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Category Archives: apple

Ready for Testing: Updated Tech Preview with Big Sur Support

At WWDC 2020, the good folks at Apple wow’d us with a look at the next major version of macOS: 11.0 Big Sur, and it’s no stretch for us to say: We’re pleasantly impressed.

We’ve been working to update Fusion with support for the new rendition of macOS, and today we’re pleased to share with you some early progress with the introduction of a new Tech Preview.

Direct Link to .dmg (no login required)

Download Group (you must be logged in to MyVMware to access this page)

Big Changes

Big Sur brings with it some really big visual changes, but also major changes under the hood. For instance, Apple has been progressively deprecating 3rd party Kernel Extensions or “kexts” which Fusion needs to run VMs and containers. In order to continue to operate in this model, we’ve re-architected our hypervisor stack to leverage Apple’s native hypervisor APIs, allowing us to run VMs without any kernel extensions.

On macOS Catalina systems, Fusion operates as it always has using kernel extensions to provide functionality. However on Big Sur systems, Fusion operates entirely without kexts.

This Tech Preview is the first release of us operating in this new mode and we’re eager to hear your feedback.

This Tech Preview supports macOS Big Sur 11.0 Beta 2 for both Host and Guest. For example, you can run Big Sur VMs on macOS Catalina, as well as on Big Sur hosts.

What else is in this preview?

Building on the last previews, this TP includes DX11 and OpenGL 4.1 support, as well as eGPU support for improved graphics performance. For example, you can render DX11 graphics for Windows VMs on the built-in display for a MacBook Air using an eGPU housing a Radeon 5700. The performance gains vs. a discrete mobile GPU are pretty significant! One might even say ‘YUUUGE’. (In order to use your eGPU, you must select ‘Prefer eGPU’ from the Virtual Machine > Settings > Display window. This is a per-VM feature.)

We’re also deprecating macOS 10.14 Mojave hosts, starting with this tech preview. Fusion 11.5.x will be the last version of Fusion which supports 10.14, whereas this year’s major release will support 10.15 and 11.0.

How to provide feedback?

We would love to hear from you in our Fusion Beta community: https://communities.vmware.com/community/vmtn/beta/fusion-pro

Known Issues

With such big changes under the hood, there are of course some known issues that we’re working on, both with our code as well as filing issues with Apple directly.

Nested VMs are not currently supported.
Jumbo Frames feature currently does not function
When the installation of a macOS Big Sur guest completes, the virtual disk containing the temporary installer image is not automatically deleted.
- Workaround: Manually delete the disk once installation is complete
Big Sur guests may log out unexpectedly and/or display a black screen when clicking an invisible icon in the upper right corner of the display.
- Workaround: There is no workaround at this time, we are continuing to investigate
A powered-on VM snapshotted or suspended with Fusion running on a macOS 10.15.x or earlier host might fail to resume on a macOS Big Sur host.
- Worksaround: Power Off your VMs before upgrading your host to Big Sur to avoid VM corruption. As always, employ backups when testing beta software!
A maximum of 31 vCPUs are available when running on the current seed of macOS 11 Big Sur. Configuring 32 vCPUs will prompt an error message to reduce the number of cores to 31 or less. (this is temporary and not related to licensing)
- Workaround: Use 31 or fewer vCPU cores
REST API is now only available to local connections.
VMs that have side channel mitigations enabled while running on Fusion on macOS 11 Big Sur may have reduced performance. This setting is enabled by default.
- Side channel attacks allow unauthorized read access by malicious processes or virtual machines to the contents of protected kernel or host memory. CPU vendors have introduced a number of features to protect data against this class of attacks such as indirect branch prediction barriers, single thread indirect branch predictor mode, indirect branch restricted speculation mode and L1 data cache flushing. While these features are effective at preventing side channel attacks they can cause noticeable performance degradation in some cases.
- Workaround: If your security situation allows, you may regain some performance by disabling side channel mitigations. in your VM Settings > Advanced window.

Fusion 8.5.3 Released, addresses macOS 10.12 issues

Using macOS 10.12 Sierra and VMware Fusion 8.5? It’s time to update!

And with the biggest sale of the year going on right now, there’s never been a better time to get up to date if you’re on Fusion 7 or older.

Today we’ve released an update to our favourite Mac virtualization product to address some critical stability issues on certain configurations of macOS 10.12. Users would get an ‘internal error’ message and Fusion would quit unexpectedly. This release fixes that issue.

