VMware Fusion Blog

Insight and highlights from the VMware Fusion Team for running Windows on your Mac

Category Archives: Release

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 8.5 Released and Available Now!

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Lots of stuff in this announcement, so read on!

Fusion 8.5 Now Available!

Start your upgrade engines, Fusion 8.5 is here!

We’re very proud of our team for achieving this milestone release, which is available as a free update for Fusion 8 customers!

New features include:

Support for Windows 10 Anniversary Guests
Support for macOS Sierra Host and Guest
Ready for Windows Server 2016
Tabbed View Support
Siri Support
Bug Fixes
Free for 8.0 Customers!

Grab the bits here: vmware.com/go/getfusion or use the built-in Software Update feature.

We chose to make this a free release for current customers for a few reasons, but largely: “We hear from our users year on year that having to pay for something as small as a minor operating system release gets a little long in the tooth” . Theres a lot going on at VMware this year giving us an opportunity to pause and focus, (but we’re not dead!) so we extended that opportunity to our users with a free upgrade that supports the latest from Apple and Microsoft, while still managing to squeeze in support for a couple of interesting features largely with the help of Apple: Tabs and Siri.

Buy:

Upgrade:

Upgrade Pricing

We also want everyone on the current version, so we’ve extended our upgrade price eligibility going back as far as Fusion 4.0… So, if you’re on Fusion 4, 5 or 6 you can qualify for a huge discount on the price of Fusion. (Oh, and we’re also giving you an additional 15% off Fusion 8 upgrades for 2 days only, and and 33% off Fusion 8 Pro upgrades!! We must be crazy… Or we love our users… you decide!)

Virtual Reality Contest

Oh, and while we’re here, did you hear about our Virtual Reality giveaway? All you have to do is tell us in 30 seconds to a minute ‘Why you love Fusion or Workstation’ and an interesting tale that is unique to you. All the details are available here: store.vmware.com/oculus

VMworld 2016: We Love Fusion and Workstation!

We did a session at VMworld which you can check out here and spoke with some of our fans afterward, here what they have to say about Fusion and Workstation!

Release Notes

Full Release Notes can be found here

Bug fixes in this release include:

MS Office applications in Windows virtual machine would sometimes not open the attachment in the mail application on Mac. This issue is resolved.
After you import a Parallels 11 virtual machine into VMware Fusion, attempting to power on the virtual machine would fail with the error “Inaccessible Boot Device.”. This issue is resolved.
When the Full Screen Minibar was hidden at the edge of the screen, hovering the cursor over it would not make it appear. This issue is resolved.
Fusion could crash when you attempt to create a remote virtual machine on vCenter Server 5.5. This issue is resolved.
On the Ubuntu 15.10 and later versions guest OS, when you replace open-vm-tools with the VMware Tools version bundled with VMware Fusion, VMware Tools may not work as expected. After you reboot the system, an Ubuntu crash report might appear and one of the services in VMware Tools might stop working. This issue is resolved.
Attempts to drag and drop files between the host and a Mac OS virtual machine occasionally fail. This issue is resolved.

We will be issuing point releases to address any issues that may come up after macOS Sierra reaches General Availability later this month.

Hope you enjoy!

VMware Fusion 8.5 Announced!

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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!

VMware Fusion 8 & Fusion 8 Pro Now Available Worldwide

Today we are pleased to announce the worldwide availability of the VMware Fusion 8 and VMware Fusion 8 Pro.

These releases mark a milestone achievement for our team within VMware, with fantastic new features and improvements in several areas including:

Windows 10
– Fusion 8 and Fusion 8 Pro provide full support for Windows 10. Use all the exciting new features like the Microsoft Edge browser, or Cortana the always-on digital assistant. Cortana even works when Fusion is in the background

Ready for OS X El Capitan
– Test the latest OS X release in a virtual machine to see what’s coming around the corner, or jump in with both feet and install OS X El Capitan on your Mac with the confidence that VMware Fusion 8 will still deliver the ultimate Windows on Mac experience.

All New Enhanced Graphics Engine with DirectX 10 and OpenGL 3.3

Everyday applications are smoother and more fluid, with new DirectX 10 only applications now supported.

65% OpenGL Performance improvement and 15% DirectX 9 Performance improvement

Built for the latest Macs including the iMac Retina 5K

Drive 14 million pixels with VMware Fusion 8 on the most powerful and beautiful iMac to date.

Building upon this great release, Fusion 8 Pro additionally delivers:

Native vCloud Air integration

Use vCloud Air, the public cloud service by VMware, to upload workloads to the cloud for public consumption. Build an app or web server locally and push it to the cloud with a simple drag and drop. Use it to connect with remote virtual machines running in vCloud Air, or even upload an existing virtual machine from Fusion for backup to the cloud.

$600 in free vCloud Air service credit

To help users get started, we’re happy to provide more then enough service credit to get users exploring what they can do with a compatible cloud.

Improved vSphere integration

With deeper integration into VMware vSphere, Fusion 8 Pro now provides more detail than every before, and can even create remote virtual machines on ESXi or vCenter Server instances.

vsphere-fusion8

VMware Fusion 8 and VMware Fusion 8 Pro are available immediately for download and purchase from vmware.com for $79.99 and $199.99 respectively. VMware Fusion 8 Pro is also available from VMware partners and distributors.

Customers who have purchased VMware Fusion 7 or VMware Fusion 7 Pro between July 29, 2015 and August 25, 2015 are eligible for an electronic upgrade to VMware Fusion 8 or VMware Fusion 8 Pro at no additional cost. Qualifying customers will automatically receive an email advising how to upgrade their license keys.

VMware Fusion 6 and 7 customers can upgrade to VMware Fusion 8 for only $49.99 and to VMware Fusion 8 Pro for $119.99 at the VMware online store.

Parallels Desktop customers can upgrade to VMware Fusion 8 or VMware Fusion 8 Pro and save 40%! Learn more here.

Download a free trial at the VMware Fusion trial page.