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.
