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Fighting the COVID-19 Coronavirus with VMware Fusion and Folding At Home

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HELP ERADICATE CORONAVIRUS COVID-19 WITH YOUR SPARE CPU CYCLES

>> Quick Link to the OVA Appliance

What a time to be alive.

I’m writing this from my apartment in San Francisco where I’ve been sheltering in place for almost 2 weeks now.

Personally I had been wondering just how I could help, beyond just applying the rules of today… social distancing, not panic-buying, keeping in touch with friends and family with Zoom and FaceTime, trying to limit time spend on Facebook (okay that last one I’m having a hard time with, but still…).

All that stuff is good, but surely there has to be more to do without putting anyone at risk, right?

Well thankfully I’m not the only one thinking that.

My friends and colleagues William Lam and Amanda Blevins, along with the support of the VMware community, have taken the onus to put together a free virtual appliance that can contribute your spare CPU cycles to the Folding At Home project.

More details: Link: A Force For Good: VMware Appliance for Folding at Home

Basically, the appliance creates a virtual machine that’s all set up with what it needs to start crunching numbers to aid research into the COVID-19 Coronavirus.

The first release did not support deployment on Fusion and Workstation due to some inconsistencies in the OVA profile, but we’ve worked to address that in today’s 1.0.1 release.

So let’s look at how to download and get to crunching numbers with it on Fusion.

GETTING THE APPLIANCE

Downloading the appliance is easy. Just go to the link below and click ‘download’.

Link: Folding At Home OVA

The download is about 250MG and the VM it creates ends up being about 750MB, so it’s a pretty small appliance.

Once the download starts, click the drop down and change the download item to grab the FAQ and the Deployment Steps PDF files.

Once downloaded, you’ll need to ‘import’ the OVA.

You can do this from the File menu, or by just double-clicking the downloaded .ova package.

The import process creates a copy of the appliance as a virtual machine.

INSTALLATION

The installation process goes like this:

  1. Download the OVA
  2. File > Import…
  3. Select the .ova file you just downloaded
  4. Click ‘Continue’ to bring up the configuration window
  5. Configure the appliance as follows:
    • Networking
      • (Optional) Set the Hostname
      • Leave IP and other settings as they are
    • Proxy Settings (Optional)
      • Only configure this if your host requires a Proxy
    • OS Credentials
      • Provide a root password (VMware1! is the default)
    • Folding At Home (F@H) Settings
      • You can leave these as they are, or configure as needed (it won’t prevent installation, and you can easily re-deploy if you want to change something)
      • Note: Fusion and Workstation do not unfortunately support the ‘GPU’ mode, so you’ll have to leave that unchecked
      • The OVA Properties are already configured to add your compute cycles to Link: TeamVMware (ID is 52737, you can check out our stats here: stats.foldingathome.org/team/52737 )
      • The default Folding profile is set to ‘medium’ which won’t try to take every last drop of CPU, making it a good option if you’re using the system while folding. Otherwise, if it’s a spare rig, bump that to “Full” to be more aggressive.
      • The F@H Remote Management console has a default password set of VMware1!, but you may change it if you wish before deploying.
  6. Click ‘Continue’
  7. Provide a file path to save the VM to and click ‘Save’
    • At this point you may want to configure some of the CPU and RAM settings, but if you click ‘Cancel’ at this stage it will trash the newly created VM.
  8. Click ‘Finish’

At this point, the VM automatically starts up.

What I do here is quickly ‘Power Off’ the VM so that I can assign more CPU cores and RAM.

  • Go to the Virtual Machine menu and select ‘Shut Down’, (or hold ‘Option’ and click ‘Power Off’ to really pull the plug…)
  • Open the VM settings and add more CPU cores and RAM. Default is 2 cores and 1GB of RAM.
    • How many cores you want to assign depends on what you’re using the system for.If it’s your daily driver you probably don’t want more than half your available CPU cores.If it’s a separate machine that isn’t actively being used, I generally leave 2 cores for the OS and assign the rest to the VM.

AFTER DEPLOYMENT

After getting your settings right, it’s time to power on the VM for real.

It should run a few maintenance tasks, and then present you with a prompt.

alt-text

Once it’s powered on, you can SSH into it to control it.

