VMware Fusion 2.0 Beta 1 Demo Video

The VMware Fusion team is proud to announce VMware Fusion 2.0 Beta 1.   

This public beta, a free download, boasts a handful of industry firsts for Mac virtualization, including true multi-display support for virtual machines and experimental DirectX 9.0 Shader Model 2 3D acceleration.

The team is also extremely happy to announce that VMware Fusion 2.0, when released, will be a free downloadable upgrade for all VMware Fusion 1.x customers, as a sincere thank you to our early supporters.

Now, on to the features!

Key Features of VMware Fusion 2.0 Beta 1

VMware Fusion 2.0 Beta 1 sports dozens of innovations and improvements.  For a more exhaustive list, visit the VMware Fusion 2.0 Beta landing page.

Highlight Reel: In addition to more in-depth demo videos on the VMware Fusion 2.0 Beta landing page, above is a teaser to get you started.  Enjoy!

True Multi-Display Support

VMware Fusion 2.0 Beta 1 brings the first true multi-display support to Mac virtual machines, letting your virtual machines see additional displays attached to your Mac as additional, individual displays.   

Drag Unity windows between displays and expand your virtual machine full screen across one or all your available displays. 

Finally run Windows-only applications that require more than one logical display, while application windows correctly maximize only to their current display.

Easier Switching to VMware Fusion

Scores of users are switching to VMware Fusion for fast, stable, and powerful Windows on Mac. 

Unparalleled Performance: To make the switch even easier, VMware Fusion 2.0 Beta 1 integrates the ability to convert Parallels Desktop and Virtual PC for Mac virtual machines.  Importing legacy virtual machines to run on VMware Fusion is as easy as click and drag.

Graduate from Boot Camp: VMware Fusion has always allowed users to unlock the true potential of their Boot Camp partition, running their Windows apps side-by-side with Mac apps. 

But for users ready to go "fully virtual" and tap the full benefits of virtualization, VMware Fusion 2.0 Beta 1 includes the ability to convert your Boot Camp partition to a "full" virtual machine.

No more waiting for Boot Camp to boot with virtual machine suspend/resume.  Snapshots to help you keep your virtual machine out of harm's way. And the ability to move your virtual machine from Mac to Mac.

Experimental 3D Acceleration Races Ahead

From the people who first brought 3D to virtual machines, and later, to Mac virtualization, comes another 3D first: experimental support for DirectX 9.0 Shader Model 2. 

VMware Fusion 1.0 launched with DirectX 8.1 support, followed by VMware Fusion 1.1 raising the bar to DirectX 9.0 without pixel shaders.

VMware Fusion 2.0 Beta 1 now ups the ante again with support for DirectX 9.0 Shader Model 2, letting users play select PC-only 3D games in Windows XP virtual machines. 

DirectX 9.0 Shader Model 2 support in Beta 1 is considered experimental, and performance will vary based on hardware and applications in question.  Some games that work in VMware Fusion 1.x may fail in this beta.

More Displays. More 3D. More of Everything.

And that's just the beginning.  In addition to multiple display and 3D support, there are many great improvements and enhancements that have to be seen to be believed.

The full list of features and enhancements rounding out the rest of VMware Fusion 2.0 Beta 1 can be found on the VMware Fusion 2.0 Beta landing page. 

We encourage you to swing by, sign up for the beta newsletter to stay in the loop, and best of all, download the beta.

Let's Get Cracking: Beta Participation

Participation in the VMware Fusion 2.0 Beta 1 is open to everyone - current VMware Fusion users and prospective users alike! 

The Beta is a free download, with registration, and can be accessed at the VMware Fusion 2.0 Beta Portal.

Community participation, filing of bugs, feature requests, and support are all handled via the Beta Portal, so check it out!

Please Note: Beta software can be prone to instability and bugs, and is only suitable for users interested in testing out the latest and greatest in a testing environment. Do not run beta software in mission critical situations.

You know, with each passing day, the "I'm a Mac. I'm a PC" dichotomy of "fun" versus "work" grows thinner and thinner.

I mean, everyone on the VMware Fusion team knows that the Mac is a killer machine for taking care of business, thanks to the ability to run Windows on Mac with VMware Fusion. 

Me, I spend all day long, every day, working out of a Windows XP VM, running on a tricked out MacBook Pro. 

