Fusion

Just yesterday, I was asking if Unity—the Coherence-killing feature that was soon to be added to VMware Fusion—was real or rumor.  (Of course, yesterday I was also getting updated by the Fusion developers that this is indeed not rumor and is definitely real.)  Now I’m here to tell you that I have experienced it with my own eyes.

VMware Fusion Beta 4 has been released (get it here), and with it comes Unity.  In a word: Wow!  It’s pretty disconcerting to see Windows applications (like a command prompt, Internet Explorer, or Visio) running side-by-side with Camino, Mail.app, and NetNewsWire.  Interleave windows?  Not a problem.  Drop shadows?  There.  Minimization effects?  Yep.  Aside from the window decorations, you would be hard-pressed to tell which applications were running natively in Mac OS X or in virtualization.

And that, my friends, is the heart of what I described ages ago (OK, perhaps it only seems like ages ago) as application agnosticism.  With virtualization technology and UI integration like this, who cares what OS an application is written for?  Of course, we still have a ways to go to fully realize application agnosticism, since Unity is only available for Mac OS X (not Linux or Windows), but this is a powerful step in the right direction.

My hat is off to the Fusion developers.  Well done!  A lot of people were predicting that Parallels had too much of a lead in Mac virtualization, but all of you have definitely proved them wrong.  Keep up the good work!

<aside>Boring technical question to any VMware developers, Fusion team members, etc:  Is Unity debuting on OS X because of some advantage within Mac OS X itself, or simply because of the timing and the competition?  I am a Mac fan, after all, and was curious if my favorite OS had a leg up on the competitors that made it easier to create Unity.</aside>

There’s a lot of buzz about Unity, a future VMware Fusion feature that, if real, completely trumps Parallels’ Coherence functionality.  The question: Is Unity real or fake?

The VMTN Blog posting “Coherence? Meet Unity” seems to be the source of it all, which lends a certain air of credibility.  The idea was quickly picked up by The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW), CrunchGear, and YouTube, among others.

However, this is an apparent about-face from the position of Fusion developers earlier in the product’s lifecycle, who were not so keen on implementing such a feature in Fusion until “they could do it right.”  Has that time finally come?

I will say this:  if Unity is truly real and coming in a future release of Fusion, and if the features that were demonstrated in the Unity video are real, it completely blows away Coherence.

UPDATE:  According to Regis (VMware Fusion lead developer), this is definitely real.  I stand corrected!

The development team at VMware has released Beta 3 of VMware Fusion, and I had the opportunity to download and install the new version earlier this morning.  Based on what I’ve seen so far, this is a solid improvement over earlier versions and the development team is making good progress on the product.

New to this version of Fusion are some of the following features (more information available in the release notes):

• Improved performance (debugging can be turned off)
• Support for Boot Camp
• Host-only networking support
• Improved hardware editor

Particularly useful for me, coming from a VMware ESX Server background, is the ability to access hardware settings directly from the Virtual Machine Library window (the main Fusion window).  This was a key complaint of mine from earlier beta versions, and I’m glad to see it addressed now in Beta 3.  Performance seems much better, which I’m sure is due to the ability to turn off debugging, but I’m also sure that there is still additional tuning to be done by the development team before the product reaches final release.  It’s pretty doggone fast now in my opinion, so I’m really excited to see how much faster it may get.

It’s also nice to see the development team throw in “little” things like support for packages, a Mac OS X-specific thing that allows us to manipulate groups of files as a single item.  (Mac users will know what I’m talking about.)

There are also little UI polishes here and there, like a fade in-fade out effect when suspending or resuming a VM, and graphic overlays on a VM window to run or resume a paused VM.

Users of previous versions, especially the very early releases (I’ve been using it since before public beta), beware of one problem I’ve run into and reported back to VMware:  the early sound device presented by Fusion may cause problems in this release.  I had the UI for Fusion keep crashing due to this problem (the VM still runs in the background).  Manually editing the VMX to remove the sound adapter and then re-adding the sound adapter in the UI fixed the problem.  This will only be an issue for users of very early builds of Fusion who, like me, have kept the same VM throughout all the new builds.

If you are an Intel-based Mac user, you owe it to yourself to have a look at this product.  This is especially true if you have co-workers that also use VMware virtualization products, like VMware Workstation, on Windows or Linux, as this allows you to move VMs between platforms with very little effort.  Right now, that’s an advantage that VMware has over its competition, and a definite plus in my book.

With everyone and their brother reporting the release of Fusion Beta 2, I’m hardly on the “cutting edge” with this posting.  To be honest, I don’t have the time to be on the leading edge of news postings, so rather than just regurgitate the same old stuff again here, I thought I might speak briefly as to the features that matter most to me as an enterprise IT consultant.

Here are the features that matter most to me:

• Virtual battery support:  This is a handy one because it helps my MacBook Pro’s battery last longer.  Previously, the Windows guests were not aware of the power status of the host, so they just ran full throttle and drained the battery in no time flat.  Now, the Windows guests can be aware of the power status of the host and adjust their settings accordingly.  Very handy.
• Improved networking support:  The added support for AirPort networking is a definite plus; I can’t tell you how many times I got bit by that one while sitting in a conference room.  Now I can use my Windows, Linux, or Solaris VMs across the WLAN while I’m in the conference room.  Again, very handy.  Although I still haven’t found any sort of advanced UI that lets us replicate the same kind of functionality as found in VMware Workstation (to create virtual switches and bridges), I’m hoping that will come soon.
• Snapshots:  I’m really glad to see this.  I don’t use VM snapshots very often, but this is one feature that really differentiates Fusion from the Parallels offering.  It also reassures me that Fusion isn’t going to be just a “consumer level” offering but that it will retain at least some of the professional-class features for which VMware Workstation is so well known.

