10 Years in the making…

The time has come to pull the covers off what we think is just might be our biggest release yet. We are pleased to announce the VMware 2017 Mac Desktop Hypervisor lineup: VMware Fusion 10 and VMware Fusion 10 Pro! Learn More

So. Many. Features.

This year marks our 10th anniversary of our favourite Mac hypervisor, and with it we’ve introduced a bounty of innovation to our beloved virtual platform. The first thing you’ll notice after installing is that Fusion has an updated User Interface. 

The new Fusion Virtual Machine Window with 3 VMs open as tabs

The new Virtual Machine Library Window, with copy-able IP and MAC address

We also improved our New VM and our Migrate Your PC Wizards, both functionally and aesthetically.

Updated UI for our New VM and Migration wizards

Behind the scenes our Virtual Hardware Platform has been updated to support new OS’s like macOS 10.13 High Sierra and Windows 10 and Server 2016 Fall Updates, as well as a host of new Sphere platform features like UEFI, Virtual TPM, and virtual NVMe storage devices.

A big feature several years in the making is our new support for Apple’s Metal Graphics acceleration technology, which gives our virtual GPU engine a noticeable boost in Performance, Battery/Power Efficiency and accuracy of rendering. Both games and professional applications like AutoCAD benefit from this enhanced feature.

New ‘Metal’ Graphics rendering engine gives us improved performance

VMware Fusion 10 Pro – A new foundation for modern Dev and Test

Built with everything included in Fusion 10, Fusion 10 Pro goes even further by adding new vSphere controls, support for seamless import of the vCenter Server Appliance, and an all new REST based API.

All About DevOps

Use Fusion as a local Vagrant provider or a remote Docker host with VMware PhotonOS, or build a custom application to deliver macOS–virtual-machines-as-a-service. With todays rapidly automated development processes, the integration possibilities are endless.

The new Swagger-based RESTful API enables developers, QE and Operations teams to integrate Fusion into a continuous deployment, delivery or other iterative pipeline by proving an entry point for remote services to securely communicate with using standard JSON.

The Swagger UI provides a complete reference of available APIs, complete with context and usage examples, making it easy to get started. Users will have control over VM operations including VM inventory management, VM power management, cloning, networking, configuration, and IP and MAC address gathering, among others.

New Windows Virtualization Based Security Features

Brand new this year is support for Microsoft’s new Virtualization Based Security features such as Credential Guard and Device Guard for Windows 10 Enterprise virtual machines,  (UEFI) Secure Boot and a virtual Trusted Platform Module (TPM) will add to existing security features in Fusion 10 Pro – delivering a more secure virtual corporate desktop environment than ever before.

Improved vSphere Integration

With Fusion 10 Pro we’ve added new controls for managing remote ESXi hosts for Power operations. Users can now Shut Down, Reboot or toggle Maintenance Mode to remote vSphere Hosts right from within Fusion.

Updated Remote vSphere Host Controls

We’ve also added a out-of-the-box support for the vCenter Server Appliance, so IT Pros who need to test vSphere can get up and running in just minutes without hassle.

vCenter Server Appliance – Seamless Import

Upgraded Virtual Networking

New this year on the networking side is our ability to simulate packet loss, latency, and to limit bandwidth, on both incoming and outgoing virtual network interfaces. This is done per-virtual machine, so you can test the resiliency of your application against degraded networks without affecting all of your running VMs.

Added advanced networking controls

We also added the ability to configure Network Address Translation (NAT) rules for each virtual network, in addition to being able to rename networks for order and convenience.

Improved control over Host Virtual Networks: NAT, Network Rename

Our teams have been hard at work this year, and we hope you love what we’ve been building!

We’re just putting the final touches on everything to make sure our Fusion products meet the high demands put upon them, and we can’t wait to make Fusion 10 and Fusion 10 Pro available to everyone in early October.

Check out our Personal Desktop Product Line page here for more details about Fusion 10 and Workstation 14!

Availability and Pricing

VMware Fusion 10 Pro and VMware Fusion 10 are expected to be available in October 2017, from vmware.com for $159 and $79 respectively. VMware Fusion 10 Pro is also available from VMware partners and distributors.

Fusion 8.5 customers can upgrade to Fusion 10 Pro for only $119 and to Fusion 10 for $49 at the VMware online store.

Customers who purchase Fusion 8 or Fusion 8 Pro between August 22 and November 1 are eligible for an electronic upgrade to Fusion 10 or Fusion 10 Pro, respectively, at no additional cost. No action is required on your part, your licenses will automatically be upgraded in your MyVMware account manager.