This blog post is being written in Windows Live Writer in a VM.  I browse the web in Firefox, Camino, and Safari, screencap with Skitch, make movies with iMovie, and make customer-facing presentations in Keynote, but the god's honest truth is that for Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint and others, I live in a VM.

Yes, I know that those exist on the Mac, and no disrespect to the Mac Business Unit up in Redmond, or even the iWork Team in Cupertino, but I'm just used to the Windows versions of those apps.  And because they run just as fast in my VM as they do out on my Mac...well...I haven't taken the time to change over.

And it's not just me.  All those VMware Fusion users out there in the world who use VMware Fusion day in and day out to let them take advantage of great Mac hardware to get things done know this too. 

David Alison's continually posts on his use of VMware Fusion to help him do .NET Visual Studio development on the Mac, which is his bread and butter for taking care of business. Gail Nickel-Kailing uses VMware Fusion and an XP VM for running her marketing consultancy business out of a Mac too.

Yum! Virtual Dog Food!

VMware, as a company, is a great example of Windows on Mac success in the Enterprise.

Every day when I walk in from the parking lot, I get to walk past our tech ops guys who run the VMware development lab.  And it always gives me great joy to see all those MacBook Pros and their glowing Apple logos, knowing that each one is running VMware Fusion and a VMware-issued Windows XP VM for interacting with the management consoles of all that big iron running in our datacenter.

Our blogmaster in chief, John Troyer, recently moved over to a shiny new MacBook Pro, running VMware Fusion, and a whole passel of VMware systems engineers out in the field, who use VMware Fusion and the Mac as their weapon of choice when bring VMware Infrastructure to the businesses of the world. 

Mike DiPetrillo, one of our most senior systems engineers, is a self-confirmed Mac-nut using a 17" MacBook Pro as his primary machine. He hung out with us at Macworld, got interviewed by USA Today and blogged about it too.

Heck, even our CTO, Steve Herrod, runs a Mac with VMware Fusion, and our CIO runs a MacBook Air (hey! Why does he get one and I don't!  Actually, we do have a demo MacBook Air...for special occassions ; )

But sure, Pete, of course VMware has Macs with VMware Fusion all over the place.  Of anybody, you guys ought to have that going on.  It's basic "dog food test" reality, Pete.

OK, fair point.  I can jump up and down all day saying that the Mac plus VMware Fusion is a perfect fit in the Enterprise, but of course I'd say that right?  Only loopy virtualization junkies like those VMware Fusion guys could make it work, right?  Wrong.

Goodbye ThinkPads...Hello...Macs with VMware Fusion?

In case you all hadn't seen, apparently IBM has been piloting letting users use MacBook Pros and VMware Fusion.  Yes.  You heard right: the originators of the ThinkPad (of which I was a big fan before I switched to my MacBook Pro) are piloting letting IBM staff use MacBook Pros with VMware Fusion to run important IBM apps that don't run on the Mac like:

• DB2 Database and Websphere app server
• IBM’s Rational Application Developer IDE for J2EE apps
• IBM’s WebSphere Integration Developer SOA development tool
• Support for IBM’s InfoPrint workgroup laser printers
• Microsoft Visio diagraming software and NetMeeting video conferencing tool

That's a hefty load of apps, but I'm sure that a beefy MacBook Pro with VMware Fusion will serve them just fine.  I know that it works great at VMware for just that sort of abuse.

And perhaps, the folks over at Apple might just have to rethink their dichotomy, and maybe have to add a third character: "Hi. I'm a virtualized Mac."

I think we have some models for them already (see at right!).

What About You?

But what about you?  Do you have a "VMware Fusion and Macs in the Enterprise" story to share?  Put it in the comments, and let us know how it's working out for you!

Josh Lindsey of Bowling Green, Kentucky is a big fan of Macs.  But at the same time, for school, he uses the Microsoft Works suite of applications quite a bit.

Then, of course, there's the fact that he likes to play a little Doom here and there...you know, just to keep his fine motor skills sharp!

He started out running Windows on Mac before VMware Fusion shipped, but wasn't too happy with the results. 

His one liner sounds like something that would come out of Steve Jobs' mouth: "Windows crashes enough on its own."  Not quite a "Giving ice water to people in hell" level zinger...but it's got promise! Ouch!

Without further ado, here's Josh's video, on his switch to Fusion:

As most of our esteemed readers know, VMware Fusion 1.1.2 went live the evening of Wednesday, April 23rd, sporting a variety of bug fixes and enhancements, aimed to make things work better, faster, stronger for our users.

