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 DevelopmentEver 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.