Time flies when you’re working hard…

It’s been a busy year for us as we’ve been working hard on delivering new compelling features to VMware Fusion.

For many years we’ve enjoyed opening things up a bit to get some feedback on what we’ve been working on, and this year we’ve decided to open that program up again.

In this spirit, it is with great excitement that we announce the availability of VMware Fusion Tech Preview 2017!

This is a free, time-limited release that is aimed at gathering feedback on our direction and progress. We encourage users to grab the build, put it through it’s paces, and let us know in the Discussions where we can do better. While the release is certainly stable, we don’t recommend this on Production systems. Tech Preview builds are exclusively for testing purposes.

What’s in the release?

If you’re an IT Professional or a Developer, we think you’re going to really enjoy what we’ve been working on. We took the time to make some enhancements to existing technology such as our command line ‘vmrun‘ utility with many additional commands, while still working on brand new features like our new REST API.

We’ve made many enhancements to the UI to modernize the look and feel, and added support for TouchBar as well as automated background cleanup tasks.

There’s also a new 3D Rendering engine that leverages Apple’s ‘Metal‘ technology instead of OpenGL on the Host. This has given us improved battery life and more performance in many areas. There are some performance hits as well, so we’re eager to hear about your experiences with both performance and ‘correctness’ of rendering.

On the Networking side of things, we’ve been working on a highly-requested feature of the UI to modify the NAT port forwarding rules, so users can do that now without having to modify text files on the command line. You can also rename networks to be whatever you like so you can easily tell your ‘storage-net’ from ‘vmnet5’.

For folks working with vSphere, check out the new features for interacting with ESXi Hosts. Users can now control host power operations remotely, so you can easily shutdown or reboot a remote ESXi host.

Check it out today

The download is located over on our community page here, and there is a license key that you can use to unlock the functionality of this technical preview.

Today Apple seeded the first Public beta of macOS 10.13 High Sierra, making it available for all interested Mac users through the Apple Beta Software program.

We’ve written about how to run 10.13 in a Virtual Machine before, and previously there was a couple of hacks to do in order to get it running. This is just part of the fun of being on the ‘bleeding edge’, and thankfully with Fusion doing all this in a virtual environment makes it pretty painless.

With the recent release of Fusion 8.5.8 we did several behind-the-scenes changes, and while the release notes were a bit light on details for a variety of reasons, we did manage to make the process of testing out macOS High Sierra in a VM much easier.

The two main problems previously were that a) We would get the error about Fusion being ‘unable to create the installation medium’, and b) the lack of APFS support in our virtual EFI implementation.

Under Fusion 8.5.7 this is expected behaviour, now resolved with 8.5.8

For the ‘Unable to create installation medium’ issue, for which we had a community contribution to help work around that which we posted to our github page, we have since addressed the issue and the user-submitted code is not required.  Big thanks to norio-nomura over on github for taking the time to submit those changes. While we did not use code from that pull request to accomplish our task, we sincerely appreciate the community digging in and contributing.

Users can now simply drag the ‘Install macOS High Sierra.app’ directly on to Fusion’s New VM wizard and it will ‘do the right thing’.

The second problem was lack of support for APFS, rendering the OS unbootable if the user chose the ‘covert drive to APFS’ option from the installer.

The previously missing APFS UEFI driver is no longer missing

This issue is now simply resolved and the VM should boot just fine.

We don’t officially support High Sierra in a VM, and don’t recommend it in production environments, but by and large things seem to be working well as a VM with Fusion 8.5.8.

How has your experience been? We’d love to hear how your testing has been going, what you like and what drives you crazy both about macOS and about Fusion!

Last week’s WWDC marked another annual iteration of our favourite operating system, macOS. This year, moving from Sierra to High Sierra, we see a number of great reasons to upgrade when it’s released in the fall:

• Metal 2
• HEVC H.265 Support
• APFS
• Siri updates
• Safari Updates

Full release notes can be found over at the developer.apple.com release notes page, as well as links to download and the installation guide.

Test Drive!

Naturally we were inclined to check things out in VMware Fusion, and we were met with some mixed results. By and large the OS runs as a VM, but at this time things aren’t working exactly as we’d like.

Here are the two main issues you can currently expect with macOS 10.13 High Sierra as a VM:

• Fail to install macOS 10.13 guest, got error “Unable to create the installation medium”
• No APFS driver in UEFI renders the Guest OS unbootable when the Guest boot volume is using APFS.

Install Fresh vs. Upgrade?