What some of our more technical (ok, fine, geeky) users may also know, is that the same day the latest distribution of Ubuntu Linux, dubbed the ever-alliterative "Hardy Heron" also went from Beta to General Availability that day.

Included in the latest Ubuntu, the most widely used desktop Linux distro, were a variety of changes to the underlying Linux 2.6.24, some of which created issues with VMware Tools. 

The good news is, some smart users have already come up with some great worarounds, which we'll get into later.  But before getting into that, it might be worthwhile to explain the dynamics that create these issues, so our dear users can better understand how these situations arise.

Machine Virt 101:Guests, Tools, and You

To the x86 operating system--whether Windows, Solaris, FreeBSD, or, as concerns this blog post, Linux--installed on top of that virtual hardware,  that hardware looks no different than the "physical" hardware those OSes tie into when installed on a physical machine.

And just like with physical machines, a set of drivers provide that tie between the "guest" operating system (virtualization slang for the operating system of the virtual machine in question) and the virtual hardware that powers it.  VMware's name for this set of drivers, which is different for each guest OS, is "VMware Tools."

These tools are what make the seamless interaction between guest and host OS happen.  Things like the ability to drag and drop between guest and host, create shared folders between the two, automatic resize of screen resolution, and even the mind-blowing "Unity" view that VMware Fusion [YouTube Vid] pioneered, and now featured by VMware Workstation 6.5 Beta.

VMware provides the broadest set of these "guest tools" in the industry, and they come packaged with VMware products, like VMware Fusion, VMware Workstation, and so on, such that when you go to create a new virtual machine, and install a new operating system, the guest tools are there for you to install too. 

This is the primary reason why VMware product downloads can be hefty at times: they package the VMware Tools for all of those supported operating systems

Come Together, Right Now

Of course, what this also means is that these tools have to be maintained to ensure that as the operating systems they communicate with change, they still "work."  This is the dance that Microsoft and hardware makers have been doing for years, but mainly only every four years or so.

Linux is a bit different, in that it changes more frequently.  In this case, the latest distribution of Ubuntu included some changes to Linux that broke VMware Tools for a limited set of functions.

While the latest distros of Linux aren't on the supported OS list for VMware Fusion, we recognize that our users like to play around with the latest and greatest, whether that means Hardy Heron or Fedora 8, or what have you.

The good news is, because those great hackers who like to use VMware Fusion and VMware Workstation to help them play with the latest and greatest, are the same people who can come up with clever workarounds, including installing Open Virtual Machine Tools that have been updated to address the changes in the Linux.

Opening Doors with Open Tools

But what are these "Open Virtual Machine Tools" of which you speak?  In late 2007, VMware open sourced the majority of VMware Tools, with an eye towards making it easier for the larger open source community to more agilely update and modify the tools that enable the multitude of x86 operating systems that can run on VMware virtual hardware to better integrate with that virtual hardware.

It's great to see this strategy paying off, with the latest version of Open Virtual Machine Tools addressing the breakage in question.

This is a great post by a user named Josh who did the VMware Fusion community a favor by pointing out a fix posted in the VMware Workstation forums about a month ago.

And as usual, the VMware forums are a great place to share and discuss technical issues.  "Mufassa" posted the fix in March after he updated 35 of his development VMs to Fedora 8, only to see after that, gasp, that the update broke VMware Tools. 

His fix is located here.

And lastly, cheers to Peter Cooper for blogging about this in the context of VMware Fusion and Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron, and doing a great job of breaking out the process, step by step.  His post is located here.

Snapshot, Snapshot, Snapshot!: Take Your Virtual Machine Back in Time

This post also provides a great opportunity to comment quickly on the value of  snapshotting virtual machines. 

Because virtual machines are just files, in addition to be able to do things like suspend and resume them rapidly, unlike Apple's Boot Camp, or even VMware Fusion running on top of Boot Camp, you can also take a picture of them in time, with the "snapshot" feature.  Later, if you want, you can revert to that snapshot, if you don't like what has happened to your virtual machine thereafter.

It's a new idea for a lot of users, but the great thing is, you can use a snapshot to try out new software, with no risk to your "production" virtual machine.

For example, recently, Windows Vista pushed its new Service Pack.  Only Vista users running in virtual machines had the ability to take a snapshot before installing the Service Pack, install it, and then see if everything still worked a-ok.  It's pretty amazing stuff.

