I've been looking for a blogging tool to help with this blog for a while now.  No offense to TypePad, but their online tool was a little tough on me.  Some of the Team Fusion bloggers, like Ben Gertzfield, Regis Duchesne, and Shawn Morel swear by Red Sweater's Mars Edit. 

As I've pointed out in the past, for good or for bad, I, like fellow Fusion user Danny Sullivan, am a Windows user, living on Mac hardware thanks to VMware Fusion.  But for me, as someone who has too much stuff going on, and doesn't have a heckuva lot of time to go up a new learning curve, there's value in how certain Windows apps on VMware Fusion "just work" for me, from a UI standpoint (i.e. Windows UI cues have been burned into my reptile brain).

Windows Live Writer seems to be like that for me.  After having blogged a couple times about some of our users who are using Live Writer on Mac in a Windows virtual machine under VMware Fusion, I thought I'd give it a spin, in my own Windows XP VM.

So far, I'm loving it.  I'm a big fan of WYSIWIG, and Live Writer feels like a web-enabled version of Word, with some blogging stuff thrown on top.

I had a little fun with the screen shot above, in a moment of Friday morning geekiness, iterating the screen cap a couple times, so we could get a screen cap in a screen cap in a screen cap.  Enjoy!

Tech support guru Dave Taylor over at "Ask Dave Taylor" has a great post up about running Vista in a virtual machine on VMware Fusion.

Apparently he's had a lot of his audience asking him questions about VMware Fusion for running Windows on Mac, so he thought he'd do a post on Vista in a VM.

I love the screenshot he provided as proof of success.  Good old Solitaire:

Our friend Rob Griffiths over at Macworld magazine has a great post today about the intricacies of printing to a Mac printer from a Windows machine, either virtual or physical.

Lots of people know about Apple's Bonjour networking software and how it can be used to print on a Mac printer from Windows.   But what a lot of people may not know is that with some tweaking, even a non-Bonjour capable printer can be used to print from Windows, with the help of an additional Apple technology: printer sharing.

Check out Rob's post to get the lowdown.  One thing to note: if doing this from a Windows virtual machine on VMware Fusion, you're going to want to be in Bridged Networking mode.

And you can see more about printing in VMware Fusion virtual machines, and more about Windows on Mac, on our self-paced tutorials page here.

Team Fusion member Shawn Morel gave a killer talk at Wolf Rentzsch's C4 indie Mac developer conference last year.

The talk was excitingly named "Virtualization Vivisection" and gets into as much nitty gritty detail about x86 virtualization as you can probably get before you have to start paying tuition.

Some of the topics Shawn dives into (and some helpful links for you to follow as you go along with the talk)?

1. Virtualization history and basics going back to Popek and Goldberg and their seminal paper on virtualization.

2. Why the Intel architecture was such a challenge to virtualize.

3. How VMware did it back in 1998 (or, how the researchers who eventually founded VMware did it, and then how that became what VMware is today).

4. "Hijacking OS X" and other things that sound scary, but make VMware Fusion possible.

5. Intel's VT versus good old fashioned Binary Translation (BT)

6. Virtual devices (and why USB is a tough nut to crack).

7. PowerPC virtualization (and why it's probably not going to happen any time soon).

8. 3D Graphics in virtualization

9. Virtualized Mac OS X on Mac OS X (which is funny, because this talk was given months before the Fusion Team demo'd Mac OS X Leopard Server virtualized at Macworld)

And, of course, much, much more.  Thanks to Wolf and company for getting these talks up on Viddler:

Some other great talks at the event:

• Wolf himself on "Indie Ethos"
• Will Shipley on "Monster Marketing"
• Daniel Jalkut of Red Sweater on "Application Acquisition"

All the cool interviews that took place at Macworld are slowly but surely making their way out of the woodwork.

NewMediaManitoba.tv had a chance to catch up with Pat, our fearless product manager, at Macworld, and talk a little bit about (that was pronounced "aboot" by the way) VMware Fusion and its features like Unity mode, Dual SMP, and how it helps users run Windows on Mac. 

Looking at this video's fantastic editing , especially in light of my own somewhat pedestrian video production attempts, is really quite impressive. Kudos to NewMediaManitoba.tv for making such great video podcasts.
 

Check it out!

The VMware Fusion team is proud to announce the release of VMware Importer Beta 2, for the importation of third-party Mac-based virtual machines to run using VMware Fusion. 

We're especially excited about this release, as users can now import virtual machines created with Virtual PC 7.0 for Mac!

Even though we live and breath Intel-based Macs here on Team Fusion, it's important to remember that Intel-Macs have only been around for a little under two years now.

That means there's a lot of Mac users out there using Virtual PC 7.0 on their trusty PowerBook, iBooks, G4 and G5 Towers, and more.  When it comes time to upgrade to a shiny new Intel-Mac, well, we on Team Fusion want those users to have a smooth upgrade process to the most seamless way to run Windows on a Mac.

