VMWare Fusion 1.0b3 (Beta 3) Released

VMWare Fusion 1.0b3 (Beta 3) has been released. This is considered a huge upgrade to the virtualization software from VMWare for Mac OS X. Among the changes – performance has been improved, Apple’s Boot Camp is supported (for using as a virtual machine), “Windows Easy Install” mode, similar to Parallels’ install, and better networking performance, among many other things.

Download (requires registration): VMWare.com/products/beta/fusion

Release Notes:
New and Improved Features in Beta 3
* Greatly improved performance — By popular demand, you can now disable debugging code to experience the full power and performance that VMware Fusion offers for running your favorite PC applications.
* Support for Boot Camp — VMware Fusion automatically detects your Boot Camp partition, so you can now run a Windows XP virtual machine from your existing Boot Camp partition. You no longer have to choose Windows or Mac: you can now run Windows side-by-side with your favorite Mac applications. Note: For this Beta 3 release, Windows Vista is not supported; only Windows XP is supported.
* Windows Easy Install — You want to run Windows applications, but you don’t want to become a guru just to install Windows. VMware Fusion has you covered; just answer a few simple questions, insert your Windows CD and let VMware Fusion take care of the rest and automatically create the optimal Windows virtual machine for your Mac, including the installation of VMware Tools.
* Virtual machine packages — Virtual machines are now encapsulated in a single, easy-to-manage package. Move your virtual machines to another hard drive or Mac simply by copying a file.
* Enhanced virtual machine creation — The entire virtual machine creation process has been streamlined, and the new Windows Easy Install feature makes creating a virtual machine even easier than before. The New Virtual Machine Assistant remembers the location you choose for future virtual machine creation.
* Enhanced virtual machine library — Managing multiple virtual machines is even easier with the Virtual Machine Library. Add new virtual machines by just dragging them into the Library, reorder virtual machines with drag and drop, and use the delete key on the Keyboard to remove virtual machines from the library. Open a Virtual Machine without powering it on, using the new Settings button, which opens a virtual machine directly to the Hardware Editor.
* Host-Only Networking — Host-Only networking creates a network that is completely contained within your Mac, with a network connection between the virtual machine and your Mac. Use host-only networking to set up an isolated virtual network.
* Improved suspend/shutdown state — When a virtual machine is suspended, VMware Fusion shows a screenshot of the last known state of the virtual machine and a friendly play button so you can get up and running again quickly.
* Improved hardware editor — Settings for virtual hardware are now complete: you can remove virtual hardware from the hardware editor when virtual machines are powered off.
* Improved international support — European and Japanese Apple keyboards now work properly in virtual machines.

This Beta 3 release of VMware Fusion for Mac includes the following improvements and bug fixes:
* Improved networking performance — In some cases, networking in earlier beta versions was slow with single-processor virtual machines. VMware Fusion Beta 3 solves this problem and greatly improves performance in this case.
* Virtual networking no longer fills system logs — VMware Fusion Beta 2 wireless networking added many entries to the system log. This Beta 3 release resolves this issue.
* In addition to the improvements listed above, this Beta 3 release fixes numerous bugs to greatly improve the stability and performance of VMware Fusion.

VMWare fusion 1.0b2 (Beta 2)

VMWare Fusion 1.0b2 (Beta 2) has been released by VMWare. It can be downloaded here. VMWare Fusion for Mac only runs on Intel-based Macs.

This beta adds “Experimental 3-D graphics support”, which we are guessing led to the creation of this video that shows a 3D Windows game being played under VMWare and Mac OS X. This is big, seeing as how Parallels Desktop does not have this feature. A Snapshot feature has been added, which archives “known good states” of your virtual machines. Networking and Microsoft Windows Vista support has also been improved.