Honestly, I don’t really care about the accelerated 3-D support; I very rarely play games on my Mac.  If I were a serious gamer and a serious Mac-lover at the same time, I’d probably have a separate gaming system for that.  Still, I imagine there are some graphics professionals out there for whom the graphics acceleration will be extremely useful.

So what do I still want to see in Fusion?  Expanded snapshot functionality approaching that of VMware Workstation and enhanced networking support (to help facilitate guest-to-guest communications with separately defined networks, plus NAT, host-only, and bridged networking).  Performance is pretty good now, and I’m sure it will only get better as the code is further reviewed and optimized during the beta/release candidate stages.

What’s still missing, though, is that one killer feature that would really set Fusion apart from any other Mac virtualization solution.  The problem is, I don’t know what that killer feature is.  Is it the equivalence of Parallel’s Coherence feature?  Is it the enhanced snapshot/linked clones functionality of VMware Workstation brought over to the Mac?  Or is it something else entirely?  If you’re so inclined, tell me what you think Fusion’s missing “killer feature” should be in the comments.

In the meantime, jump over to VMware’s site and get the latest build of Fusion.

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:

• 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!
• 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.
• 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.

Parallels Desktop for Mac took the prize as the first virtualization solution for Intel-based Macs (OK, the first commercial solution).  Even so, heavyweight VMware’s entry into the Mac market caused many to say, “Well, there goes Parallels.”

Not so fast.  I’m a huge VMware fan and make no secret of it.  But in perusing the list of features for this latest beta, I see a couple of features that VMware ought to be worried about:

• The ability to boot from a Boot Camp partition (this allows you to use a single installation of Windows XP that can be booted via Boot Camp or booted virtually)
• “Coherency mode”, in which Windows windows (sorry, not really sure how else to put it) side-by-side with Mac OS X windows.  It reminds me of the rootless X11 display that ships with Mac OS X and allows X11 and Aqua applications to interact with each other.

In my eyes, coherency mode is huge.  The ability to run Windows applications side-by-side with Mac OS X applications (and I suppose X11 applications) is phenomenal.  Throw in (eventually) seamless window support from Citrix for their native Mac client and you’ve got yet another type of application window that can be resized, minimized, or moved just like any other.  TSClientX has already added support for SeamlessRDP to make seamless windows available via RDP as well.  Why not in our virtualization solutions, too?

Then you add solutions built on WINE, which are designed to emulate the Win32 API on a non-Windows operating system, and you’ve got lots of options for coexistence.  The one thing in common about all these solutions?  Simple:  They’re all built on Mac OS X.  Only the Mac operating system offers the ability to mix-and-match operating system windows on a single desktop at the same time.  (To me, that is really cool.)

What’s really odd, too, is that there was talk at VMworld 2006 about customers wanting this functionality (“coherency mode” or native windows) added to VMware Fusion.  I guess now VMware has another set of reasons to look into this feature:  the need to keep pace with the competition.

I installed VMware Fusion earlier today and immediately set out to install Windows XP Professional.  Despite the fact that once I switched to Mac OS X I haven’t ever really looked back, I still have the rare occasion when I need to run some Windows application (usually Visio).  So, it made sense to me to install Windows first, then to move on to more exotic subjects such as Solaris or OpenBSD.

I had a fully functional installation of Windows XP Professional up and running in less than 15 minutes.  (I kid you not.)  The installation was faster than any physical/non-virtual installation I’d performed.  I was astounded.  While Windows XP was installing, I flipped over and surfed the web, checked e-mail, helped my wife with some font designs, and checked my RSS subscriptions—all without any noticeable performance impact.  (In fact, the Windows XP virtual machine is still running right now as I post this blog entry.)

Sure, the product has a few gotchas (it is still in beta, after all), but it still looks and feels pretty polished.  I’m excited to see how the performance will improve, as the current build has logging and debugging turned on and won’t let you turn it off.  As VMware continues to fine-tune this product and add features, performance, and stability, it is going to rock.

My quibbles with the product thus far?  Very minor.  I’d love to see the VMware Tools installation offer the option to run some type of custom resolution or a wide-screen resolution in the VM; even with my new MacBook Pro’s higher resolution of 1440×900, it is still difficult to run a VM at a resolution of 1024×768.  Also, there is a known issue in this build that makes working with ISO images more difficult than it should be; I fully expect that will be addressed in future builds.  For now, it’s more of an inconvenience than anything else.

Next week at VMworld 2006, I hope to be able to attend one of the VMware Fusion-oriented breakout sessions and gain some more insight into the product’s development, future plans, features, etc.  (I can’t tell you how excited I am about VMworld.  I’m very much looking forward to this conference.  Los Angeles, here I come!)

Note to VMware developers/employees/beta team members who may be reading this:  How about development of some sort of Mac-native VMware console solution?  (Using the existing Windows-based VI client inside a Windows VM on a Mac host does not count.)

UPDATE:  I’m not the only one blogging about VMware Fusion; see Richard Garsthagen mentions it briefly here, and Bob Roudebush discusses his experiences with VMware Fusion in great detail on his blog.  Good stuff!