VMWare rocks…

Yeah, VMWare is really remarkable. I just switched to a macbook pro and I have a copy of Adobe Master Suite for PC, I can run Photoshop and inDesign without many problems however Premiere absolutely unusable. Might be better if I had more RAM. I’ve only got 2 Gigs.

I moved the other way because I found Paralles faster and more reliable than fusion! Funny old world!

I use Parallels because it’s suitable for my lightweight use of Windows, and it can run Civilization IV. The developers here tell me that Fusion is what you want to use if you do any work in Windows.

of course, vmware would be a damn sight better if they supported, and let people run osx on it as well, instead of bowing to apple’s nonsensical EULA.

Virtualization comes to Scoble

If you’re interested in the industry, follow-up on the freshly relaunched http://virtualization.com blog, which I co-edit.

I own both Parallels & VMware, but right now I prefer Parallels. I don’t use Windows very heavily; I usually run Outlook, Visual Studio, and occasional MS Office apps. I find that Parallels integration is nicer and Coherence mode feels smoother than VMware.

My main use of Windows is Visual Studio Team Server for source control (yes, we maintain our Mac source code under Windows). I have my Mac home directory mapped as a network drive in Windows, which I use to check out files. I’ve always had problems with VSTS giving an error when accessing the Mac drive. The latest version of Parallels is the first time I was able to use either Parallels or VMware without any VSTS errors.

I’ve even removed my old Office X (which I never bothered upgrading) and I can now have office docs open automatically in Office 2004 in Parallels.

Hey Scoble!

Glad you’re digging the software. We love it when our users are so happy, they shout it from the top of their blogs ; )

For others who are interested, we’ve made it really easy to switch to Fusion.

1. We are offering a $30 competitive upgrade rebate for Parallels and Virtual PC users who buy VMware Fusion (off our list price of $80): http://www.vmware.com/landing_pages/fusion_rebate.html

2. We have a free utility called VMware Importer for importing Parallels and Virtual PC-based VMs to run on VMware Fusion: http://www.vmware.com/download/fusion/importer_tool.html

3. And most importantly, anyone can download a 30-day free trial of VMware Fusion to see if it’s right for them: http://www.vmware.com/download/fusion/eval.html

To everyone thinking about following Scoble’s lead: try it yourself; blog the results ; )

-Pete Kazanjy
VMware Fusion Product Marketing

@jrb: Firstly, Apple is one of our most important partners, and it is important to work with them to make sure that everyone can have success together.

With that said, you may recall that Apple changed its licensing 10/31/07 to allow Mac OS X Leopard Server to run in a VM.

We subsequently demonstrated a first ever technology preview of unmodified Mac OS X Leopard Server running in a VM at Macworld in January.

You can see the blog post announcing it here: http://blogs.vmware.com/vmtn/2008/01/virtual-leopa-1.html

Scott Devine, co-founder of VMWare, is teaching a class in Virtual Machines at Columbia University this semester. All the lecture notes are posted online as they become available.

http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~nieh/teaching/e6998/

Congrats on moving over! My dev team started on Parallels and has moved over to VMware. I’ve written a couple posts on how to utilize VMware in a dev/QA environment and to watch out for Vista in VMware… Vista will bog down Fusion pretty bad.

Also – be warned – the 3D acceleration option in VMware’s settings is misleading. It doesn’t speed things up… I blame it for a lot of the slowdowns I’ve experienced.

Wow, jumping on technology trends, 9 years later on the PC side, and under a year on the Mac. Your new shiny thing, not new or shiny, but it works more than well enough. Interestingly enough, the whole Microsoft vs. VMWare wars, be some nice soap opera melodrama for you to follow. They are a Palo company, right next door to godforsaken Podtech, on PageMill, nice cafeteria too. Fusion still lacks per multi-display and OpenGL but performancewise against Parallels, it be a serious rev machine.

Why can’t we have something like VMWare as the OS, and then run whatever OS personality module you want for the app you want?

I’ve had a great experience (pun!) running XP on Leopard with Fusion since last March (with Fusion beta on Tiger at first). No problems. Runs great. But guess what? I found a much better way to run XP. Never crashes. Fast as hell. It’s called OS X (without XP).

OK, I still need XP now and then but am working hard for for freedom. Tough in a corporate environment where you’re the only Mac user – but I’m a determined guy!

I think you guys should check out CrossOver. It’s like VMWare Fusion, without the Overhead of running the Windows OS. it will actually let you play games on your linux/OSX!

http://www.codeweavers.com/products/

I’m loving it.