There are more details and context available in the FAQ guide posted on the appliance download page

CAVEATS

Personally I had a few issues deploying it…

alt-text

  • Bridged networking didn’t work for me
    • I had to use NAT, but that didn’t change any of the functionality.
      • I switched to NAT while the VM was booting up and hung on ‘scanning for network’. As soon as I swiched to NAT from Bridged (Autodetect), everything started working.
      • If I were managing it remotely, I would need to do some port forwarding in Fusion’s Network Editor for the vmnet it’s on. (details on what ports are needed are in the FAQ and deployment guides)
    • Sometimes it wouldn’t accept my new root password…
      • VMware1! is the default, and that worked anyhow

That’s basically all there is to it. It will sit and wait for Work Units to calculate.

You can check to see if it’s running any jobs or do some troubleshooting: (from either the console window or by SSH’ing into the VM. sshd is started by default.)

  • Check the status of the Service:
/etc/init.d/FAHClient status
  • You can restart the services with /etc/init.d/FAHClient stop /etc/init.d/FAHClient start Or /etc/init.d/FAHClient restart

You can then view the logs as below

/etc/init.d/FAHClient log -v

Or:

less /var/lib/fahclient/log.txt

Welcome to the front lines of the war against COVID-19!

Links:

Originally posted at: https://mikeroysoft.com/blog/covid-fah/

VMware Fusion Tech Preview 20H1: Introducing Project Nautilus

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It’s Tech Preview time, and this year we’re doing things a bit differently. Let’s dive in!

New Decade, New Approach to “Beta”

Here on the Fusion team, we want to get features in the hands of customers faster than ever before, and we want to iterate and refine things with the guidance of our users, and to do so transparently, out in the open, as much as possible.

In that vein, for the Fusion Pro Tech Preview 2020 we’re doing things a bit differently than we have in previous years.

This year, in an ongoing way, we’ll be releasing multiple updates to our Tech Preview branches, similar to how we update things in the main generally available branch.  The first release is available now, and we’re calling it ’20H1′.

What this means is that if you have Tech Preview 20H1 (TP20H1 as we lovingly call it…)  installed, it will get updates throughout the year as we improve the quality of our release.

We’re also moving our documentation and other things over to GitHub. We’ll be continuing to add more to the org and repos there, maintain and curate it, as well as host code and code examples that we are able to open source.

Having our docs etc on GitHub let users provide feedback and file issues filed against both docs as well as the products themselves. We will continue to post updates and encourage discussion in the community forum, while GitHub becomes more of a place where we can refer to the ‘latest source of truth’, and where folks can file (and even track) more ‘official’ bugs.

We encourage folks to file issues on GitHub, as well as fork and make changes to the repos there if you believe there’s a better way or if we’re missing something.

Same as always, the Tech Preview builds are free for use and do not require a purchased license, but they come with no guarantees of support and things might behave unexpectedly. But hey, that’s where the fun is, right?

Okay, let’s talk about features…

Firstly, we did some cool USB work!  We’ve opted into using Apple’s native USB stack, enabling us to remove one of our root-level kernel extensions. Try out your devices and let us know if they have any trouble by filing an issue in this GitHub repo: Fusion GitHub usb-support

In Fusion Tech Preview 20H1, however, our main focus is the initial release of an internal project we’ve been calling ‘Project Nautilus‘. We’ve been working on this for almost 2 years, so I’m extremely pleased to say that it’s finally available to the public to use, for free, as part of TP20H1.

 

What is Project Nautilus?

Project Nautilus enables Fusion to run OCI compliant containers on the Mac in a different way than folks might be used to. Our initial release can run containers, but as we grow we’re working towards being able to declare full kubernetes clusters on the desktop.

By leveraging innovations we’re making in Project Pacific, and a bevy of incredible open source projects such as runC, containerD, Cri-O, Kubernetes and more, we’re aiming to make containers first-class citizens, in both Fusion and Workstation, right beside virtual machines.

Currently a command-line oriented user-experience, we’ve introduced a new tool for controlling containers and the necessary system services in VMware Fusion and Workstation: vctl.

Containers on the desktop today

Today when you have say, Docker for Mac installed, its services start, it creates a special Linux virtual machine (in one of many ways, including using Fusion), and essentially maps all of the ‘docker’ commands back the kernel running in the linux vm. (remember that docker is just a front-end to containerd, formerly dockerd, which front ends runC, which interfaces into the linux kernel ‘cgroups’ feature for isolating processes [i.e. the ‘container‘ part of the container].)

