While some vendors may have trouble getting their ducks in a row, others are coming out ahead of schedule. VMWare announced today that the final version of their virtualization software, Fusion, would be seeing the light of day on August 6th, better known to you and me as next Monday.
VMWare had originally promised that they would ship the software sometime before the end of August, and they’ve fulfilled that promise in spades. Fusion will be available from VMWare’s own online store on Monday, and it’ll make its way to brick-and-mortar stores, including Apple Stores, later this month.
But if you’re pretty sure you want to pick up a copy, I’d recommend doing it sooner rather than later. If you pre-order by noon Sunday, Pacific time, you can snag Fusion for just $40: half off the full $80 retail price.
Question: if I already have the latest Parallels on a MacBook Pro, is there any point at looking to Fusion? Is the performance better, for example? Or does it do something that Parallels doesn't?
Some Windows XP Boot Camp Partitions CRASH after running VVMware Fusion 1.0 Release Candidate (build 50460)
DON'T RUN FUSION ON YOUR Boot Camp Partition until they fix this problem.
Of course I am working with VM Fusion engineers on this issue. In fact I am also in contact with Pat Lee, Senior Product Manager - VMware Mac Products.
There are more than a few people having this problem see:
http://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?threadID=89401&tstart=0
I am just a simple end user who has never done anything remarkable to my Windows XP Boot Camp partition and it has always worked, but after running the VM Fusion preprocessing on the Boot Camp Partition just once (I have never tried Parallels) Boot Camp now won't boot. This is not a Windows XP problem; it is that Fusion is NOT yet compatible with all versions of Windows XP.
On Jun 27, 2007 4:05 PM Jim Gill, with VMware Palo Alto, wrote: "The preprocessing steps will need to account for systems like yours." Obviously the preprocessing steps DO NOT yet account for Window XP Boot Camp partitions like mine.
I advise that before you try Fusion that you take the time to backup your data and spend a day or so rebuilding your Windows image.
It looks like it is going to be a great product, but now that VM clearly knows about this bug; I hope they fix this BEFORE their planned public release.
Here is an update on my Boot Camp Partition problems with Fusion:
With VMware's help I was able to fully recover the Boot Camp partition without loss of data, and after a couple of days of tinkering, I was able to get it to work as a Virtual Machine in Mac OSX.
Fusion made a new Virtual Windows Disk without any problems, and the cross over with Mac OS is astounding!
However, because it does not yet support DirectX 9.0, I must still boot directly to my Boot Camp partition to use many of my most favorite Windows programs.