Release Date:October 5, 2008 Shipping:Eligible for Super Saver Shipping Availability:Usually ships in 24 hours
Features:
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Run Windows side-by-side with Mac OS X without rebooting
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Run Windows applications across multiple screens; instantly launch Windows applications from any Mac file, the Dock and more
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Use Expose to switch between Windows and Mac applications; minimize Windows applications to the Dock
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Run 3D games, design software and other graphics-intensive apps with support for DirectX 9.0 Shader Model 2 3D hardware-accelerated graphics
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Use Windows-only USB devices on your Mac, including GPS receivers, cell phones, PDAs, and iSight cameras
Editorial Reviews:
Product Description Who says you can't have it all? Get the best of both worlds and seamlessly run your favorite Windows applications on the Mac with VMware Fusion. Instantly launch Windows applications from any Mac file, the Dock, and more. Run Windows side-by-side with Mac OS X without rebooting, and quickly switch between Windows and Mac applications with Expose. Use Windows-only USB devices on your Mac including GPS receivers, cell phones, PDAs, and web cameras. Run 3D games, design software and graphics-intensive apps with support for DirectX 9.0 Shader Model 2 3D. You can even bring your entire PC along, virtually, using VMware Converter. Windows really is better on the Mac. Hardware accelerated DirectX 8.1 3D graphics Run Windows, Linux, Solaris, FreeBSD, and NetWare without rebooting Most integration with the Mac including - Drag and Drop, Copy and Paste, Shared Folders (Windows 2000 and later), Auto-resize and full screen support System Requirements - Intel Mac required Minimum 1 GB of RAM (2 GB RAM recommended) 400 MB free disk space for VMware Fusion, and at least 5 GB for each virtual machine Mac OS X 10.4.11 or later Operating System installation media (disk or disk image) for virtual machines Microsoft Windows (not included)
Amazon.com Who says you can't have it all? Get the best of both worlds and seamlessly run your favorite Windows applications on the Mac with VMware Fusion. Instantly launch Windows applications from any Mac file, the Dock, and more. Run Windows side-by-side with Mac OS X without rebooting, and quickly switch between Windows and Mac applications with Expose. Use Windows-only USB devices on your Mac including GPS receivers, cell phones, PDAs, and iSight cameras. Run 3D games, design software and graphics-intensive apps with support for DirectX 9.0 Shader Model 2 3D. You can even bring your entire PC along, virtually, using VMware Converter. Windows really is better on the Mac.
Who says you can't have it all? Get the best of both worlds and seamlessly run your favorite Windows applications on the Mac with VMware Fusion. Click to enlarge.
Mac and Windows unite with VMware Fusion's powerful "Unity" view. Click to enlarge.
Share data back and forth between your Windows and Mac with ease. Click to enlarge.
Run 3D games, design software and other graphic-intensive applications. Click to enlarge.
VMware Fusion 2 doubles the number of virtual CPUs you can attach to a virtual machine, with experimental support for 4-way vSMP virtual machines. Click to enlarge.
Get the best of both worlds.
Moving to the Mac is easy. Getting started is a breeze. Import your existing Windows PC with VMware Converter, or easily install a new Windows OS in a few simple steps with Windows Easy Install.
Graduate from Boot Camp. VMware Fusion is the perfect complement to Apple's Boot Camp. No more choosing between Mac or Windows on boot; run Windows side-by-side with Mac OS X from your existing partition. And when you're ready, import your Boot Camp partition to reclaim extra space and enjoy great features such as Snapshots, AutoProtect, and Suspend and Resume.
3D for you and me. Run 3D games, design software and other graphics-intensive apps with support for DirectX 9.0 Shader Model 2 3D hardware-accelerated graphics.
Displays for days. Use Windows applications across as many displays as you please--up to eight screens.
Mac to the core. Built from the ground up for the Mac, VMware Fusion works the way you expect with customizable tool bars, Quick Look integration, searchable Apple help and more.
Airbags for your Mac. Take snapshots of your Windows installation, and always have the option to roll back to a safe state in case of trouble. And with AutoProtect, automated snapshots let you easily go back in time to before problems occurred.
USB without limits. VMware Fusion lets you use Windows-only USB devices on your Mac--from GPS receivers, to cell phones, PDAs and even Apple iSight cameras.
Keep the bugs away. To keep Windows XP and Windows Vista on your Mac as safe as possible, VMware Fusion includes a complimentary 12-month subscription to McAfee VirusScan Plus.
Maximize your Mac. Take your Mac to the max by running virtual machines with up to four virtual CPUs, 8GB of RAM and with 64-bit operating systems.
Features:
Seamlessly integrate Windows applications with the Mac
Instantly launch Windows applications from any Mac file, the Dock and more
Run Windows side-by-side with Mac OS X without rebooting
Minimize Windows applications to the Dock
Use Expose to switch between Windows and Mac applications
Import an existing PC with VMware Converter
Install new Windows OS with Windows Easy Install
Run Windows applications across multiple screens
Use Windows-only USB devices on your Mac, including GPS receivers, cell phones, PDAs, and iSight cameras
Run 3D games, design software and other graphics-intensive apps with support for DirectX 9.0 Shader Model 2 3D hardware-accelerated graphics
It's OK on averageJanuary 8, 2009 I was a little upset about the product itself. I have a new MacBook with 2GB RAM and the system runs pretty slowly when Windows runs. I was particularly disappointed by the fact that I could not play Civ 4 on the virtual machine.
I decided not to return the product because for the price I paid for it I can use it occasionally (rarely) mostly to open MS Office documents with which I have issues with OppenOffice.
