac OS X 10.5.6 update. For folks who are running Mac OS X Server 10.5.x in a virtual machine, you may see Software Update (in the virtual machine) offering to update your system. We recommend that you do not proceed with this update, or at least take a snapshot of your OS X guest first.

There are some known issues with this OS update that cause WindowManager to fail under default setting in a OS X virtual machine, as well as some USB issues. Go to the updated VMware Fusion 2.0.1 Release Notes for more details on these issues and workaround in case you already updated your virtual machine to 10.5.6.

These issues will be fixed in the next maintenance release of VMware Fusion. And they do not affect Mac OS X 10.5.6 as a host.

Last week when I wrote about what Tools generally does and mentioned that it enabled 3D acceleration, someone asked a natural question: What makes 3D acceleration in a virtual machine so hard? Why can't the guest directly control the graphics card?

Last time I gave a brief overview of what VMware Tools is and why they're is important. But how do you interact with them?

The main way is via VMware Toolbox. You'll need Tools installed, of course, and the way you get to it depends on the guest OS you're running. In Windows, right-click the VMware-three-boxes logo in the system tray and select Open VMware Tools. In Linux or Solaris, run vmware-toolbox. We don't currently have a Toolbox for OS X guests, and I'm not sure about FreeBSD or Netware. You'll need to have opened Toolbox as an administrator for some features.

Once in Toolbox, you can get information about what version of Tools you have installed (About tab), shrink a disk (Shrink tab, requires a sparse disk with no snapshots), links to shared folders (Shared Folders tab, if you have them enabled), scripts which are run when the virtual machine powers on/off or suspends (Scripts tab), connect/disconnect devices (Devices tab), and general options (Options tab).

Tools does way more than what's listed in Toolbox, but the other stuff is either automatic (such as copy/paste support) or configured elsewhere (such as HGFS shared folders, which are under the virtual machine's Settings).

I've previously alluded to how difficult it is to figure out what's going on in the guest by examining the instruction stream. Yet Fusion can do all sorts of nifty things such as drag-and-drop, Unity, HGFS shared folders, and so on - there's no way Fusion can do all that on its own. So how do we do it?

Enter VMware Tools. Tools is code that lives in the guest and allows us to peek inside. Instead of Fusion staring at a stream of reads and writes and adds and so on to try to figure out what's going on, Tools can just ask the guest OS. Doing things at the right layer makes things so much simpler!

Tools it a bit more than that, though. One of the benefits of virtualization is portability - you can move a virtual machine between computers (in some cases, even as the virtual machine is still running). But what if the first and second computers have different hardware - how can the virtual machine possibly cope if it starts off on a Mac mini, gets suspended, and resumes on a Mac Pro (or maybe even a computer running Windows or Linux and using VMware Workstation, VMware Player, VMware Server, or so on).

Virtual machines don't see the physical hardware directly (which would cause portability problems). More importantly, nearly all hardware expects to be controlled by exactly one OS - even if the guest could see the physical hardware, it would cause lots of problems. Instead, the guest sees a set of emulated hardware that doesn't depend on the actual hardware; Fusion takes care of translating appropriately.

All hardware, even virtual hardware that doesn't really exist, needs drivers for OSes to know how to talk to them. For some of the virtual hardware (for example sound) we emulate existing physical devices, the guest can use standard drivers provided by the OS or third parties. For other virtual hardware (for example video) we use our own "hardware" that doesn't exist in the physical world. While it obeys a basic set of commands, it needs drivers to get all the features (such as 3D acceleration). These drivers are a part of Tools.

Generally speaking, you want to install Tools in the guest, instructions can be found in Fusion's Help. We have Tools for a wide variety of guest OSes - Windows of course, and Linux, and OS X, and Solaris, and FreeBSD, and even Novell Netware. Not all versions of Tools have the same capabilities (we obviously give priority to more commonly used guests), but all are useful.

Ever wonder where your virtual machines are kept? The default location for non-Boot Camp virtual machines is /Users/${USER}/Documents/Virtual Machines. Boot Camp virtual machines are kept in /Users/${USER}/Library/Application Support/VMware Fusion/Virtual Machines. You can also locate a virtual machine by ctrl-clicking on it in the Virtual Machine Library and selecting "Show in Finder".

Yet another way to find virtual machines is to use the fact that they tend to be quite large. Simply look for where your disk space is being used, perhaps with a tool like Grand Perspective or with a regular Finder search.