Ah, Fusion 2, how do I love thee? Let me count the ways. VMware is continuing to develop the new version of their Mac virtualization product. I thought that they’d freeze the featureset with the first beta’s changes, but that turns out to not be the case. Beta 2 has ton of new features.
Unity now has a feature that allows you to open Mac files with Windows applications with no middleman. That’s right, you can double click that Excel file and have it open in Windows, allowing you to use only one version. You can run it natively on your Intel processor and still have those intact macros without being forced to use the Windows file browser. Fancy.
The snapshot feature also looks very promising. You can set up Fusion to periodically snapshot your virtual machine so that when you do something stupid (like get a virus), you can back up to a usable state, no questions asked.
The video acceleration has been improved and VMware promises HD video playback possibilities. I’d really like to take that for a spin because, despite DRM coming near its end, some HD video is only on Windows. For the more geeky power users, there is a new “vmware” command line command for manipulating your virtual machines. That is sweet.
With all of these changes in a single beta version, I’m a little excited thinking about what may come before the final. Even better, 2.0 will be a free upgrade for 1.0 owners.
Nice. Free upgrade? very nice. Thank you, Sun, I hold you responsible for this with your freebie virtualization software.
There's a few glitches and it took ages to upgrade the VMWare Tools, but so far the experience has been pretty good. I have no idea what the graphics overhaul is like but the Unity improvements sure are nice and you now have complete control over key mappings (Command now acts as Control for me!). All this said, the improvements only really bring VMWare's features up to the level of Parallels 3.
I bought Fusion when it was available as a prerelease. What, over a year ago? I think I have used Windows twice since then, and only for a few minutes. I think I'll pass on 2.0.