great product | VMware Fusion

An excellent piece of virtualization software | VMware Fusion

software:


	• VMware Fusion Mac OS X, Macintosh \| Smith Micro Software Inc., 2007 average customer review:based on 185 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Fusion works amazingly well

I installed VMware Fusion on a January 2008 8-core Mac with 4GB with a 24-inch monitor and had it take over a Boot Camp partition. The Windows partition has 32-bit Vista Ultimate and it works very well. I found a couple of unusual things but once I used the right disk to load the Vista Image and configured it to use 2 processors I was amazed how well everything went. There is a known limitation on graphic performance with my ATI 2600 card. I don't need to run PC games. But, overall it does everything I need it to to run an occasional Windows application on this machine. Others have used Parallels and just Boot Camp but the ease of use and easy installation made Fusion one of the best solutions I have seen. It works amazingly well. USB, Printing, etc. Switching between Vista and Windows is transparent... just click and it is done. I am sure it helps to have BIG hardware to run both OS's... but if you have the hardware, Fusion is a great software choice.

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great product

great product. Unity mode seems a little quirky video refresh wise. I recommend this product. A little known option is the fact that you can go to the folder that stores the virtual machines, and (with Fusion shutdown) make a copy of the virtual machine "file" under a different name. When you start Fusion, select the file, and it will give you a new, identical copy, virtual machine. Why would you want to do this? Well, you now have two PC's to use. One to work on, the other to install that new version of a popular software title that just might render your "Windows PC" entirely useless. When it does, shutdown your virtual, go to your folder, delete the BAD copy of the Windows virtual, and restart your original virtual. You are back to a working copy. Enjoy...

Fusion is a great addition to supporting a VMware ESX enterprise environment.

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An excellent piece of virtualization software

I purchased VMWare Fusion over the competition (Parallels) because of the support for 64-bit operating systems and multiple processors. As soon as I installed this software on my 2008 Mac Pro, I took a trip down memory lane and brought out all my past versions of Windows I've had throughout the years, going all the way back to the early 90s.

After installing Windows 3.1, Windows 98, Windows 2000, Windows XP (SP2), and Windows Server 2008, each one runs mostly without a hitch. There are a few sound driver issues which make earlier versions of Windows give me a blue-screen, but that's of little consequence to me. The main thing is that I have multiple testing environments of Windows with multiple versions of Internet Explorer in each environment. As a cross-platform web application developer, this is extremely important to me and Fusion makes it so much easier than having separate machines.

I'm also using Windows Vista (64-bit) via Boot Camp, and Fusion found that and set it up quickly. As of this writing, VMWare does not officially support the 64-bit version of Windows Vista, but it does work. I had to manually set the preferences so it would understand the 64-bit partition and not throw errors. But for my uses, it seems to be speedy enough to handle basic tasks without having to reboot natively into Vista.

There's a few quirks, which I expect for a 1.0 product, but nothing that's a show-stopper for me (yet). Running multiple instances of Windows under the Unity setting (blending Mac OS X and Windows together in one desktop) gives some unexpected graphical anomalies.

Also, I will say the activation bug for Vista (64-bit and/or SP1) is quite annoying. With the current version (v1.1.2) you will have to re-activate your software every time you switch back from Boot Camp to Fusion and back again. I blame Microsoft for this garbage more than I do VMWare, but I'm hoping future updates to Fusion fix this problem.

To conclude, this is my only virtualization software I've ever used, but it's quickly spoiled me. I love my machine even more because of it. I haven't tried the competition so I can't compare to it, but this should handle most of your virtualization needs, hands down.

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VM Ware that unites Mac and Windows

I've been using VM Ware fusion for the past month and found it to be very very useful. I got a new Mac book pro at work and was installing all the software that I use for work purposes. I am a software engineer and the product we develop works good on internet explorer. The mac version of internet explorer is extremely buggy. There came VM ware fusion and baam.. I installed it and then installed Windows XP (not a big fan of Vista) and used the unite feature on the VM ware fusion interface. I'm able to add the internet explorer app icon to the Mac docking station. Oracle database doesn't install on Mac OS X Leopard (only on Server edition). Its again VM Ware fusion to the rescue. Installed oracle on the Windows XP virtual OS and I'm now in complete business. I think few people will find that Mac OS X is just not sufficient. But now I have the best of both worlds and I'm happy. I'm very confident that you will not be disappointed. This software is worth more than $80.

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Great product, weak customer support

I have been using Fusion on my new MacBook Pro 2.4 GHz laptop and love it. I run Quicken 2008 for Windows and, believe it or not, WordPerfect in my XP-Fusion installation and they operate perfectly. I had used a PowerBook for many years before I got my new MacBook, which of course does not support Windows, so I had to rely on a desktop PC to run my Windows Apps. This solution worked but was inconvenient. In stark contrast, Fusion is very convenient. It allows me to do everything I used to do on my desktop machine right here on my MacBook. That was a big, big improvement.

As others have noted, Fusion does not support FireWire devices, so my XP installation does not recognize my FW 800 external drive. That was disappointing but not a deal breaker.

I used a free trial version of Fusion until recently, when I ordered the permanent version from Amazon. It came yesterday but getting it setup turned into an adventure. The instructions blithely tell you to enter the 20 digit serial number but fail to tell you where to find it. Unfortunately, I didn't figure out for nearly an hour that it was on the envelope the Fusion CD had come in and that the envelope had slipped to the bottom of the pile of papers I got in the Fusion box. I called VMware, Smith Micro, who distributes Fusion, and Amazon, all three, and nobody I talked to had the slightest idea where I might find the serial number. Worse, I couldn't get a live body at Smith Micro to answer when I called, return a voice mail message, or respond to an email request to technical support to tell me where the serial number was or give me one.

I confess that the confusion that arose over the serial number was at least as much my fault as it was anyone else's but the failure of the documentation that came in the Fusion box to tell me where to find it and my inability to get a straight answer out of anybody else, is what made me give Fusion a 4 Star rating instead of a 5.

All in all, Fusion does what it's supposed to do, and more. Highly recommended.

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