So that bulky VM sits there running, waiting for your docker commands, and runs all your containers within it.

Each running container becomes a part of the docker private network, and you forward some ports to localhost and expose your service.

In Fusion with Project Nautilus, we’ve taken a different approach.

Nautilus is different

The vision for Nautilus: A single development platform on the desktop that can bring together VMs, Containers and Kubernetes clusters, for building and testing modern applications.

With Nautilus, leveraging what we built for vSphere and Project Pacific, we’ve created a very special, ultra-lightweight virtual machine-like process for isolating the container host kernel from the Host system. We call that process a PodVM or a ‘Native Pod’.

Each Container get’s its own Pod, and each Pod gets its own IP address from a custom VMnet, which can be easily seen when inspecting the container’s details after it launches.

Meaning, we can easily consume running services without have to deal with port forwarding back to localhost.

It also means that while today we deploy the container image in a pod on a custom vmnet, we can conceivably change that to a bridged network… Meaning you could start a container, the pod would would get an IP from the LAN, and you can then immediately share that IP to anyone else on the LAN to consume that service, without port forwarding.

Of course with custom vmnets we can configure port forwarding, and we’ll also be exposing more functionality there as we grow the Nautilus toolkit.

One of our goals is to bring to bear a new model for design much more complex deployments. We see a future where we can define, within a single file, a multi container + VM + kubernetes cluster deployment, allowing users to accelerate their application modernization.

Nautilus Today

Today Nautilus is controlled by ‘vctl’, and that binary is added to your $PATH when Fusion TP 20H1 is installed.

Let’s look at the vctl default output:

mike@OctoBook >_ vctl

vctl - A CLI tool for Project Nautilus Container Engine powered by VMware Fusion

Feature Highlights:
 • Native container runtime on macOS.
 • Pull and push container images between remote registries & local macOS storage.
 • Run containers within purpose-built linux-based virtual machines (CRX VM).
 • 1-step shell access into virtual machine debug environment. See 'vctl sh'.
 • Guide for quick access to & execution in container-hosting virtual machine available in 'vctl describe'.

USAGE:
 vctl COMMAND [options]

COMMANDS:
 delete Delete images or containers.
 describe Show details of containers.
 exec Execute a command within containers or virtual machines.
 get List images or containers.
 help Help about any command
 pull Pull images from remote location.
 push Push images to remote location.
 run Run containers from images.
 sh Shell into container-hosting virtual machines.
 start Start containers.
 stop Stop containers.
 system Manage Nautilus Container Engine.
 tag Create tag images that refer to the source ones.
 version Prints the version of vctl

Run 'vctl COMMAND --help' for more information on a command.

OPTIONS:
 -h, --help help for vctl

You can see we are off to a good start, there’s a lot we can do already. We also have many aliases in place. Most commonly you’ll have ‘ls’ for ‘get’, ‘i’ fo

As a quick example, to run our first container first we need to start the services.

mike@OctoBook >_ vctl system start
Preparing storage...
Container storage has been prepared successfully under /Users/mike/.nautilus/storage
Preparing container network, you may be prompted to input password for administrative operations...
Password:
Container network has been prepared successfully using vmnet: vmnet12
Launching container runtime...
Container runtime has been started.

Once the system is prepared and started, we can pull an image:

Note that we’re providing a full URL to the image hosted on docker hub, but we could easily point that to a private Harbor instance or some other OCI-compliant registry. In these examples I’m referring to the full path as the image name, but you could ‘tag’ it and just refer to the tag for simplicity’s sake.

mike@OctoBook >_ vctl pull image docker.io/mikeroysoft/mrs-hugo:dev
─── ────── ────────
REF STATUS PROGRESS
─── ────── ────────
manifest-sha256:83cd5b529a63b746018d33384b1289f724b10bb624279f444c23a00fd36e3565 Done 100% (951/951)
layer-sha256:c94289816e8009241879a23ec168af2d9189260423f846695538c320c8b99ea7 Done 100% (17575762/17575762)
layer-sha256:9d48c3bd43c520dc2784e868a780e976b207cbf493eaff8c6596eb871cbd9609 Done 100% (2789669/2789669)
layer-sha256:b6dac14ba0a98b1118a92bc36f67413ba09adb2f1bb79a9030ed25329f428c1f Done 100% (5876538/5876538)
config-sha256:cb657649e42335e58df4c02d7753f5c53b6e92837b0486e9ec14f6e8feb69b61 Done 100% (7396/7396)
INFO Unpacking docker.io/mikeroysoft/mrs-hugo:dev...
INFO done