What we’ve seen is that upgrading existing macOS VM’s is the easiest path to go. Always make sure to have a snapshot or a clone [clones are Fusion Pro only] of your VM so you have a known good roll-back point if things go awry. Upgrades are done in the guest just like they are on a physical machine, so Apple’s instructions apply and can be found right here.

For installing fresh, we had a fix for this last year which the community has updated with a new fix! (oh how I love our users!)

Without the patch, this is what happens

The process is the same as I outlined before, just replace the .tool with the new one from here. Original blog post: http://blogs.vmware.com/teamfusion/2016/06/fix-for-installing-macos-sierra-as-a-vm.html

Ah, there we go…

To APFS or not to APFS?

Isn’t that the question? Unfortunately Fusion’s current lack of support makes the decision for us. Rest assured we are very excited about and interested in leveraging the new capabilities found in Apple’s new File System, but for now it will give you an OS that you can not boot in a Virtual Machine.

As such, during the installation, be sure to NOT check the ‘Use APFS’ checkbox, otherwise you will render the VM unbootable.

We currently need to uncheck this box to boot successfully

If it remains checked, here’s what things look like after the installation has completed:

Missing APFS UEFI driver

With the added message:

It looked, but alas could not find it.

Again, simply not choosing APFS during the installation gets around this limitation, but I wanted to make sure users were aware that we knew about it and how to still take High Sierra for a test drive. Rest assured we are very excited about and interested in leveraging the new capabilities found in Apple’s new File System!

On another note, what we’ve also noticed is that not everyone gets the full OS installation image downloaded when they grab the ‘Install macOS High Sierra.app‘ package from the App Store. Originally mine was only 5MB and it downloaded the OS during the installation itself, but after upgrading my Host MBP to 10.13 (with APFS) and tried to run the upgrade again, it clearly downloaded the update in a different (earlier) stage of the installation. I quit before actually installing a second time and then use that .app to install my VM with the ~5GB .app file that I now had.

So there we have it! In summary:

• Fusion 8.5.7 runs on 10.13 Host with or without APFS
• macOS 10.13 High Sierra runs as a Guest without AFPS after a small patch to one of our scripts to support the new OS image structure changes.

A bit of business, but please note that ‘support’ for this new os is still considered experimental, so it’s definitely not recommended in production environments, but it makes for some fun and exciting times on testing machines!

Let us know in the comments or the Communities how your experience has been!

Team Fusion is proud to announce the availability of VMware Fusion 8.5.7.

A free update for existing users, this release contains bug fixes and adds improved support for the upcoming Windows 10 Creators Update.

We also resolved an issue when using git to perform a ‘git clone’ from within virtual machines failing in NAT configurations. Sorry about that one, but thanks for the community’s support in helping us fix it!

You can always grab the latest Fusion by using the Check for Updates features within the app, or by going over to vmware.com/go/getfusion

Check out the release notes here:

http://pubs.vmware.com/Release_Notes/en/fusion/8/fusion-857-release-notes.html

Hi folks!

Here on the Personal Desktop team (which is the product group containing our Fusion and Workstation products), we love our users. We bend over backwards to make sure the products are secure, and work in a way that our users expect with regular new features and the stability we’ve all come to depend on.

In this vein, the VMware User Group, or VMUG, members are our most passionate and advanced users. These are the kind of users who rely on Fusion or Workstation to test  applications and operating systems locally before pushing to their bigger vSphere platform. They know virtualization inside and out, are our earliest adopters, and dedicate time to testing the latest and greatest from any vendor that wishes to have a footprint in their data center.

Which is why we’re very excited to announce that VMware Fusion and VMware Workstation are now included in the VMUG Advantage program!

The VMUG Advantage program includes the ‘VMUG EvalExperience’ subscription which provides exclusive access to 1-year evaluation licenses of VMware’s flagship products and solutions, for use as a learning tool in your home lab. In addition, you get:

• EVALExperience
• 20% Discount on VMware Training Classes
• 20% Discount on VMware Certification Exams
• $500 IBM SoftLayer Cloud Credit
• 35% Discount on VMware Lab Connect
• $100 Discount on VMworld Attendance

The full list of products in the EVALExperience program includes:

• VMware Workstation Pro 12.5
• VMware Fusion Pro 8.5
• VMware vCenter Server Standard for vSphere 6
• VMware vSphere with Operations Management Enterprise Plus
• VMware vCloud Suite Standard
• VMware vRealize Operations
• VMware vRealize Log Insight
• VMware vRealize Operations for Horizon
• VMware Horizon Advanced Edition
• VMware vSAN

If you’re an admin who works with VMware’s products, there’s never been a better time or reason to join the VMUG Advantage program!