VMWare and the Holly Grail of pc cross platform support

rutt

The newest version of VMWare Fusion supposedly completely integrates pc applications into the mac desktop, allowing you to interact directly with them instead of using them in a virtual desktop. I've been using VMWare Fusion for a few months, but to support linux not windows on my Mac. I have used VMWare products for about as long as they have existed (7 years?) This is a very mature, stable, and high performance product. VMWare is owned by EMC, a little like being owned by IBM.

I would guess that it will cut Parallels by the time of it's first non-beta release. The betas have been rock-solid as far as I can tell. What they call beta is likely to be more stable than what a start up would support as a released product.

Here is a link to the announcement.

wxwax

Will it take out the trash and sing the kids to sleep too?

CatOne

Yeah, Rutt, it's all that and a bag of chips.

Actually I was using Boot Camp on an iMac I have until Fusion beta 4 came out. It's been nice... though I've only been using it for 6 days.

Their integration mode ("Unity") is nice but I've found that it's pretty ugly with
Quicken.... no real surprise that Quicken has some goofy launcher so it shows up as a CMD-style icon saying "Quicken Launcher" rather than using the actual Quicken icon. Also, the "search Windows applications" tool they give you seems to only find things that are explicitly in the start menu... rather than all applications (silly me... given that's how a Mac worked I'd have thought it made sense ;-) Anyway... for running the 3 apps I run, it's great, and I can use that iMac for bigger and better things like running Leopard betas with extreme recklessness :-)

quark

I agree. I have been using it for a month or more and it seems to be stable. I use it for linux mostly. I did have a bit of trouble with the windows virtual disk but since it is virtual I could just do a quick restore and working again in a few minutes.

ian408

Windows has a virtual server. I wonder if I can load OSX in it

pathfinder

Leopard is being released with BootCamp built into it.

For many of us, who only have one or two minor XP programs, and do not really need WEB access via windows, BootCamp may be all we need.

That is what I will use to start anyway.

Think i2E, Garmin updater, Msoft Streets and Trips. I cannot think of another WIN app that I need anymore, and that is after using Windows for over 20 years.

Am I reading that right, VM Fusion is only $39.95 untill Aug 2007?? Maybe I do need it after all. Is it hard to install and configure?

rutt

VMWare is probably no harder to install and use than bootcamp. Well, since bootcamp will come preinstalled with leopard, that can't be quite right. But installing windows is the real issue and vmware makes that easy.

Unless you absolutely need ALL the speed of the underlying machine, VMWare will be a much better solution.

I am committed to VMWare, though I haven't yet installed windows. I think I have to do that for work, so I'll go through the process and help others with easy issues.