Seductive features, strong performance
VMware’s Fusion 2.0.4 has a feature set that’s similar to Parallels in many ways, and it’s a free upgrade to registered users of prior versions.
A number of features were seductive. We liked VMware’s Unity, used with Linux. Unity let us integrate guest virtual machines (VM) with MacOS by hiding the VM’s background and making the running of Linux and Windows applications more Mac-like. This included allowing Windows/Linux applications to show up as an application in the MacOS Dock, and allowing the application to minimize to the MacOS Dock.
We encountered a few bugs with Linux Unity, such as some trouble with modal dialogs, which are dialog boxes that don’t allow you to access windows behind it. We had to switch back to windowed guest VM mode to deal with the problem, but otherwise Unity worked very well with Ubuntu.
The new Unity in hosted Windows made integration between operating systems easy. But if we showed the taskbar in Unity mode, it only showed in that current workspace when using Apple Spaces, an odd limitation. Also, sometimes Unity flickered the background wallpaper with some applications.
VMware Fusion can also be run headless, meaning that it’s accessed by a VNC client without installing a VNC server on the guest operating system. This feature is not in the GUI and one must know the exact string to add to the .vmx file that enables it.
One other mode we tried was to run Unity with both Linux and Windows at the same time. Everything worked as expected such as using the start menus for application launch, and finding applications on Apple’s Dock. The only nitpick is that you must select the VM in the menu to see the applications menu for each operating system. As an alternative to selecting the VM in the menu, right-clicking the Dock icon will let you see both Unity VMs and select applications directly from that menu.
Fusion includes application sharing, which let us open documents in Mac OS X in Windows applications and vice versa. We found it to be not as strong as similar application sharing in Parallels. Parallels will show a list of all programs that can handle the file — both Mac or Windows applications, whereas Fusion does not. For example, if we wanted to open a .pdf file that we have in XP with a Mac application, we could do that. But the tradeoff is that it would only work with the default Mac application in Fusion. Also, shared applications don’t work with the Ubuntu version we tested.
And while we couldn’t get shared applications to work within Ubuntu, shared folders work and are mounted in the /mnt/hgfs directory. Dragging and dropping files between VMs also worked well in both Linux and Windows. We could also set URL handlers to a specific browser.
Fusion claims to be able to import Parallels 3.0 (not tested) and 4.0 (tested) machines, or Virtual PC (old Mac version) machines (didn’t test) or other Windows-based machines with VMware Converter (tested and worked well; in this way we were able to import a Virtual Box VM that had Windows XP installed on it).
For importing from Parallels 4.0, we tried a Windows XP VM. We were able to import it and it automatically installed VMware tools upon start-up. The only thing we had to do was to uninstall the Parallels Tools. The process was very easy and slightly smarter than Parallels.
There is a VM installation mounting option called “easy install” that lets you install a guest operating system without interacting with the installer. Only certain operating systems are supported, and we tried XP and various Ubuntu version (6.06 and 8.04, 8.10). XP installed with no problem. Linux Easy Install with Ubuntu 8.04 didn’t work well.
We had trouble after the newly created guest VM restarted to install the VMware tools; it was inconsistent in behavior. Each time we tried it, the process took a long time to execute. This feature may work better for other Linux distributions, as we thought Ubuntu was easier to manually install without this so-called easy install option.
When a VM was not running, we could mount a VM’s file system by using VMDKMounter. To use this, you must have MacFUSE installed (and it should be installed by default with Fusion). This is only supported with NTFS or FAT volumes.
This feature won’t work with Linux filesystems. We could then read the VM’s file system and alter it.
Fusion 2.0.4 includes multiple-display support in Windows or Linux with full-screen mode. But it only works as long as you don’t try to change the settings within Windows or Linux. If we tried to change the resolution settings, half the screen became invisible and it would only display on one screen after that. We don’t recommend trying to change resolutions using the guest operating system control panel.
We found Fusion’s “driver-less printing” handy. Fusion detected any printers we installed on our Macs in a Windows VM guest (but not the Ubuntu Linux versions we tested) and printed without installing any drivers. This is not the same as detecting network printers; Fusion will install all the printers we had on our Mac including networked ones. In other environments were able to connect to the printer on the network by entering the IP address and selecting the right printer, but this takes a bit more time.