Now that we have the container in our local inventory:

mike@OctoBook >_ vctl ls i
──── ───────────── ────
NAME CREATION TIME SIZE
──── ───────────── ────
docker.io/mikeroysoft/mrs-hugo:dev 2020-01-19T17:46:09-08:00 25.0 MiB

Cool, there’s my image (you can see it live at https://mikeroysoft.com!).

Let’s start it up!

mike@OctoBook >_ vctl run container my-www --image=docker.io/mikeroysoft/mrs-hugo:dev -d
INFO container my-www started and detached from current session
 
mike@OctoBook >_ vctl ls c
──── ───── ─────── ── ───── ────── ─────────────
NAME IMAGE COMMAND IP PORTS STATUS CREATION TIME
──── ───── ─────── ── ───── ────── ─────────────
my-www docker.io/mikeroysoft/mrs-hugo:dev nginx -g daemon off; 172.16.223.128 running 2020-01-19T17:58:33-08:00

You can see that the container ‘my-www’ is running, based on the mrs-hugo:dev image in it’s fully-pathed form.

You can see the command being run, and most interestingly you have an IP address.

Opening that up yields whatever was running in the container. In my case it’s nginx serving up some static content on port 80. No port mapping necessary.

I won’t go into much further detail in this post, but in the coming days and weeks we will be doing a series of posts and additions to the GitHub repository to explore using all of the capabilities we’ve been able to deliver as part of Nautilus.

Nautilus Tomorrow: Let’s get there together

This is only the first iteration, and we’re making great effort to ensure that we can iterate quickly. This means not only listening better and hearing more from our users, but also tracking issues more transparently, and hold ourselves accountable for delivering fixes and improvements in a timely manner.

We see a not-so-distant future where we can define complex multi-vm+container+kubernetes cluster setups locally on the desktop using a standard markup, and to be able to share that quickly and easily with others even if they’re using Windows.

So there you have it… time to go get started!

Direct Download

VMware Fusion on GitHub

Black Friday Sale is on!

It’s that time of year again!

The time where we offer up our biggest savings on our favorite desktop hypervisor products, VMware Fusion and VMware Workstation!

Fusion 11.0 customers can install Fusion 11.5 as a free upgrade without needing a new license key, but for users still on Fusion 8 or Fusion 10, now is the best time to upgrade to the latest and most advanced releases yet!

Fusion 11.5 introduces support for the latest Windows updates, as well as macOS Catalina with Sidecar support!

Oh, and don’t forget the all new Dark Mode!

Embrace the dark side!

Fusion has never looked this good!

Get your upgrade before the sale ends!

 

We’re also offering big discounts on VCP exam vouchers and Education services!

OFFER ENDS DEC 01 AT 21:00 PACIFIC!

VMware Fusion 11.5 Available Now!

It’s with great pleasure that we announce the immediate availability of VMware Fusion 11.5!

Download here!

Still on Fusion 10 or 8.5? Upgrade here with 20% off!!

Release notes

This release comes as a free upgrade to existing Fusion 11 users, with Fusion 8.5 and v10 customers being still eligible for discount upgrade pricing. This release also extends support for v11 customers until December 2020.

Added to that we’re also running a 20% off sale right now! We wanted to make sure that folks who are still using older releases can get support for macOS Catalina without having to pay full price for the upgrade.

So what’s new?

First up, Dark Mode.

When Dark Mode is enabled onl our Mac, Fusion transforms into a darker and more nighttime-friendly version of itself.

Fusion not only detects when Dark Mode is enabled and adjusts the user interface accordingly, but it also can synchronize the mode with Windows and macOS Guests who support the feature.  This is a per-vm preference, and can be enabled in the VM Settings > Advanced window.

Next up: Sidecar

macOS Catalina introduces an incredible new feature called Sidecar that lets your Mac use your iPad as an external display.

With Fusion’s support of this feature, users can deploy a VM and drive it completely from your iPad, including support for the Apple Pencil and Bluetooth Keyboard. Works Wired or Wirelessly.

