I have to start out by making a confession here. In October, I made the switch. The time came for me to buy a new laptop, and I chose a MacBook Pro. Now that we have that out in the open… it brings me to what ultimately ended up to be a dealbreaker and the topic of this article: VMware Fusion.
As much as Apple wants you to believe that you just take your new Mac out of the box and it has everything you need to do all the stuff you want… those of us in IT know otherwise. Sure, I can organize my photos, music, and take pictures of myself and create a one-click wonder web site. But what if you need more than that? What if you need to manage and test Windows servers, Databases, and you need to be able to connect to your workplace on the road?
The ‘Fusion’ product is truly a perfect fit for VMware and a perfect fit for the Mac. After almost 3 months using it daily and putting it to the test I can honestly say it is a very capable and solid product for the money (a mere $79.99 with a $20 rebate). It contains many of the value features from ‘Workstation’ as well as the new “Unity” feature which allows virtualized applications to co-exist as part of the host desktop.
The Version 1.1 upgrade added improved support for Direct X and even allows you to boot multi-boot (ie. Boot Camp on the Mac) OS’s as a VM. The main drawbacks that I have found are that the video “hardware” lacks WDDM and only has 64 MB of RAM… hence, no Aero support in Windows Vista. It also only has limited Direct X 9 support. Although, it’s worth noting that this is no dissimilar from any other virtual platform available today. Another feature that would be nice in the mixed FS environment would be to have some direct file system integration between the host and guest operating systems, aside from optical drives.
In all, ‘Fusion’ gets a 5 out of 5 rating from me. It’s a superior virtualization product to its competitors and has undoubtedly filled an important gap when it comes to Mac adoption.
Fusion, like Workstation on Windows, has “shared folders” for sharing files between host and guest. Optical drives are the only way before the VMWare drivers are installed (or if the OS isn’t officially supported by VMWare).
I hear that VMWare wants to bring support for Aero to their product. I think they will accomplish it eventually.
I also give VMWare Fusion a 5/5. It is a very good product. For Windows OSes I always water them down as much as possible by disabling pointless services and allocating no more RAM and virtual CPUs than are really needed. This allows both the Host and the Guest to operate as quickly as possible without interfering with each other.
I highly recommend this product. If you are even thinking about buying it, buy it. It is very much so worth it.