VMware Fusion for Mac Edges Closer

VMware's virtualization product for the Intel-based Mac, code-named Fusion, just got a little more real for a number of lucky people. VMware recently sent out an email invitation to a group of people fortunate enough to take part in a private beta testing of the future Mac virtualization product.

Dear Beta Customer,

We are pleased to announce Fusion Friends and Family release. Fusion is the code name for the new VMware desktop product for Mac. You are part of a select group of users with the opportunity to experience this new and exciting product first hand.

Currently, the beta product is running with logging and debugging turned on, so it is impossible to gauge what performance will be like. I'm also not sure if this will be the final "look and feel" of the product either. I've been in a few discussions where that question has come up, and I haven't gotten a definitive answer yet.

Feature wise, Fusion shows off a few cool options that Mac users will be pleased with.

To increase virtual machine performance, VMware is offering the ability to leverage virtual SMP capabilities. Users can assign more than a single CPU on a supported hardware platform with an Intel Core Duo CPU. This can be important to gain additional performance for those CPU-intensive workloads.

Another commonly asked for feature that VMware is throwing into the product - file sharing via drag and drop. Users are very interested in being able to easily share files between their OS X environment and the guest operating system. While an extremely handy function, in today's cruel world, I have to wonder if it opens up further security risks?

Perhaps one feature that stands out to me is the ability to access physical devices from the virtual machines. You can not only access those physical devices that you are used to seeing in a virtualization product such as CD-ROM drives, printers, sound and high-speed disks, but VMware also made it easy to detect and use devices such as iSight, iPod, Bluetooth, IR Remote, and USB 2.0. This is an impressive list to say the least, especially for such an early stage release of the product.

While the current build still has bugs and performance issues, it is important to remember, this is still a private beta. As VMware and Parallels go back and forth to enhance their offerings, Mac users on either side will continue to win.

What are your impressions of the product so far?

Posted by David Marshall on November 4, 2006 07:01 AM