Also featuring: Jumbo Frames

Professionals oftentimes use Fusion and Workstation to deploy virtual lab environments, but when using some more advanced networking tools and techniques unfortunately some things didn’t work. One reason is because a larger MTU size was required for their virtual networks, but previously this wasn’t something users could configure.

Now with this support, savvy IT Pros and VI Admins can run a full vSphere, with NSX, virtual lab environment on Workstation with overlay support. (Given sufficient hardware resources, of course!)

There are a number of other reasons to use Jumbo Frames, including network performance advantages in enterprises and universities with supporting network infrastructure.

And More!

We’ve squashed bugs, improved performance and closed security holes, while adding support for the latest OS’s from Microsoft, Linux, BSD and Apple.

Get it now! 

Still on Fusion 10 or 8.5? Upgrade here with 20% off!

Release notes

We hope you enjoy, and please share your feedback in our community forums!

 

VMworld 2019: Fusion and Workstation Announcements

At VMworld 2019, Zongmin Li and I took to the stage to present our annual ‘What’s new in Fusion and Workstation’ session, where we share what we’ve been working on and and look ahead on our roadmap a bit.

In this session we made some exciting announcements:

Fusion 11.5 and Workstation 15.5: Free Updates Coming in September

The biggest announcement is about our annual product release. We have a lot of great new features that we’ll be issuing as a free update to existing users, and extending the period for Fusion 8 and Workstation 12 customers to upgrade without having to buy a full ‘new’ license.

So what’s in the releases? Let’s take a look…

Fusion and Workstation Shared Features

  • Jumbo Frame Support
    • Configure the MTU size of your virtual networks (Pro products only)
  • New pvscsi device support
    • More compatibility with vSphere virtual hardware
  • New OS support
    • Windows 10 19H2, Ubuntu 1910, Debian 10.0, RHEL 7.7
  • Local Kubernetes Clusters
  • Performance and Security Bugfixes

Fusion Only Features

  • macOS 10.15 Catalina
    • Host and Guest support
  • Dark Mode and Dark Mode Sync
    • Fusion now goes dark when Dark Mode is enabled on your Mac, and can optionally synchronize this setting with Windows 10 and macOS 10.14+ guest VMs.
  • Sidecar (requires Catalina host)
    • Use Windows on your iPad, wirelessly, with hardware keyboard and Apple Pencil support!

Workstation Only Features

  • Network Config Preservation
    • When upgrading Workstation between major versions, your custom network settings are preserved
  • Network Config Export
    • Export complex network configurations with an easily shareable text file.
  • Multi-Mon Shortcut Key
    • Quickly adjust the layout of your virtual displays.
      • ctrl+shift+m brings up the topology chooser where you then key the number of the corresponding layout you want

And finally, we had one more thing to share…

VMware and Microsoft Hypervisor Platform Collaboration

Closing out the presentation we had “One More Thing” to share, and we brought our friend Ben Armstrong, Product Manager for the Microsoft Windows Hypervisor Platform, on stage to join us in announcing something we’ve been working on for quite some time now.

For the past year we’ve been collaborating closely with Microsoft on the Windows Hypervisor Platform engineering team so that Workstation can co-exist with Hyper-V enabled hosts.

Read more about our collaboration here

We’re very proud of what the engineering teams are delivering this year in Fusion and Workstation, and for the incredible features that have yet to come.

 

Black Friday Sale!

Hurry while the savings last!

On Wednesday, November 21st at 8am PST (and maaaaaaybe a bit earlier ;), the doors to our biggest sale off the year will be opened!

Shop Now!

Save up to 35% off your favorite VMware Desktop Hypervisors – Fusion and Workstation, from now until Monday during our annual Black Friday sale!

Fusion 11 delivers exciting new features such as DirectX 10.1 graphics, a revamped App Menu, one-click SSH to Linux VMs and more!

Hurry while the savings last!

Shop Now!

 

 

VMware Fusion 11 is here!

 

 

Fusion 11 and Fusion 11 Pro: Available Now!

Download          Upgrade Now

Hot on the heels of macOS Mojave’s release today, we’re proud to announce that  our latest major upgrade to Fusion: VMware Fusion 11 and Fusion 11 Pro, is available now!

We are incredibly proud of this release as we continue to focus on developer workflows and increasing our automation capabilities, while still improving on GPU and overall performance, stability and security.