When people think of VMware and server virtualization, they typically think of VMware Infrastructure, the gold standard of server virtualization software.

Well, but for those out there who need to run Mac server apps and Windows-based server apps at the same time, VMware Fusion has been a handy solution for them. 

Because VMware Fusion can run any of the more than 60 guest operating systems supported by VMware virtual hardware, VMware Fusion can indeed be used to run server operating systems, like Windows Server 2003, 64-bit, Ubuntu Server, and even Windows Server 2008, all while running on any Mac OS X operating system 10.4 or later.

Power to Burn

In fact, VMware Fusion is the only Mac virtualization application that lets you run 64-bit operating systems as virtual machines, along with the attendant large memory support (e.g., VMs with more than 2.5GB of RAM, etc.), and VMware Fusion is the only Mac virtualization application that lets you attach more than one core to a virtual machine. 

Even though its exterior is shiny Mac-friendly, consumer-focused goodness, under the covers, VMware Fusion shares a family resemblance to datacenter heavies VI3 and VMware Server.

Ryan Lovett's submission to the "My Switch to VMware Fusion" video contest deals with just that.  But rather than switching from another virtualization solution, he's switching from multiple physical boxes in his server cabinet, all onto a single Mac Mini, running VMware Fusion.  Mac server virtualization with VMware Fusion.  Pretty cool, eh?

He's collapsed what looks like an old G5 tower, some Windows-based print and file servers, and a FreeBSD router, all into a single Mac Mini, running three virtual machines on it, all the time, with VMware Fusion.

Check out Ryan's video below! 

Ryan, if you'd care to add anything in the comments section about uptime, and what sort of VMs you're running, I'm sure our readers would love to hear more about it.

This submission to the "My Switch to VMware Fusion" video contest comes direct from Alex Noble of Cambridge, UK. 

Now, it seems in addition to a taste for fast, stable, and powerful Windows on Mac (heavy on the "fast" part, by the looks of his submission), Alex also seems to have a taste for comedy. 

And I have to say, I'm 100% in agreement with Alex that there's nothing like a top hat and snootified Victorian accent to add some wit to a video contest submission, innit? 

Apparently, Alex's switch to VMware Fusion isn't just helpful, it's also funny.

Whatever it was about Alex's submission, it reminded me of some of my favorite sketches from Alex's countrymen, the comic geniuses of Monty Python. 

If this is what Alex can do with his Mac's iSight camera and iMovie, I can only imagine what he could do with some extras, a holy hand grenade, and some Knights who say Ni. 

Check it out yourself!

The "My Switch to VMware Fusion" contest videos keep coming in so hot and heavy it's hard to keep up with them! 

Even though we're getting a little buried here, I wanted to take a moment to share a particularly neat one, especially for all you people out there with USB peripherals that need Windows to run.

One of the great things about VMware Fusion being based off of the same mature, decade-in-development code base as virtualization stalwart VMware Workstation, is that we get the benefit of platform features that have been groomed, tried, and tested for years.

A key place where you see this "just working" is in the case of USB peripheral pass-through.  Our users love the fact that an incredibly broad range of USB devices pass through into the guest operating system with ease.

Paul's USB Conundrum

Paul Brady of Blakeslee, Pennsylvania is a big fan of VMware Fusion's USB support too. 

He works as a Systems Engineer for a company called Active Identity which provides computing security and identity solutions.

As anyone who has done two-factor authentication knows, a lot of the time, USB ports are  used for authentication purposes, whether with a USB dongle, or a smart-card reader that plugs into a USB port, and into which the user slides a smart card. 

Either way, USB is really important, as it is for so many people.

In Paul's case, he wanted to use his MacBook Pro for demonstrating to customers how Active Identity's solutions worked across multiple operating systems, using Parallels.

But much to his chagrin, he just couldn't get it to work, which meant lugging around a bunch of laptops to do his demos on, even though he had a perfectly good MacBook Pro that should have been able to run Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, and SUSE Linux to do his demos on.

When VMware Fusion shipped, he gave us a spin, and never looked back.  It's safe to say that Paul has been pretty happy with his "Switch to VMware Fusion." 

Great video Paul!  And nice Darth Vader helmet.  I got to get one of those for staff meetings.

The VMware Fusion team would like to announce the general availability of VMware Fusion 1.1.2, a free update for all VMware Fusion users.  You can download this newest version here.