Users can download the update from within the product by clicking ‘Check for Updates’, or you can grab the raw bits right from vmware.com/go/getfusion

It’s also the perfect time to update to the latest supported version of our most popular products with our Cyber Monday sale going on all week.

There’s still a couple of days to get 35% off our already discounted Fusion 8.5 Pro and our flagship Windows and Linux virtualization product, VMware Workstation 12.5 Pro.

Biggest sale of the year is almost here!

It’s nearly that time again… Black Friday and Cyber Monday are quickly approaching!

We’re going to have our award winning virtualization products on sale at huge discounts just in time for the holidays.

If you had been holding off upgrading to Fusion 8.5, our Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales are the biggest discounts we offer all year, it’s the perfect time to get supported under macOS Sierra and Windows 10 Anniversary (which has been called ‘the most secure Windows to date‘.

In other news, we also just released a security patch to address a vulnerability demonstrated at this year’s PwnFest festival in Seoul, Korea last week. We patched the vulnerability in hours and pushed the release on Sunday to protect our users.

You can read the release notes for 8.5.2 here

Fusion for Business

Did you know that VMware Fusion makes it easy to manage a fleet of Bring Your Own Device users? By adding VMware Horizon FLEX, businesses have more control over local virtual desktops than ever before. Use Fusion or Workstation to create your ‘Gold Master’ templates and then share those with end users. The templates can be restricted and even encrypted, and managed from a central console: Horizon FLEX.

Even when used un-namaged, Fusion allows Macs to live in the enterprise like never before. Users can run the corporate desktop, complete with custom windows-only application developed in-house, right from their Mac.

Want to learn more? Check out our video and come visit our VMware Fusion and Horizon FLEX product pages!

VMware Fusion: Mac Virtualization for Everyone

Hi everyone!

Most Mac users know about VMware Fusion and how it’s the best way to run Windows on your Mac… BUT… did you know it’s also the tool of choice for IT, Developers and Businesses looking to get the most out of their hardware investment, or embrace a BYOD culture?

Well if you didn’t, consider this an introduction to how people use Fusion for things OTHER than home users running Windows on the Mac.

Check out our new video below!

VMware Fusion 8.5 Announced!

We’ve been holding in the surprise for some time now but on the keynote stage today at VMworld, Sanjay Poonan, EVP of our End user Computing business unit where Fusion and Workstation are situated, pulled the covers back and revealed the details about our big annual release.

This year we are delivering Fusion 8.5 and Fusion 8.5 Pro, and the big surprise is this: It’s a free upgrade for all current-version customers. So, if you’re on Fusion 8.1.1, you’re going to be able to upgrade to the latest Fusion with full support for macOS Sierra and Windows 10 Anniversary edition, for free. We’ll also be adding Windows Server 2016 support when it comes available.

The release includes support for some interesting macOS Sierra features, including Tabs and Siri support.

This is an exciting release for us because it marks the first time that we have provided a yearly update for no additional cost to current-version customers. We’ve been holding the surprise in for some time, so we’re very excited to finally share this with the world.

We’ve also changed how users can upgrade to the latest release. Users are eligible for upgrade pricing going back to Fusion 4. So, if you have an old Fusion license and haven’t upgraded in a few years, there’s never been a better time.

Tabs! With macOS Sierra, you can now bring all those VM’s into a single window

Hey Siri, Open Microsoft Edge

This also marks the release of VMware Workstation 12.5 Pro and Player editions, which you can read more about here. We expect all 4 products (Fusion, Fusion Pro, Workstation Pro and Workstation Player) to release mid-September.

So if you’re still on Fusion 7 or older, you can upgrade to 8.1.1 today and know that we’ve got your back by making sure you’ll be able to run the latest and greatest from Microsoft and Apple!

Fusion is picking up the tab…

Hah, tab… see what I did there?

Here’s a sneak peek at something we’re very excited about…

Sierra-tabs

One of the new features of macOS Sierra people are talking about has been native tabs for apps, and let me tell you I’m pretty excited about it. Seriously, the folks in our office are probably getting tired of me geeking-out over this by now…

Our users have been asking us for this feature for a while, and we had heard wind that Apple was going to open this up so we didn’t have to figure out a custom implementation. Good things come to those who wait =)

This feature is something I think “other Mac-based virtualization tools” will have a hard time doing…

Part of our design philosophy is to consistently use native UI elements wherever possible. This ethos applies not only to Fusion, but also to Workstation and Player where we have native UI for Linux built on GTK, for example.

