It looks like VMware has unwrapped a gift of its own for the Apple community - after a lot of discussion and public feedback which amounted to a lot of people screami... ahem, politely asking to be added to the VMware Fusion Beta program, the time is now!

VMware has made the Fusion beta available to the public with build 36932.

To give you an idea of the demand for this product, a VMware blogger said that about 2100 people petitioned for it, and 70,000 people registered for it online to be notified when they could start downloading it.

That time is here. You can begin downloading it now for free, but they ask that you keep in mind that the product is still in beta and is currently running in debug mode, so don't run any performance tests on it. And VMware has yet to implement many of the features that they have planned for the product, so stay tuned.

In case you missed it, here are some of the product's features:

• Create and run a wide variety of 32- and 64-bit x86 operating systems on OS X without rebooting. You can simultaneously run PC applications next to your OS X applications.
  
• Leverage Virtual SMP capabilities to gain additional performance improvements. On any Mac with dual-core processors, you can assign multiple CPUs to your virtual machine to gain additional performance for CPU-intensive workloads.
  
• Access physical devices from the virtual machine: read and burn CDs and DVDs, and use USB 2.0 devices like video cameras, iPods, printers, and disks at full speed. Even devices that do not have drivers for OS X will work in a virtual machine.
  
• Drag and drop files and folders between OS X and virtual machines to easily share data between the two environments.
  
• Leverage the cross-compatibility of VMware virtual machines. VMware virtual machines created with existing VMware products are all cross compatible, including virtual machines created by VMware Workstation, VMware Player, VMware Server and VMware Infrastructure 3.
  
• Run any of the 360 virtual appliances available from the Virtual Appliance Marketplace.
  

Posted by David Marshall on December 26, 2006 06:21 AM