VMware Importer Beta 2 allows for the importation of Virtual PC 7.0-based virtual machines with the following operating systems:

1. Windows 2000 Service Pack 4


2. Windows XP Service Pack 2


3. Windows Server 2003

VMware Importer Beta 2 also lets users import virtual machines created using Parallels Desktop for Mac 2.5 and 3.0, including:

1. Windows 2000 Service Pack 4


2. Windows XP Service Pack 2


3. Windows Server 2003


4. Windows Vista

Check out the VMware Importer Beta 2 landing page here, and give it a whirl!

And, as always, users looking to convert a physical PC to run as a virtual machine under VMware Fusion can use VMware Converter Starter Edition to do just that in a snap.

Questions and comments are always welcome at the VMware Fusion community forums, where Fusion users come to talk Mac virtualization.

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It might not be a moose, but it's still pretty cool. VMware Fusion was named to Amazon's Editor's Pick "Best of 2007" list, along with other notables like Mac OS 10.5 Leopard, Dragon Naturally Speaking for Vista Ultimate (which will run under VMware Fusion) and more!

Amazon is a great partner, and we've always been happy to see ourselves consisently up on their constantly updated "Mac Software Bestsellers" (as of today, we're #4, just behind Microsoft Office 2008 and 2004 for Mac and Mac OS X Leopard...great company to keep!) all while gettting solid user reviews.

Thinking it's probably gonna be a tough row to hoe to get past Mac OS X Leopard and Microsoft Office for Mac, be it 2004 or 2008*. But a guy can dream, right?

*But why run Office for Mac, when you can run your current office for Windows, under VMware Fusion? ; )

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Combing through my Google Alerts this morning, I was pleased to see that VMware Fusion had garnered another positive product review in the blogosphere .

I was that much more excited when I clicked through, only to realize that the Alaskan Apple Users Group had awarded VMware Fusion their highest accolade for a Mac software product: the fabled "Five Mooses" (pictured above).

Excellent! The team is honored to add another positive highlight to the growing stack of reviews and award, and would like to thank the Alaskan Apple User's Group and the reviewer, Ronald Schoedel, for their support!

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The awards keep coming fast and furious at the end of the year.

The latest?  Redmond Magazine ("The Independent Voice of the Microsoft IT Community") has awarded VMware Fusion (and VMware ESX Server, and VMware Workstation...I see a trend...) an Editor's Choice Award .

The best part?  We won the "Biggest 'Wow' in an IT Product" award (i.e. "Your jaw just dropped when you first used this product"), beating out Vista's "Instant Search" and Ubuntu 7.04.

Before everyone says it, yes Redmond Magazine is a pretty geeky enterprise IT publication, but we'll wear that as a badge of honor.  VMware has had great success over the years by winning the hearts and minds of Sys Admins the world over, making their lives easier and helping them get things done, first with VMware Workstation, then VMware GSX, and then with VMware ESX Server and VMware Infrastructure.

We're honored to be noted by the IT geek community, and hope that as more and more Macs, both personal and company-owned start flooding into the corporate IT environment, they'll think of VMware Fusion as the most seamless way to run Windows apps and peripherals on those shiny new Macs, using XP and Vista virtual machines they already built with VMware Workstation.

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Welcome to the new blog for the VMware Fusion team here at VMware.  We'll be covering all sorts of topics on the blog, from the product itself, Mac virtualization as a larger space, "Fusion in the news," and more.  Pretty much anything we want to have an open conversation about, we'll try to get up here to spur it on.

Up to this point, we've been using the main VMware VMTN blog as our "home away from home" and had some success with some fairly well-received posts like "Top Ten Things You Can Do with VMware Fusion on Your Mac " (front page of Digg! W00t!) and others.  But it's time for us to move out on our own.  We'll still show up there from time to time, but our goal is to have a place on the web that is "all Fusion, all the time."  And this blog will aim to be that.

We'll see what sort of cast of characters we get up on here.  We'll definitely see our fair share of Pete Kazanjy, as the product marketing lead (hi!), my boss, Pat Lee, our product management lead, and Group Manager of Consumer Products at VMware.   But ideally we'll be getting some of our rock star engineers up here too.  You may have met Ben Gertzfield  already, either through his blog, or other places on the web, like this killer tech talk he gave at Google on "Inside VMware Fusion ." Or Regis Duchesne , another one of our coding machines. 

Of course, there's a whole slew of others here "behind the curtain" and hopefully I'll be able to get them out here to have a chat and talk some about what we're doing.

As always, feedback is gladly appreciated. Feel free to note in the comments things you'd like to see us cover!

~Pete Kazanjy

VMware Fusion Product Marketing

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