If you do not have already paid for a copy of MS Windows and MS Office, I really don't think it's very useful. I am also not quite 100% clear about the security issues that the use of the virtual machine implies, it is kind of unclear how much exposure does the data and the machine get to malware while running Fusion.
Very, very useful!January 8, 2009 First up, I can not compare this to Parallels 4. I shifted to Fusion before Parallels 3 came out and never went back. I did run Parallels 1.x, Fusion 1.x, and Boot Camp originally. It worked fairly well but I can warn you that having Fusion and Parallels both offer up your Boot Camp partition (one at a time of course) causea the Windows activation system to get rather irritated. It caused Windows to force a reactivation every time I launched it. No problem with Boot Camp + Fusion or Boot Camp + Parallels, the problem only pops up when trying to do Boot Camp + Fusion + Parallels. Not something that is typically done but something to be aware of if you are planning to evaluate different virtualization options using your Boot Camp partition as the source.
With that out of the way, I am very pleased with Fusion 2. Fusion 1 was ok but seemed a but rough and not Mac-like from a user interface perspective. The Fusion 2 user interface has been polished and feels more Mac-like. It's a minor detail but I appreciate it.
Performance-wise, I have no complaints at all. Fusion has never crashed on me. XP actually feels much, much snappier when running inside a virtual machine than when running native. I only use it for launching XP machines right now so I can't comment how it handles other OS's (Vista 32/64, XP-64, Linux, etc).
I use Fusion on a few different machines. Mac Pro (2.66 GHz dual cpu, dual core/4 GB memory), MacBook Pro 15" (2.33 GHz Core 2 Duo / 2 GB memory) , and a MacBook Pro 17" (2.8 GHz Core 2 Duo / 4 GB memory). No problems on any of them. Of course the Mac Pro is the fastest; it has the fastest hard drives, fastest memory, and most available cpu resources. XP inside Fusion on the Mac Pro is very, very fast. Definitely much more responsive than booting to Windows natively. That said, running XP inside Fusion on the MBPs are still snappy. I've never found myself twiddling my thumbs or muttering to myself wondering when it will finish doing whatever it is I asked.
Fusion can use VMWare Workstation images. That is a huge benefit for those of us in the IT industry. It opens up the ability to use various VMWare appliance images that people build by simply downloading the image and opening it. There is also a trend for vendors to provide a preconfigured VMWare image to clients for demo and testing purposes. With Fusion you have access to all of those virtual machine images without any fuss.
If you find yourself having a problem switching between the Mac cmd hotkeys and Windows ctrl / alt hotkeys you can configure Fusion to map the Mac key commands to Windows key commands.
Unity is a rather nifty feature. Unfortunately I can't use it often because a key application I use, SecureCRT, behaves a bit differently in Unity mode than in non-Unity. SecureCRT runs as a single process / application but has a few different windows open. In Unity mode, cmd-tab behaves in the Mac way, cycling you through active applications. It won't cycle you between the different windows inside the application. In the Mac-world, you use cmd-` to switch between windows inside an application. That sort of works while in Unity mode. It will cycle the different windows to the foreground but it doesn't set focus / activate the window. You have to use alt-tab to cycle between the windows and have the window activate when it comes to the foreground. So, cmd-tab to get to the application, then alt-tab to cycle and activate the windows of the application. SecureCRT isn't the only application that is a single process with multiple windows. I'm pretty sure that Firefox and Opera also operate in that mode. Office apps may as well.
Fusion also allows you to set the default application to handle things like URLs. Windows can get sent to Mac or Mac can get sent over to Windows. Or if you want you can do a mix. For example, you could use Mail on the Mac side for handling all mailto links and Internet Explore to handle all http or https links. Not that I would recommend it but you could. Supported types you can map back and forth are: mailto, http/https, telnet/ssh, news, ftp/sftp, news, and feed. Each type can be enabled or disabled individually.
One minor annoyance: If you disabled autorun inside Windows then VMWare Tools will not install automatically. You can choose the option to install the tools from the menu but it only mounts the cd image for the tools. You'll have to go into My Computer, open the tools cd drive, and launch the setup manually. I wondered why the tools didn't autoinstall on one system but did on another; that was why.
So, the gist of all that? If you're looking for virtualization for Mac then Fusion is a very good choice. If you already use VMWare Workstation on Windows or Linux then it's pretty much a no-brainer to go with Fusion on the Mac.
Works greatJanuary 8, 2009 Program works great. The instructions are easy to follow. Very easy to switch between OS X and Windows. I installed Windows Xp and it runs very well on my mac. The only issue I have it that if I insert a CD/DVD into Windows it won't always appear on my mac's desktop until i disable the cd-rom drive in vmware.
Almost like having a PC lurking inside the MacJanuary 7, 2009 I haven't spent too much time within the "virtual machine" I imported from my old PC (using Windows XP), but so far all of the functional facets of the programs seem to work just as they should, with the exception of some funny behavior when accessing external peripherals attached to the Mac. For instance, I tried to use the SSC Service Utility (Windows only) to re-set the counter on my Epson printer, and it just reports that there is a problem accessing the printer. I haven't tried troubleshooting this much, since I don't need to use this on an ongoing basis, but it just illustrates that not everything works exactly as it would if you were running an actual Winbox. But for the price, it's an outstanding way to move to a Mac and still keep your old Windows machine alive inside the Mac for those occasions when you just need to use the PC.
Added flexibilty to my iMacJanuary 7, 2009 Great product! Really allows me to run Windows XP and MAC OS X side by side.
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