Cut right to the chase and get the bits:

Direct Download             Upgrade

This release delivers many new features and platform enhancements such as:

Enhanced Metal Graphics Rendering Engine with Direct3D 10.1

Fusion 11 and Fusion 11 Pro both default to the new Enhanced Metal Graphics Rendering Engine on supported hosts, and has been updated to deliver DirectX 10.1 compatibility. Now supporting Anti-Aliasing as well as Geometry shaders, games and apps which require DirectX 10.1, or which fallback to 10.1 from DirectX 11, will now run in a Windows 7, 8 or 10 virtual machine.

DirectX 10.1 with Anti Aliasing and 3GB VGPU RAM

 

Updated User Interface, Application Menu

Fusion 11 delivers an all new Application Menu for quickly accessing VM inventory, changing view modes, settings, snapshots, or launching Windows applications from a single click. The Application Menu can run with or without Fusion, allowing users to launch and control VMs at an instant.

New Finder integration at the top of the VM Window allows users to quickly navigate to anywhere in the running VM’s folder tree, supporting drag and drop file location printing (Drag the VM name to Terminal or any text-input field, it prints the vm’s file path)

Open a Finder window to anywhere in the VM’s file tree, or drag to print the path in a text field

 

Includes added support for customizing the Touch Bar for equipped Macs using new contextual functions for the VM Library and the VM Window.

Improved: Fusion REST API v1.2

Introduced in Fusion 10 Pro, the Fusion REST API has new controls for configuring Virtual Networking such as Mac-IP DHCP bindings, NAT Port Forwarding control and more.

New controls for managing DHCP and NAT

One-Click SSH

Fusion 11 and Fusion 11 Pro can rapidly connect to any Linux VM running an OpenSSH or compatible service with a single click from the VM Library Window. You can choose to save the password to avoid entering it in each time.

Quickly SSH into a Linux VM

 

New vSphere View

In addition to supporting ESXi 6.7 and the deployment of vCenter Server Appliance 6.7, VMware Fusion 11 Pro can now view into Hosts and Cluster detail when connected to remote (or local nested!) vSphere environments. View your resources by VM, Host or Cluster to get a better look at your sphere inventory right from Fusion.

Run a series of ESXi VMs with a vCenter Server Appliance to simulate a real vSphere environment, and connect to it directly from Fusion

Also Included in this release:

Hardware Version 16

Fusion 11 now uses VMware Virtual Hardware Platform version 16 which contains many improvements around areas of security, performance, and stability, as well as adding support for the latest Macs, including the 18-core iMac Pro and MacBook Pro with 6-core Intel i9 CPU.

  • Included in HWv16 are:
    • Improved Virtual NVMe Device Performance
    • Important Security Fixes (Spectre, Meltdown and L1TF)
    • Virtual Trusted Platform Module
    • UEFI Secure Boot
    • IOMMU
    • VBS Support (guest only)
  • Support for the latest Host and Guest OS’s
    • macOS 10.14 Mojave – Host and Guest
    • Windows 10 October 2018 Update – Guest
    • Windows Server 2016 updates – Guest
    • Ubuntu 18.04.1, Fedora 28 – Guest
    • VMware Photon OS – Guest
    • VMware ESXi 6.7 – Guest 

 

Automated Disk Cleanup

Introduced in Fusion 10 for Windows Guests, Fusion can be configured to automatically perform a ‘disk clean up‘ operation every time the VM is Shut Down to help save host disk space.

 

Virtual Network Simulation

Introduced in 2017, Fusion 11 Pro can also configure virtual networking, including bandwidth limits, packet loss and latency to test application resiliency in bandwidth-restricted environments

 

Performance, Bug and Security fixes

Fusion 11 includes many under-the-hood changes to increase performance, particularly with Virtual NVMe devices. Simply change your virtual disk type to NVMe to increase performance on SSD storage equipped Macs.

Also included are a bounty of security fixes and architectural changes to mitigate against todays latest hardware and software based threats like Spectre, Meltdown and L1TF vulnerabilities.

 

Another Amazing Release!

All in all we are incredibly proud of this release as we continue to focus on developer workflows and increasing our automation capabilities, while still improving on GPU and overall performance, stability and security.