In the case of OS X / macOS, we have always had a better time when we implement things that are standard UI elements within the Apple ecosystem. This year our design philosophy really pays off with our ability to natively support multiple running VM’s in a tabbed interface on macOS Sierra.

So, by upgrading to Fusion 8 and macOS Sierra, users will just get this feature by default. Yes, I said Fusion 8 😉

Enabling it is pretty simple, even if it is a little different than how you’re used to opening tabs in Safari or Finder.

With Fusion you need to have 2 or more VMs open (the Library Window does not count).

With the VM window active, go to the Window menu and click ‘Merge All Windows’.

Sierra-window-merge2

There’s no fancy animation yet, and I expect Apple will probably add that later on.

So for folks using more than 1 VM, this is a pretty exciting feature!

We have more surprises in store for this year’s release, and with VMworld looming we’re getting very excited, and can’t wait to share the news! Stay tuned!

Meet the team!

One of our signs at our Palo Alto campus

The Fusion and Workstation teams are having a very busy year. Since we shipped Fusion 8 and Workstation 12 almost a year ago, we’ve been busy adding new skills to the development teams so that we can take the products in a new and compelling direction. Added to that, the team has released several updates that you really should be loading on to your systems – they make the products better in a bunch of ways that are described here, here and here.

Given that some of the new features we’re working on are aimed at developers, we recently sponsored a Macworld party at WWDC so that people could meet the me and the rest of the management team. I was impressed by how passionate and supportive the party-goers were, and we certainly learned a lot. Our backlog of ideas almost doubled!

Early shot of the rooftop Patio Party with Macworld and friends during WWDC 2016, VMware’s Andy Morris can be seen on the very right in the middle of some intense conversation with our eStore team director, Michael B.

More sober and back in the office, it occurred to us that more people might like to meet the team too. The management team is boring, that’s just the five of us Powerpoint jockies; the real teams that do the hard work of building, delivering and supporting the products are a diverse group of people spread all over the world.

Our Palo Alto braintrust. Without these geniuses, we wouldn’t be having this conversation! Ooh, and check out the turtles in our pond!

The core compute, storage and network guys work on all of VMware’s hypervisors and are known as Layer 1. These guys build the hypervisor as well as our Virtual Devices (all the “hardware” that Windows/guests see), the Graphics stack, the Networking stack, VMware Tools, VMRC (the ‘console’ view), USB devices, and the list goes on… In the photo is about half of the group. Every one of the people in this photo is a certifiable genius, and without these guys, a whole industry would not exist.

Our Hosted UI and Quality teams

Once they’ve done their voodoo, as they do, they pass the base code to these guys, our Hosted-UI (Product) and QE (Quality) teams. These folks have the incredibly difficult task of turning what is basically just cool tech, in to the products you love. And they do it exceedingly well. Every time we do a customer survey, Workstation and Fusion score the highest of all our products for quality and satisfaction. Our Hosted-UI team members, past and present, put in a lot of hours making Fusion and Workstation the amazing products they are today, and for that we can’t begin to express our gratitude. By the same extension, we couldn’t be more excited about what we have in store for the future!

The Support team!

Of course, even with awesome quality control, sometimes you just need help solving a problem, and that’s where these guys come in. This is about half of our 24 hour, 7 days a week, Fusion and Workstation support staff. These guys are the ones we listen to the most. Building new products is fun, but we’re very aware that you rely on them to solve real world problems. These guys are our canaries, our triage, our compass. We couldn’t do it without them.

This combined team is working tirelessly to support you in your business. They’ve got a great surprise lined up for Q3, something very interesting for Q4, and something very big for H1. It’s not easy delivering a product that is downloaded almost 5 million times a year, but these people are the very best at what they do, and we’re proud to have them with us.

Fix for installing macOS Sierra as a VM

## UPDATE: This fix in this post is no longer required if you have Fusion 8.5, the fix is included ##

I love our dev teams.

These folks work tirelessly to make sure that the crazy complexity that is Fusion and Workstation are able to support both the latest and greatest as well as the ancient and obsolete.

