VMWare Fusion?

[SSpiro]

I really don't see much mention about Fusion on most the sites I go on..

Is anyone using it? Opinions or thoughts?

I use VMWare a LOT for work, and enjoy it on my PC's at the office.. I downloaded Fusion Beta 2, and it looks REALLY promising.

Anyone?

 

[Bill Gates]

I use it and find it to be a better product overall than Parallels. Parallels was causing stability problems on my MBP, and seems to be a little buggy. Currently Fusion lacks some of the features that Parallels supports, but hopefully they will implement them in the future, perhaps in a better way as well. Coherence mode in parallels is more of a hackjob than true ingenuity.

 

[phillipjfry]

I haven't had any issues with Fusion, yet. But I haven't really given it a run for it's money. 🙂
Seems stable, but I wouldn't play any PC games with it.

 

[slicedbread]

i quite like fusion. I get the impression that when its out of beta, it will be a more solid product than parallels. However at the moment, being able to use the BC partition in a VM really saves alot of hassle with not having to manage 2 windows installs. Plus as its beta, it apparently has debug mode turn on (you can't turn it off) for the VMware programmers to find bugs. Once its out of beta and the debug mode is off its meant to run even faster.

 

[SSpiro]

So far I'm impressed. I love VMWare's PC programs.. so I think this will definitely be a winner.

 

[72930]

Direct X 10 support in the final version will be great...on quad and octo core machines, VMWare Fusion's multi-core options (apparently upcoming in Parallels) are great...

I'm also looking forward to their answer to Coherence mode...

 

[tyr2]

I use it every day with a Win2K VM. Only had a couple of minor niggles around resuming a suspended machine, also the configuration interface is far from complete. But it's certainly promising and seems stable, looking forward to a full release.

 

[user13]

Has someone tried running games via Fusion? I heard that it supports DX8 already and I'm curious how it works in general and about games in particular. How much RAM is optimal to run Windows via Fusion? Thank you.
I'm a Parallels user traditionally and I have been using it from early betas. I like the product very much, I'm satisfied with its performance in general. The only drawback is lacking of graphics support.

 

[user13]

What I like most about Parallels is Coherence mode. It's absolutely great and it doesn't have any analog in Fusion, maybe that's why I don't use it. Boot Camp partitions support is also great, but I'm unsure if Fusion doesn't have this feature(in fact, I know little about Fusion).

Parallels was causing stability problems on my MBP, and seems to be a little buggy.

Why do you consider Parallels to be buggy? I use it rather often and it suits me very well - everything works fine. Any examples of problems with Parallels would be appreciated. Thanks

 

[Bill Gates]

What I like most about Parallels is Coherence mode. It's absolutely great and it doesn't have any analog in Fusion, maybe that's why I don't use it. Boot Camp partitions support is also great, but I'm unsure if Fusion doesn't have this feature(in fact, I know little about Fusion).

Why do you consider Parallels to be buggy? I use it rather often and it suits me very well - everything works fine. Any examples of problems with Parallels would be appreciated. Thanks

The primary issue is where it couldn't mount the boot camp partition whenever I clicked the shortcut to launch the Windows VM directly, or when I used an application shortcut. I would have to click the play button again for it to work. Additionally, the CD drive was not recognized under several Linux livecds that I tried. The new version of Fusion that was just released (beta 3) now supports Boot Camp.

 

[Lixivial]

Why do you consider Parallels to be buggy? I use it rather often and it suits me very well - everything works fine. Any examples of problems with Parallels would be appreciated. Thanks

I have at least two examples:

1. Parallels Transporter gives cryptic messages as to why it's failing, and I've yet to get a good physical to VM image out of it. Installing Transporter was a hassle for some machines -- it required me to run it as Administrator, even though my user had admin rights. Though the InstallShield error message made no mention of this.

2. When booting from a Boot Camp capable VM, it complains if you have at least one external FAT32 or NTFS partition hooked (even if they're not mounted!) into the machine.

Boot Camp partitions support is also great, but I'm unsure if Fusion doesn't have this feature(in fact, I know little about Fusion).

Fusion does in the latest beta, but I'd advise against using it for now. It suffers from the same thing Parallels did when they introduced Boot Camp support -- changing hardware, and having to revalidate Windows.

 

[danny_w]

I tried VMware Fusion briefly and gave up on it. Perhaps it was because I was in too much of a hurry or because I was trying to run Win98SE, but it seemed to give me several problems. I know it is only beta software, so perhaps that is part or even most of it. It seemed to install fine, and created a VM fine, and loaded Win98SE from a bootable cd that I have. However, once I booted Windows, it had no audio (it showed yellow marks over the devices in device manager). I then loaded the VMware tools, and both the video and mouse drivers required manual installation. I never did get audio to work. Then the following morning I booted up Fusion and it said that my trial registration key had expired (after less than 24hrs). What the heck? I tried reentering the key and it refused to take it. I tried getting a new key but they gave me the same one. I finally ended up removing it completely. Maybe some other day...

 

[Chone]

Has someone tried running games via Fusion? I heard that it supports DX8 already and I'm curious how it works in general and about games in particular. How much RAM is optimal to run Windows via Fusion? Thank you.
I'm a Parallels user traditionally and I have been using it from early betas. I like the product very much, I'm satisfied with its performance in general. The only drawback is lacking of graphics support.

Grand Theft Auto games work fine at least Vice City does not sure about SA, I will try Warcraft III later on and maybe Half Life 2 with its DX8 fallback mode.

VMWare looks pretty darn interesting oh and they allowed the removal of the debug mode for speed in the latest release. Aside from graphics the virtual machine is very fast, on Vista I scored 5.4 for the processors in my Mac Pro, on bootcamp Vista the score is 5.9

Hopefully Parallels will have 3D and multi core support soon because I have a Parallels license but not a VMWare one 😱

If they can get DX9 games running at least at 70% regular game speed without bugs then that will be a huge success, I'd definitely sacrifice 30% speed for no rebooting but then again I'm not sure when (if ever) they'll get DX9 performance at least at 70% speed.

 

[matthewdavid]

It mostly rocks

I've been using it for weeks now and it seems rather nice.

My setup is Windows XP SP2 with VS 2005 so I can work at home. Sure I've got a dell laptop from work, but now with Beta 3, where I can disable the debug checks, it's actually faster than the laptop.

I tried Parallels, it was nice, especially coherence mode. I took some video of my mac running VS that way and really freaked out some fellow devs.

But we use VMWare a lot at work for testing and setups, so VMWare it is.

The main bonus so far, aside from compatability with work, is being able to use just about any VMWare appliance you can find. Ubuntu rocks on VMWare.

I imagine that once the release version is available, Parallels will have some hard competition considering VMWare is almost a defacto standard.

 

[thegoldenmackid]

Grand Theft Auto games work fine at least Vice City does not sure about SA, I will try Warcraft III later on and maybe Half Life 2 with its DX8 fallback mode.

VMWare looks pretty darn interesting oh and they allowed the removal of the debug mode for speed in the latest release. Aside from graphics the virtual machine is very fast, on Vista I scored 5.4 for the processors in my Mac Pro, on bootcamp Vista the score is 5.9

Hopefully Parallels will have 3D and multi core support soon because I have a Parallels license but not a VMWare one 😱

If they can get DX9 games running at least at 70% regular game speed without bugs then that will be a huge success, I'd definitely sacrifice 30% speed for no rebooting but then again I'm not sure when (if ever) they'll get DX9 performance at least at 70% speed.

Does SA-VC not require DX9?