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
- Supported through minikube and docker-machine-driver-vmware
- 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
- Quickly adjust the layout of your virtual displays.
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.