In this particular case, Apple had released a Developer Preview of their latest iteration of their Mac operating system previously called OS X. The new macOS Sierra has plenty of features to delight, but installing it in a virtual machine with VMware Fusion to test it out was met with some complications that I wrote about.

That workaround was a bit of an exercise, but our team has a more graceful fix ready to go now.

It’s a pretty small patch, only a couple of lines changed for one of our supporting scripts, but it makes the entire process as easy as ‘drag .app onto the New VM wizard, click next, wait for the magic to delight you’.

The Fix:

We need to replace a single file that’s located in your VMware Fusion app bundle.

To do this, go to your /Applications folder and right-click / ctrl-click the VMware Fusion.app

Select ‘Show Package Contents’

Navigate into Contents > Library

There’s a file in there called ‘Create Mavericks Installer.tool’. We must replace this with the patched one.

You can download the patched file from our newly-created “officially unofficial” Github page located here:

github.com/vmwarefusion

github.com/vmwarefusion/sierra-vm-installer-fix

Fusion-github

I plan on using this Github space to host random patch files and other interesting stuff, so feel free to fork and submit a pull request if you think there’s something we could do better in this script or anything else we post up there in the future. It’s not exactly ‘Open Source VMware Fusion’, but it’s a step in the right direction I think 😉

So go ahead, download the .tool file, replace the existing one with the patched one and get your macOS on!

Github users you know what to do, for folks that may be new to Github just click the green ‘clone or download’ button and choose ‘download .zip’.

Fusion doesn’t even need to be powered off.

Once you replace the file you should be able to click ‘File > New’ in Fusion, and simply drop the ‘Install 10.12 Developer Preview.app’ directly onto the New VM wizard.

**Update**

Forgot about permissions… You’ll have to adjust permissions at the command line with the following 2 commands:

sudo chmod 755 /Applications/VMware\ Fusion.app/Contents/Library/Create\ Mavericks\ Installer.tool
sudo xattr -rc /Applications/VMware\ Fusion.app/Contents/Library/Create\ Mavericks\ Installer.tool

If you have the windows open in Finder you can just type ‘sudo chmod 755’ and then drag and drop the Create Mavericks Installer.tool onto the Terminal window. Or be lazy and just paste what I wrote above which will work on any system 😉

Simple as that!

macOS Sierra and VMware Fusion 8

Hot off the heels of WWDC, Apple has made available the next major update to it’s flagship operating system for Mac. With a new name, macOS, Apple seems to be getting away from the OS X moniker and aligning with the rest of the OS’s that it has in it’s bag: tvOS, iOS, watchOS, and now macOS.

Users have been excited to run this in a VM to test, but it doesn’t “just work” in Fusion yet unfortunately. The reason is that Developer Preview builds have debugging code included which changes the memory layout of the installer. We specifically require a certain block layout of the .app to create the bootable install image, but because the layout is different due to debugging code, it fails with an ‘Internal Error’.

There are 2 ways to get around this:

Install 10.11 and upgrade it to 10.12
Manually create the bootable install image and attach it to an empty 10.11 VM.

The first one is pretty easy, and you can make an OS X 10.11 VM using the recovery partition with just a couple of clicks from File > New.

Once it’s up and you’ve installed VMware Tools, you can drag the ‘Install 10.12 Developer Preview.app’ onto the desktop of your 10.11 VM, double-click it and begin the install.

For folks that don’t have the time or who want to walk through a fresh installation there is a multi-step method that I’ve written about here that will show you the way and explain what’s happening along the trip.

www.mikeroysoft.com/macos-sierra-on-fusion-8/

For folks who want to run Sierra on the Mac itself and use Fusion, there is a bit of a bug that we’re working on, but there’s an easy workaround.

Currently if you try to run a VM it will fail/crash with an ‘Internal Error’.

The simple work around for now is to disable 3D graphics acceleration (per-VM setting).

It’s possible that this ‘goes away’ when Apple moves to the public beta branch (it has different debugging code enabled than the developer previews), but we’ll be keeping a close eye on things as they develop and share what we learn.

Overall, I’ve found that macOS Sierra as a Host and as a Guest work pretty well. Siri tends to work better on the Host in my experience, so we’ll be examining how to make it a smooth experience in a VM as well. For now, my advice is to speak slowly to her when she’s ‘trapped’ in a VM 😉

(talking about AI with ‘he’ and ‘she’ is weird… welcome to the future!)