 

Upgrade eligibility: Owners of Fusion 10 and Fusion 8 or 8.5 are eligible for upgrade pricing. Users who purchased Fusion 10 from August 21st onward will have their keys automatically upgraded in you’re My VMware account.

Get it Now!

Fusion Tech Preview 2018 Available for Testing

Fusion Tech Preview 2018

The VMware Fusion team is very excited to announce the VMware Fusion Technology Preview 2018 release!  We would love to hear your feedback about the exciting new features we have been working on.

Cut to the chase and download the latest bits from our Tech Preview Community:
VMware Fusion Technology Preview 2018.

Or from MyVMware directly:

https://my.vmware.com/group/vmware/get-download?downloadGroup=FUS-TP-2018

What’s New

DirectX 10.1 – We are excited to introduce DirectX 10.1 support with Fusion 2018 Tech Preview. Using Apple’s Metal technology to render 3D accelerated graphics, support for DirectX 10.1 in Guest VMs introduces several subtle differences over 10.0

DirectX 10.1 delivers the following graphics improvements:

  • Full MSAA (Multisample anti-aliasing) support
  • Shader Model 4.1 support
  • Cubemap array support

This enhancement allows users to run games that require DirectX 10.1, and improves performance for DX10.0 games and apps. Test it out and let us know how what you think about the graphics quality and performance.

DirectX 10.1 requires macOS 10.13.0 or above.

macOS Mojave Beta Experimental Support – Fusion Tech Preview 2018 can run on latest macOS 10.14 Mojave beta as Host and a guest OS. Users can run Fusion on a Mac with 10.14 Beta installed, or test out 10.14 by running it in a virtual machine. We currently only support installing using the .app from the Mac App Store. We do not currently support upgrading existing macOS VMs, nor do we support creating a new VM from a 10.14 recovery partition. We know there is some work to be done to support Apple’s latest and greatest, so please share your feedback with us in the Community.

ESXi Host/cluster view when connecting to vCenter – We’ve add a new Hosts and Clusters view when using Workstation to connect to a vCenter Server from Workstation. Users now have visibility to navigate to non-VM objects (ESXi hosts, Resource Pool and vApp) and their respective relationship hierarchy (i.e. Datacenter > Cluster > Resource Pool > vApp). Users can also switch back to the ‘flat’ VM view with a single click.

 

The all new Application Menu

New Application Menu – This tech preview showcases a new Application Menu that we’ve been testing. This App Menu uses our own REST API to create a whole new experience. The new app menu aims to do what the existing Library Window does. Beyond quickly launching applications within guest, the new Menu Bar App supports:

  • New VM creation
  • Virtual Machine Power Operations
  • Switching from different Views (Unity, Full Screen, Windowed)
  • New contextual search feature for VMs and Windows Apps
  • Display IP, MAC and VM resource allocation (CPU, RAM)
  • Taking Snapshots
  • Opening VM settings

 

Customize Fusion shortcuts on your touch bar

Customizable Touch Bar Support – Users can now customize the Mac Touch Bar (on supported hardware) to tweak what to appears on your Touch Bar Display. Touch Bar is customizable with new controls for following scenarios:

  • Library Window
  • VM Window

SSH login to Linux VM – Users can now SSH login to Linux VM with a single click. The SSH user/password can be securely remembered so you can easily SSH to the VM without entering password, or configure it to forget and require a password each time.

Once SSH is running in your VM and accessible by username and password, you can quickly open up a terminal session

 

Resolved Issues:

Bluetooth devices on Mac host get disconnected when you quit Fusion

When you quit Fusion, Bluetooth devices like keyboard, mouse may temporary get disconnected from Mac host.

This issue is resolved.

High battery consumption on Windows 8 and Windows 10 VM

For Window 8 and Window 10 VM, when you toggle following display options:  “Use High Performance Graphics” and “Always use High Performance Graphics”, battery consumption is unexpectedly high.

This issue is resolved.

VM does not work with NAT after High Sierra 10.13.x Update

macOS High Sierra 10.13 may cause VM network connection issues under NAT networking mode.

This issue is resolved.

Known Issues:

Unable to use App Store to upgrade macOS 10.13 or 10.14 VM

Attempting to upgrade macOS to 10.13 or 10.14 via the App Store may fail.

We are working on fix for this issue. Workaround is to manually download latest macOS 10.13 or 10.14 installer .app on the Host, transfer to the VM and upgrade using the image.