Release Notes:
New and Improved Features in Beta 2
* Experimental 3-D graphics support — Play a selection of DirectX 8.1 games in Windows XP Service Pack 2 virtual machines.
* Snapshot feature — Roll back your virtual machine to a known good state when something goes wrong in your virtual machine—for example, when your virtual machine picks up a virus, or when a software upgrade causes problems.
* Improved networking — Automatically bridge to the computer’s primary network interface.
Full support for Airport wireless networking, including virtual machines behind a NAT firewall and bridged to the local Airport network.
Support for up to ten virtual network interfaces
* Improved Microsoft Vista support — Support for Microsoft Vista Business, Enterprise, and Ultimate editions.
Complete VMware Tools support for Microsoft Vista including copy/paste, dragging and dropping files, shared folders, and screen resizing.
* Improved hardware editor — Add additional virtual hard drives to a virtual machine for needed capacity.
View the physical computer’s battery status in the virtual machine.
* Improved full screen mode — Support for plugging and unplugging displays while virtual machines are in full screen mode.
Improved usability: an on-screen tip shows how to enter and exit full screen mode easily.
* Experimental support for Mac OS X Leopard — You can now install and run VMware Fusion on Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard). Support is experimental because Mac OS X 10.5 is not yet released. VMware Fusion will support the release version of OS X 10.5 in the final VMware Fusion release.

Bugs Fixed in Beta 2
* Improved keyboard and mouse support — Third-party graphics tablets, keyboards, and mice no longer interfere with keyboard and mouse input.
Support for plugging and unplugging input devices while virtual machines are running.
Support for using VMware Fusion with remote access applications such as VNC, Synergy, and Remote Desktop.
* Improved CD/DVD support
* Better support for mounting and unmounting discs in virtual machines
* Quicken Scheduler corrupts keyboard and mouse input in virtual machines — Offer workaround to disable Quicken Scheduler when it is detected.
* Various other bug fixes.

Video of 3D Game/Acceleration on VMWare Fusion

There is a YouTube video making the rounds, purporting to show VMWare Fusion running a 3D Accelerated/Direct-X based game in Windows, running under Mac OS X, and doing it fairly smoothly.

Fake or real? Looks real, but considering that VMWare Fusion shares a codebase with the VMWare Workstation (for Windows), it seems like even if it was a Windows-based machine with various changes to make it look like Mac OS X, it still is pretty clearly running under VMWare, which means that at some point it would end up in Mac OS X.

It doesn’t look like it’s a new game, but it’s still impressive.

VMWare to Demo VMWare Fusion Beta

According to MacNN.com, VMWare is going to publicly demonstrate VMWare Fusion for Mac at Macworld San Francisco next week. Should be interesting to see what they come up with.

The VMWare Fusion beta program started a few weeks ago – whether this demonstration will cover that or a newer version is unknown.

eWeek Article: VMware Slices Up Mac OS X

eWeek had some very interesting comments about using VMware Fusion for Mac, including about running Mac OS X inside of a virtual machine. They also gave their first impressions of VMware Fusion and compared it to VMware Workstation, which runs on Linux and Windows-based PCs.

Excerpt:

VMware has come up with a Cocoa-based interface for Fusion, which fits in better with the look of OS X than the VMware Workstation interface would.

Still, we found that using Fusion was basically the same as using VMware Workstation on Linux or Windows: Fusion offered up the same configuration and control options that VMware Workstation does, and we found Fusion’s performance comparable to what we’d expect on similar hardware.

During our tests of Fusion, we noted that OS X is not one of the operating systems onto which we could install a virtual machine. Virtualized OS X is a sticky subject because Apple will not allow its operating system to run on non-Apple hardware.

At the demo of an as-yet-unnamed VMware virtualization product at last fall’s Apple Worldwide Developers Conference, a VMware official told eWEEK Labs that VMware might enable virtualized instances of OS X by implementing some sort of check to make sure that an OS X virtual machine was running on Apple hardware, but so far it seems that OS X will remain walled off from the world of virtualized deployment.

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