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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

You can read more about it at one of the official VMWare Blogs – “A Holiday Gift for Mac Users”. Quote:

It’s a great time of year – everything is decorated and looks pretty, people are in a festive mood, there’s a lot of great parties and everyone is exchanging gifts. Talking about giving gifts, we have a holiday gift for the Mac community – the public beta for our new desktop product for Mac, codenamed Fusion, is now available. It is free but the beta requires a serial key, which you will get as part of the download process.

We announced (press release, my blog) in August at WWDC that we are developing a desktop product for Mac. We demoed an early version of the product during WWDC at the Four Seasons Hotel to a few hundred attendees who left the Moscone Center and walked 4 blocks to see the demo. That was just the beginning! 70,000 customers pre-registered for the beta. We released a “friends and family” version in October to a select few customers to get early feedback. One incident sticks out in my mind when we visited a customer who was part of the friends and family program. As soon as we sat down and before we could do any introductions, out came a credit card across the table and his voice boomed, “I’d like to buy it now!” Well, we’re not quite ready to take orders just yet but we are ready to receive feedback from the larger Mac community. That would be a great gift you can give us…

Excerpt:

While Mac OS X Leopard was the focus of Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference early in August, the event served as the backdrop for major moves in the platform’s virtualization market. For a moment, three vendors were standing, but as the cheers of the Mac faithful at the keynote address faded, one took a dive.

For ages the lone developer of Mac virtualization software, Microsoft unexpectedly announced that it would stop developing Virtual PC for Mac. This move coincided with VMware’s entry into the Mac market and startup Parallel Software International’s defense of its turf with an announcement of a major upgrade.

Virtualization giant VMware announced that by the end of the year, it would jump into the ring with a beta that would be able to run Windows Vista.

Parallels, a small company based in Herndon, Va., and less than a year old, announced that it would beat VMware to the punch and ship a Vista-ready, final release version of Parallels Desktop before VMware delivered its beta.

At WWDC, however VMware had the goods, previewing pre-beta VMware code running Windows Vista Beta and AutoCAD on a Mac Book Pro. The company said that the Linux and Windows versions of VMware formed the core of the Mac version.

Quote/Excerpt:

Posted by Srinivas Krishnamurti
Director of Developer Products and Market Development

Ever since Apple announced that they are going to switch to Intel x86 chips, phones have been ringing off the hook. Everywhere we went – customer visits, tradeshows, seminars, VMworld, neighborhood block parties – everyone was asking, “Hey, what are your plans for supporting Macs?” Some folks went a step further to petition us to support OS X.

Traditionally we don’t talk about products that are still under development for a variety of reasons. But word got out that we have something “working in the labs.” And we started getting more calls along the lines of, “Hey, we know you have it so when are you going to announce it?”

So we bucked the trend! Today we announced our plans to build a new product for Macs. We have a bit more work to do — bug fixes, installer cleanup, etc. — before releasing the beta. We are hopeful to have something for you to try out in the next few weeks.

We also agreed early on in the design process to make sure that your experience of running a virtual machine is very close to native, in terms of performance and use of hardware/devices. To that end you will notice excellent performance when running a virtual machine on OS X. Since most Macs now have Intel’s Duo with two cores, we added Virtual SMP capabilities so that you can assign more than a single CPU to any virtual machine to gain additional performance. One of the cool things that I like about my Apple (albeit an older one with PowerPC chip) is the simplicity of doing any multi-media work. I can record movies or use iChat quite easily without the need to buy additional software. We wanted to make sure you have access to all those devices from your virtual machine as well so we spent a lot of time on making sure devices work well. You can use USB 2 devices like video cameras, etc.

One final note about this product: virtual machines created with this product are fully compatible with the latest release of other VMware products, including Player, Workstation, Server and VMware Infrastructure and vice versa.

Some of the features:
- Guest OSes: Windows, Linux, NetWare and Solaris
- Runs multiple instances/OSes at the same time
- OS Virtual Images can be shared between different Primary OSes.
- Can run already existing “Virtual Appliances” (pre-built solutions)

You can sign up for the beta here.

Official Press Release at VMWare.com

VMware Announces New Product for Apple Mac OS X Users
New Intel-based Macs will be able to Simultaneously Run Mac OS X, Windows, Linux, NetWare and Solaris

SAN FRANCISCO and PALO ALTO, Calif., August 7, 2006 — VMware, Inc., the global leader in software for industry-standard virtualized desktops and servers, today announced a new product that will enable Intel-based Macs to run x86 operating systems, such as Windows, Linux, NetWare and Solaris, in virtual machines at the same time as Mac OS X. VMware will demo the product today during the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference 2006 in San Francisco.

“We are excited to bring our desktop platform product to Apple Macs. The demand for this has been unbelievable and it is clearly front and center for Mac users,” said Diane Greene, president of VMware. “VMware is in the business of providing the most advanced and robust virtualization platforms as well as phenomenal add-on functionality that leverages our virtualization platform. This announcement brings our desktop platform and add-on capabilities to Mac users, and it will allow them to run a wide variety of operating systems without rebooting. Mac users who also use the PC will be able to use this product to consolidate onto the Mac.”

The new Mac product is based on VMware’s robust and advanced virtualization technology, shipping for more than seven years and used by more than four million people today. Moving forward, virtual machines created with any of VMware’s products will run on Intel-based Macs and, similarly, non-Mac OS X virtual machines created with the new product will run on the latest versions of other VMware platform products.

In addition, Mac users will be able to leverage more than 250 virtual appliances for solutions such as security, load balancing, collaboration, databases, development, communications and business applications that are available for download from VMware Technology Network (VMTN) at www.vmtn.net. Virtual appliances are pre-built, pre-configured and ready-to-run software applications, all packaged within virtual machines that can be run using VMware virtualization products, including VMware Player and VMware Server which are both available for free download at www.vmware.com/download.
Pricing and Availability

The beta release of this product is expected to be available later this year. Interested parties will be able to sign up for early access by visiting www.vmware.com/mac.
About VMware, Inc.

VMware, an EMC company (NYSE: EMC), is the global leader in virtual infrastructure software for industry-standard systems. The world’s largest companies use VMware solutions to simplify their IT, fully leverage their existing computing investments and respond faster to changing business demands. VMware is based in Palo Alto, California. For more information, visit www.vmware.com or call 650-475-5000.

VMware is a registered trademark or trademark of VMware, Inc. in the United States and/or other jurisdictions. All other marks and names mentioned herein may be trademarks of their respective companies.