VMware Fusion Public Beta
Published on 22 Dec 2006 · Filed in News · 337 words (estimated 2 minutes to read)Rumors had been building for the last few days, and in response VMware finally released the public beta for VMware Fusion, the Mac desktop virtualization product. I’d written about my first impressions earlier; now I’d like to share my thoughts on the public beta build.
Keep in mind that this is still a beta; it’s too early to make any sort of performance comparisons. (Having said that, I’m not really worried about performance; Windows XP Professional seems to run just fine for what I need. Of course, your mileage may vary.)
Here’s what I’ve picked up in the 10 minutes or so I’ve had to work with the new build:
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The user interface is more polished, as to be expected. The icon has changed slightly (I actually prefer the old color scheme, for what it’s worth), and more commands have been edited. In particular, there is now a UI for editing the VM configuration, although some parts of that screen are still incomplete. I can finally tell Fusion not to connect the sound card to my VMs now!
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VMware has added bridged networking to the product. This is a big one for many people, I suspect, as it is with me. Putting VMs into a bridged networking configuration will help with connectivity, both between the VMs and the physical network and between the VMs and the host system.
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I anticipate that the networking functionality has been made more robust as well; a few of the private beta testers ran into issues when frequently changing networks, when resuming VMs from suspend, or when waking the host system. Those kinds of bugs are to be expected in a beta product and I have no doubt that the Fusion development team will take care of (or has already taken care of) those issues.
I’m sure that there’s more to the new version than just what I’ve seen so far in the last few minutes. As I get the opportunity to continue to explore the product, I’ll post any additional information.