VMware Fusion Beta Program is Now Live

The VMWare Fusion beta program is now live. You can sign up for a beta key at VMWare.com/products/beta/fusion/. It is currently free.

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…

eWeek Article: Windows on Mac OS X: Virtualization Heats Up

John Rizzo at eWeek has written an article, Windows on Mac OS X: Virtualization Turf War Heats Up about the potential competition that Parallels Desktop for Mac faces from VMware Fusion for Mac as well as Microsoft’s Virtual PC fading away.

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.

More VMWare Fusion Information (Developer Blog)

More information about VMWare Fusion has been posted by a developer on the official VMWare Blog – “Working in the labs…”.

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.

VMWare Virtualization for Mac OS X Announced

If you have been following virtualization on the Macintosh before now, you know that many have been expecting a VMWare solution for Mac OS X for quite some time. Today, VMWare made it official.

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.
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