 

We really appreciate your help testing this software. Please share your feedback in our VMware Fusion Technology Preview 2018 community.  We will try to answer any questions that you may have, and we’ll investigate any issues that are raised. We also encourage users to also share other thoughts about how we can improve or enhancements that you would like to see in future releases.

Thank you!

The VMware Fusion Team

Apple Showcases VMware Fusion on new iMac Pro

 

A gorgeous virtual powerhouse

Today Apple has made available their newest addition to the Mac lineup: the iMac Pro, and we couldn’t be more excited about the prospects of such a powerful Mac, particularly as the most capable Mac based virtual machine host ever, running VMware Fusion.

Early reviewers have touted the “Blazing Fast” performance that this hardware offers, with both CPU and on GPU, but the new machine isn’t exactly for everyone.

With the iMac Pro, Apple returns to it’s roots with an offering aimed at professionals and power users.

Recently Apple held a media event attended by press, industry analysts and others, to showcase some of the capabilities of such a powerful machine and what it might be used for.

During this event it was reported that Apple demoed VMware Fusion as a professional app that can make full use of this new hardware performance. More than just running Windows on the Mac, Apple showed an end-to-end development and testing pipeline built using virtual machines running on a single machine.

Obviously use cases for Video/Audio editing, 3D/CAD design were discussed, but to quote this Macworld article: By

“Most impressive was a demo of Apple’s Xcode, which ran several UI tests and VMware Fusion virtual machines at the same time without the iMac Pro breaking a sweat.“

Does not break sweats, can run clouds inside it

From a single iMac Pro using VMware Fusion you could rapidly architect an entire development pipeline complete with SCM, an automated build system, automated UI testing, development and staging environments, topped off with a series of different ‘desktop’ VM’s to test the application with.

Leveraging pre-built packages like those from Bitnami, users can quickly grab all the building blocks for this kind of modern “DevOps” environment. (quotes because I get that DevOps is a buzzword referring to Agile development tools with a goal of continuous iteration and or delivery and an accompanying cultural movement… ).

A user could for example tie together a GitLab VM for SCM; Jenkins, GitLab or Gradle for build and pipeline; some stack for the Dev and Stage environments (LAMP, Node.js, Tomcat, etc…); Redmine, Trac or Mantis for Bug Tracking; JFrog for your artifact/binary repository and then ReviewBoard for team code collaboration.

For folks on the more traditional IT Pro or datacenter admin, this machine is powerful enough to run the complete VMware solution lab from a single desktop. You could easily run the vCenter Server Appliance, several ESXi hosts, vSAN, vRealize suite, and more, all thanks to the common underlying VMware platform and the incredible resources from these new machines.

The possibilities are endless thanks to the amazing abstraction that VMware virtualization provides, and the sheer power that this new Apple hardware delivers, and we can’t wait to fill our office with them.

Did you order the iMac Pro? Which spec? Tell us in the discussion below!

Celebrate 10 years with us and get over $600 of software for $160!

This year at VMworld we had a special treat for our attendees with our Fusion 10th Anniversary Collector Box. Outside the box it says Fusion 10 all over, but with the box came a USB card that has you covered on all platforms: Workstation 14 Pro for Windows, Workstation 14 Pro for Linux and Fusion 10 Pro for Mac.

Of course this is great if you were lucky enough to attend VMworld, but what if you didn’t?

Out of luck, right?

Not anymore!

We pulled back a curtain in the storage room and found a whole crate of boxes that didn’t make it into the hands of our users, so we’re making them available to you for only $160!

That’s right, for the price of a new copy of Fusion 10 Pro with this box you get 2 copies of Workstation 14 Pro, a copy of Fusion 10 Pro* AND a very svelte collector tin and coaster for your office!

Over $660 in just software for only $160!

What else is there to say? If you dig cross platform virtualization, this the best deal you’ll find on the web today. Hurry while supplies last!

Buy Now! > vmwaremerchandise.com

 

*Includes a ‘Thank You’ card insert which contains 3 keys: 1 Fusion 10 Pro Full License Key, 1 Workstation 14 Pro for Windows NFR Key, and 1 Workstation 14 Pro for Linux NFR Key. “NFR” keys are promotional keys and will unlock all capabilities of the software but do not include entitlement for filing support requests or major-version upgrade discounts. Offer is only available in the United States.

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