Lion-Optimized VMware Fusion 4 Debuts with Over 90 New Features

[mubo]

Sigh. That's perhaps the most crazy statement I've read today.

When you have several hundred workstations, over a thousand HPC render machines - Windows tends to become a bit pricey. For VFX, Linux *is* the industry standard platform. 95% of the standard 3D modelling and 2D/3D compositing systems run on Linux. You must remember that SGI's IRIX was the dominant OS of that industry for a long time until commodity hardware and Linux took hold and replaced it. SGIs soon became bricks and doorstops.

Photoshop was one of the rare exceptions. Disney and a few other facilities contributed funds to the Wine project to develop it sufficiently to allow Photoshop to run well enough under Linux using the Wine system. Ultimately as hardware got cheaper, VMs were a better solution. There was no other application - open source or commercial that could match Photoshop's feature set. There are one or two other products that required Windows. These were used by a very small number of artists out of the several hundred coming and going through the facility.



I work for a web hosting firm now. I'd say the majority of all production web sites and applications that we and our customers are running are running on virtual machines. I've been using VMs now in live production environments for years and I couldn't disagree more with your statements.

Martyn

could not agree more, you have taken the words out of my mouth/keyboard

 

[bilbo--baggins]

Gawd do I wish I could say the same.
The financial institutions I deal with believe it or not REQUIRE I.E. to have me do work??? WTF is that. No Safari, no Firefox, no Developer tools via either, No chrome, no Opera... nada. I.E. or bust.
Also, my software is windows only as well.:

So I have 2 that I don't see changing in the next 5 years still. Ridiculous.

Dinosaurs.

 

[infomatique]

I have a number of machines no of which were purchased within the last 6 months so lion was not pre-installed.
I purchased copies of the standard edition and server via app store.

What I did in the end was import Lion from a Parallels installation and it worked perfectly.

Did yours come preinstalled on your machine?

Some people are saying that the EULA prohibits virtualization unless you actually by a copy from the app store (which will offer you a disk image to use).

----------

The VMWare site is horrible and it is very difficult to find current documentation. Any instructions that I could find appear to address earlier versions. In the case of Parallels it is easy to install Lion (very easy) ... so what I did was import Lion from a Parallels VM.

If you did not back-up the DMG when you downloaded Lion, you may be able to do it with the lion recovery utility that you can get from the Apple site-though this could be tricky, since you would likely need to first create the recovery disk, then create a DMG from that.

The only other option I can think of would be to create a SL VM, then re-download Lion.

I will admit that at least so far, I have not seen any suggestions or instructions from Vmware, which I find a bit concerning, as I would think they would be smart enough to give us a better instructions.

http://support.apple.com/kb/DL1433

 

[chrono1081]

The downside to this was that many software vendors insisted that you ran and standardised on Red Hat Enterprise Linux to ensure consistency between configurations and standard software bundled with the distro. RHEL costs money to license. I'd suspect that many studios kept older (non-Enterprise) versions of Red Hat or Fedora on their workstations and renderfarms and then upgraded to CentOS when that become more widely available. Some studios ran SuSE. Not many ran Debian from what I can recall.

Some people may ask: but why didn't you deploy Macs? Well, we did. But they were such a pain in the arse to integrate within the existing network infrastructure due to the changes that Apple made with certain protocols. You could work around them, but it wasn't easy. Thankfully Apple have improved a bit on that front since. Quicktime .MOV files were the de facto video file format for dailies and whatnot and it worked across the entire range of machines and OSes (Linux, Mac and Windows).

Of course Apple also gave the VFX world the compositing package, Shake. Even under Apple's regime they kept the Linux version going (alongside the Mac version) - until Apple decided enough was enough and discontinued it. But Apple at least allowed customers to buy the source code to continue developing it internally and to develop plugins ,etc.

Virtualisation on the desktop, for us, only became necessary when Adobe started to add stuff to Photoshop and also do weird stuff with licensing. Thats when VMWare came in on Linux and thankfully they allowed commercial use of their free Player product.

When I went to work for a VFX software development company (who make the excellent Mocha product), we went the other way. The build system ran off an Xserve running Parallels Server. Worked very well all things considered, but ruddy expensive. It was just that they were the first company to exploit virtualisation for OS X.

That said my overall preference for desktop and server virtualisation over the years has undoubtably been VMware. They have been consistent, helpful and while slightly annoying in some areas - they've been considerably more sane about things than Parallels has ever been.

Martyn

I...LOVE...Mocha....and am super pumped that the new After Effects has a plugin of theirs!

Thats awesome that you worked for them.

 

[gyorpb]

I installed Lion last night on VMWare 4, easy as pie. I'm having a hell of a time trying to get Migration manager to read my Time Capsule backup, though.

.tsooJ

 

[rkruck]

VMware Fusion 4 and Video

I know with Fusion 3 you could only set your graphics memory on the VM to 256mb. Is that still the same or can it go to 1gb like Parallels 7?

Thanks
Robert

 

[AidenShaw]

Fixed in VMware Workstation 8

I know with Fusion 3 you could only set your graphics memory on the VM to 256mb. Is that still the same or can it go to 1gb like Parallels 7?

Thanks
Robert

They've fixed that in VMware Workstation 8, so they have the technology

(guest view on left, host view on right)

 

[linux2mac]

But yeah, for IT and development virtual machines are a must.

Absolutely. I have been using VMware Server since 2.0 on Linux. Fusion 3 has been great since my I converted my client machines to Macs. Downloading Fusion 4 now. I am looking forward to another polished Mac app!

PS - I would really like to see a bare metal hypervisor like ESXi supported on Mac Mini server hardware. That would be one slick little dev box.

 

[Maximara]

Here's an excerpt from the page you linked:


The way they wrote this, it's obvious to me that they mention 10.6 and 10.7 will work in a Fusion 4 as a VM and Fusion 4 will run on a Mac running 10.6 or 10.7.

I found the

Mac OS X Leopard Server virtual machines?
Yes, VMware Fusion 4 now supports Mac OS X Leopard and Snow Leopard in a virtual machine.

part more interesting because Leopard (10.5) was the last MacOS to run on a PowerPC and with a kludge you could use the classic emulator on the PowerPC version of Leopard. Sadly, the mention of Snow Leopard (Intel only) make me think it only runs the Intel version. Pity as SheepShaver development seems to have stopped.

 

[anthony11]

I've never seen the reason for a VM running Windows on a Mac because the price is almost the same as just buying a low-end laptop with Windows 7.

HUH?? VMWare Fusion cost me $30 -- what the hell kind of netbook is in that price range?

Also, maybe you like to build your biceps lugging two laptops around, but I'd rather carry just one.

 

[nOw2]

Has anyone worked out if VMWare are providing a lower cost upgrade from VMWare 3?

Edit: no, there is no upgrade pricing. Even though the installer hints at an upgrade process. Everyone is a new customer again.

 

[Objectivist-C]

Any working promo codes? WORKSTATION and FUSION20 seem to have expired.