After seeing a Google tech talk on VMWare Fusion, I thought I give it a try. VMWare Fusion is a virtualization software for the Mac OS X that allows you to run additional Operating Systems such as Windows XP or Ubuntu while running Mac OS X at the same time. Basically you can run an additional guest system inside a VMWare Fusion window from Mac OS X. This differs from Boot Camp in that you can run both systems at once, not pick which to run at boot time.
After installing, VMWare Fusion immideately found Windows from my Boot Camp partition. I also found a Ubuntu 7.10 VMWare image from Ubuntu itself although you can find images on VMWare’s Virtual Marketplace.
VMWare is a awesome technology that I foresee myself using as much as possible but it does have some bugs and shortcomings. I had to reactive windows after running it from VMWare Fusion, Windows complaint about having the hardware on the computer change significantly. I also experience an annoyance that the DVD player would start to play. I also found it annoying that you have to hit ctrl+alt to return to the host computer, I wish VMWare was as seamless as Windows’ Remote Desktop Connectivity. And worst of all, WMWare Fusion costs $79, while the Windows version, VMWare Player, is free!!!
Technorati Tags: vmware, virtualization, boot camp, os x, windows, xp, ubuntu, techtalk, review
Related posts:
One Comment
Weird, I’ve had no annoyances at all using WMWare Fusion : it took my bootcamp immediately, installed the VMWare Tools in it, but I can keep booting Windows through bootcamp and Fusion seamlessly. The Unity stuff is a bit too slow to be really practical, although it’s a nice touch (seems to me Parallels Unity equivalent works better, but can’t bet on it).
And last thing : VMWare Player is NOT the equivalent of VMWare Fusion, it can only PLAY virtual machines you’ve previously built using VMWare full version.
Now I agree you can download VMWare full in 1 month trial version, create your virtual machine then uninstall the full and install the Player, but that’s a license trick…