I use both Parallels and VMWare. On my MacBook Pro (1st gen, so Core Duo and not Core 2 Duo) I ran parallels 3. I cannot go more than 2 GB of RAM on that machine, and I don’t care that I cannot do more than one core (nor any 64 bit OSs, since the hardware does not support 64 bit anyway…). I really like the integration of coherence and of the file management for my portable.
At home, on my 2008 Mac Pro, I use VMWare. I use it with Boot Camp partition (so no container portability there), I dedicate 1.5 GB of my 6 GB of RAM to it, I have a whole HD dedicated to it, and I have 2 of my 8 cores dedicated to it. It was, in my opinion the best solution for the Mac Pro – can support 64 bit OSs, 2 cores – features that Parallels does not (yet anyway) support.
I think there is room for both out there, and I am glad they are pushing each other, and I can benefit form improvements to both.

Now if I can just get the new Macbook Pro that may or may not be announced tomorrow I will be in MacOS and Windows nirvana… virtually!

I just recently got a Macbook Pro when I found myself needing to replace my laptop. VMWare Fusion and the Intel chipset was what finally made it possible for me to be a Mac user. I make my living working with some tools, including a VPN client into my work network, that only exist in the Windows world, so as much as I’ve wanted to get a Mac, it wasn’t in the cards. That being said, I still have a Vista desktop and an Ubuntu desktop at home that I use all the time as well, but it’s nice to have the Mac for when I’m mobile, and still be able to access those Windows tools I need.

In fact, next week I’m doing some training classes on CT Summation, a litigation review tool that only runs on Windows, using the MBP to do my demonstrations. Should be interesting to see what kinds of reactions I get.

I have noticed massive Fusion/Vista improvements, since SP1, bit more snappy, Vista was virtualization brutalization. In general, SP1 much better overall, fixed some of the weird WPA2 wireless problems, and runs tons smoother, virtual and regular.

It doesn’t speed things up

Yeah, I’ve noticed that too, thought it was only me. I uncheck it.

Still I want to run OSX on my Gateway Tablets and souped up HP. Funny how, people always talk about Apple being an important partner (read suck up to), Microsoft never gets that treatment from VMWare. I just can’t imagine VMWare saying “it is important to work with them to make sure that everyone can have success together” or “respects their licensing policies” about Microsoft. So if they don’t suck up to Microsoft, why Apple? Fusion and OSX for the PC, please — no more OSx86 hacked up hassles.

OSX on Apple hardware, nice, in terms of true virtualization, but quite missing the point in terms of the market wants. VMWare will duke it out with Redmond and send the lawsuits flying, but bows to Apple’s “nonsensical EULA”. Odd that.

VMWare make excellent products; I’ve used Workstation since 2000 on the PC and moved into the server products since.

Now I’ve started using a Mac Book Pro I was able to literally drag and drop my library of standard build Windows test/dev VMs from my USB flash drive to my Mac and fire them up and keep going – simple!

You /can/ run Mac OS X under VMWare on a PC if you google hard enough (unofficial/illegal hack..) it works but performance could do with some improvements.

VMWare has totally changed my workflow in the years I’ve used it in my infrastructure support/projects roles; no longer do I need to maintain rooms of spare PCs and spend hours building or (worse!) re-building test machines, debugging faulty/old spare hardware just clone, snapshot, roll back or trash.

In the Wintel enterprise space I work in VMWare is making the underlying tin pretty irrelevant/disposable, you can buy cheaper hardware as you can acheive a good level of fault-tolerance via a “virtual grid” using ESX and start to get away from some of the religious arguments over being an HP or IBM shop because they integrate better with the chosen OS..

The only problem is frustrating lack of clarity on support from 3rd party vendors – I’m trying to start a discussion on my blog here http://vinf.net/2008/02/21/support-for-virtualized-osapplications-an-open-debate/
if anyone has any input

Once I get the money together, apple is the way I’m going now that the workstations are a better value and can run both operating systems. Is there a drop in performance when running windows on a mac, that’d help me figure out which version of a program to buy.

I have only used Parallels and it has caused me nothing but problems. I think I’ll be switching to Fusion as soon as I have the cash.

AA.

http://satanhimself.wordpress.com/

Mind you VMWare under Vista kills autoplay in a nasty way that doesn’t get fixed even when you uninstall; not until you tweak the registry.

Lovely. I went back to Virtual PC.

Agreed on general greatness & utility of VMware on OS X.

I highly recommend installing the recently-released 1.1.1 update for VMware Fusion.

Fusion 1.1.1 seems to have improved my suspend/resume times for my XP (SP3 RC2, 512mb, single virtual cpu) VM by what feels like 3-5x vs. Fusion 1.1; it’s very snappy now.