VMware Fusion 1.1.2 now provides better support for the MacBook Air, enables Time Machine backup of virtual machines, adds support for Windows XP SP3 Boot Camp partitions, and is now available in Simplified Chinese.

Seamless Windows on the World's Thinnest Notebook

VMware Fusion 1.1.2 addresses two MacBook Air-related problems. Previously, MacBook Air users would encounter a crash if a virtual CD/DVD drive was connected to the virtual machine but a CD/DVD drive was not connected to the MacBook Air. This update fixes this issue.  Also, this latest VMware Fusion update adds the ability to burn CD/DVDs with the MacBook Air’s USB Superdrive.

Take Your VM Back in Time

Prior versions of VMware Fusion automatically excluded virtual machines from Time Machine backups to avoid hitting a Mac OS X-related crash when backing up running virtual machines.

Apple has addressed this issue in Mac OS X 10.5.2 and VMware Fusion 1.1.2 enables Time Machine to back up virtual machines on Mac OS X 10.5.2 and later.

NOTE: As part of the back up process, Time Machine makes duplicate copies of all non-excluded files, as those files change.  As such, Time Machine will make a new copy of any virtual machine that has run since the last time Time Machine ran.  Because virtual machines have a tendency to be large files (just like iMovie projects, or Aperture Libraries), and might take up large amounts of space with duplicate copies on your Time Machine hard drive, you may want to consider manually excluding certain virtual machines from backup in Time Machine’s preference pane.

How do you say "virtualization" in Chinese? VMware Fusion.

VMware Fusion 1.1.2 also introduces Simplified Chinese to the list of localized languages it ships with.  VMware Fusion now ships concurrently in five languages: English, French, German, Japanese, and Simplified Chinese.

New Service Pack for Boot Camp

With Windows XP Service Pack 3 arriving on April 29th, VMware Fusion now supports Windows XP Service Pack 3 Boot Camp partitions when they are run as virtual machines.

Other Bugs Squished in VMware Fusion 1.1.2

• Properly disconnect USB devices left connected to the virtual machine at shut down, making the USB devices available again to the Mac.
• Addresses problem with wireless bridged networking in some cases not being able to obtain an IP address from the DHCP server.
• Fixes a sound problem where only the default speaker worked in some cases.
• Pressing the newly-introduced keys on the new slim Apple Aluminum Keyboard caused VMware Fusion to crash in certain circumstances.  This has now been fixed.
• VMware Fusion’s keyboard shortcuts to remap common Windows commands to Mac keyboard equivalents could not be disabled previously in Full Screen or Single Window views
• In some cases, VMware Fusion, after being upgraded to Version 1.1.1, would fail with a Signal 10 error when the user tried to use the keyboard. This problem has been fixed.

Come and Get It!

VMware Fusion 1.1.2 is a FREE update for all existing VMware Fusion customers.  For new customers, VMware Fusion retails for $79.99, and is eligible for a current $20 mail-in rebate for customers in the United States and Canada. 

Parallels Desktop or Virtual PC for Mac users qualify for a $30 competitive upgrade mail-in rebate that lowers the cost to $49.99.

More information on switching to VMware Fusion and the competitive upgrade rebate.

To download VMware Fusion 1.1.2, go to:

http://www.vmware.com/download/fusion/

OK, this video just popped into my inbox, so I have to share before I hit the road today.

Something about blue screens of death in a VM before you've had your coffee is good for a giggle.

Elias Eldabbagh had been running Window on his Mac for a while before VMware Fusion came along, primarily to run Windows productivity apps. 

Well, unfortunately, his implementation wasn't the most productive, with lots of crashing and BSODs.  Not exactly "just works."

But his story has a happy ending.  Watch and find out ; ) And when you're done, think about sharing your "Switch to VMware Fusion" story in our video and blogging contest!

We're already seeing some great videos rolling in for the "My Switch to VMware Fusion" video contest (see more about the contest here).

Eoghan O'Shea of Limerick, Ireland submitted a video talking about how he switched from Apple's Boot Camp to VMware Fusion for running SolidWorks on his Mac at school. 

He's at University in Limerick Ireland, and takes classes that require CAD drawing, and as most people know, AutoCAD, Solidworks, and other industry-standard drafting apps are pretty much Windows-only.

He had been using Boot Camp, but was less than impressed by the amount of time it took to switch back and forth between environments. 

His video does a better job of explaining than I will this early in the morning, so without further ado, here's Eoghan's video: