VMware Fusion 4 (Mac)

A long time user of VMware Fusion 3.x, I was hoping all would be well with my upgrade to OS X Lion. In fact it was seamless. But then VMware immediately had their Fusion 4.x offering to take advantage of tighter integration of your Windows 7 client. I took the leap of faith in VMware products, and upgraded to Fusion 4.x, and the whole thing went without a hitch. I had read prior to instalation of version 4, that version 3 had to be put in the trash, which I did, simply by dragging the version 3.x app from the /Applications folder into the trash. Then I inserted the instalation disc into my iMac, and to my surprise, version 4 comes with a specific icon to push if you are upgrading from version 3. After the rapid instalation took place, I booted my existing clients, and was relieved to see everything was intact, and Fusion 4 recognized that VMware tools needed to be updated on the client, and proceeded to perform that upgrade without any surprises. Everything was seamless, and just worked the first time. Now my client machines are treated as simply another desktop in Lion, when I run them full screen, which is my normal habit. This means you can use the swipe gesture to get to your Windows clients. Could not be more simple. I've yet to run into any issues, which is more than I can say for OS X Lion, which, as well known breaks many older applications built for pre-Intel macs.

VMWare's Fusion is one of three virtualization products that I'm aware of for the Mac-the other being Parallel's product, and the free VirtualBox. Like those, Fusion lets you install an entire separate operating system inside OS X, that's running at the same time.

It's worth noting that modern Macintoshes can already run Windows and other OSes without separate software, by using "Boot Camp", which basically lets you reboot your system to switch between OS X and Windows or whatever OS choose to install. The advantage of using Fusion instead of (or in addition to) Bootcamp is that you DON'T reboot, and can use Windows programs side by side OS X programs. The disadvantage of Fusion (and all products like this) is that it can't give the OS that's running inside it full access to your computer's hardware...you'll never get as good performance from Windows running inside Fusion (or any product like this) as you will if you actually reboot to Windows through Bootcamp, so for example if you're wanting to run a game, or play a Blu Ray movie, or do video editing or something like that, you'd probably need to reboot through Bootcamp.

But for other, less processor intense software, Fusion's a great choice. In my case it's handy to use it for a financial program I use, among others.

I should note that while as far as I know, Parallels is a fairly new company, VMWare has been making virtualization products for YEARS for enterprise use. They know what they're doing when it comes to making these products work and run stably. What I wasn't sure about was whether the Fusion interface would be good from a consumer perspective...turns out it's pretty great. I've been using VirtualPC for years (originally on the Mac when it was an emulation program, and now after Microsoft bought it as a virtualization tool in Windows). VirtualPC is very straight forward to set up and configure...and it turns out that jumping in to Fusion from VirtualPC is painless. Fusion's just as easy to configure, only impressively it even handles a lot of the OS setup, which VirtualPC doesn't do.

But I'm probably getting ahead of myself... My newest Macintosh is a 2011 Macbook Air, which lacks a DVD drive. I own a Superdrive for it, and needed to use it to install Windows XP anyway, but I was impressed that VMWare not only gives you a DVD, but also a USB thumb drive in the box. Installation is typical for OS X, where you just drag and drop the program, and then launch it. The ONLY problem I've had so far with Fusion is that when I ran it for the first time, it seemed to "lock up" for quite a long time...something like 5 minutes at least. I'm not sure how long as I left for a while, and when I came back it was responsive again. At that point I just ran the auto-updater, and haven't noticed any unusual behavior from it since.

Once you run it, Fusion gives you several choices for setting up an OS. It's supposedly able to kind of migrate you from an existing Windows PC to a virtualized PC running in Fusion (though I didn't try this method). It's also supposedly able to use a Boot Camp install. My Macbook Air doesn't have much storage space, so I don't have Windows set up that way, and couldn't try that. I'm not 100% sure that this is an issue, but a possible problem with using your Boot Camp install of Windows is that every time you boot in Fusion, and then reboot through Boot Camp, Windows is "seeing" that your hardware has changed, which will trigger activation...so I'm not really sure how practical it is to use the same copy of Windows for both Boot Camp and Fusion.

The option I choose, was just to set up a new virtual machine from scratch. Impressively, Fusion detected the Windows XP disc I had in my Superdrive. The default options it selected seemed fine, and then it even prompted me for a username, password, and product key Windows would be using, so that I wouldn't have to create those during the installation. So this was actually even easier to set up than it would be on a normal install!

I walked away again at the point, so I'm not actually sure how long it took-but Windows XP was up and running when I came back. It's worth nothing that with Fusion (and any similar products, and Boot Camp), you're actually running a real full OS inside the program, so it's necessary to perform the same updates, install something like Microsoft Security Essentials, etc., just like you would if it were a separate PC. I should also note that you'll need to buy a regular copy of Windows to use inside Fusion. I happened to already have an unused copy of Windows XP, so I just used that, but if you're buying new, I'd just go with Windows 7 (probably the Home Premium version for most people).

At this point I just started setting things up like I would a normal Windows PC...ran Windows update, installed Firefox, etc. I've used it off and on for a few days now, and haven't noticed any issues. I HAVE noticed that Fusion seems surprisingly fast...it SEEMS to feel faster running Windows XP inside Fusion than inside VirtualPC.

Unlike VirtualPC, Fusion provides more modern graphics support...supposedly you get at least some hardware acceleration for Windows XP or newer, which should mean that Windows Vista or 7's graphical interface should run okay (like with OS X, Windows Vista or newer offloads processing of the graphical interface to the GPU, if you have one). Now it's still not going to give you as good performance as running on the same hardware natively...so for games, Blu Ray, etc. you'll probably want to use Boot Camp instead, but I am impressed by how snappy Windows feels compared with running it inside VirtualPC. Again, this is why I'd pick VMWare's Fusion over other products-while their Macintosh product is just 4 or so years old, they've been doing this a long time for enterprise stuff, and it shows. Of course I have a 2011 Macbook Air...the 2010 models would probably feel much slower, while a 2011 Macbook Pro would be faster.)

A few other things worth mentioning...
-Fusion installs almost a Windows Start menu up by the clock. It's kind of neat...it basically is structured similarly to the actual Windows start menu, and lets you launch programs from that. I haven't yet, but I assume you can shut it off.

-Like all virtualiazation programs, Fusion has to install some system level drivers/kernel extensions or the like. I don't like having third party software muck about with my operating system, but virtualization software has to...which again is a reason I'd prefer it be done either by the same company that made the OS, or by VMWare that at least knows what they're doing with this stuff.

-Like all virtualization programs, OSes running within Fusion use up a chunk of your Mac's RAM. Fusion by default gave Windows XP 512MB, which can be changed. Obviously that means the more virtual machines you want to run at the same time, or the more RAM you want to give to a virtualized OS, the more RAM your Mac needs...that may be a problem for the Macbook Air which doesn't have upgradeable RAM (the Macbook Pro by contrast you could easily upgrade to 8GB if need be). The "hard drive" the hosted OS sees is really a file on your real hard drive, so again, the bigger your real hard drive, the more space you have to give to the hosted OS. Fusion also lets you select the number of cores/CPUs that the hosted OS "sees". Be default, it configures Windows XP to use 1 core, but you can increase that (and of course the more of your CPU you let it use, the worse OS X may run while the hosted OS is running).

-You can also "pause" Windows, roll back changes that have been made to it, etc. Running an OS like this can actually be really handy to test out a piece of software you may not want, or for development work, etc.

-By default, Fusion configures Windows for NAT, that is it shares the Macintosh's internet connection...if your Mac is connected, so is Windows running through Fusion. Though if you have more complex needs, it's possible to set up networking differently.

I'm probably forgetting to comment on some features...and obviously a product like this is kind of impossible to test in every conceivable way, given the dozens of Mac models it runs on, the hundreds of OS configurations, thousands if not millions of programs you can run inside it, etc. But at least so far I'm very impressed-VMWare seems to have made a very stable, fast program, that to my surprise seems to be just as easy, if not actually easier to configure as VirtualPC...if you've got the need to run Windows programs without rebooting, Fusion is definitely worth checking out!

I've used Fusion 4 for a while now. I've used the prior versions of Fusion and I've used Parallels 6 recently also. All are on Snow Leopard / 10.6 on Mac Pros and MacBook Pros.

The good:
* You can finally do disk cleanup on VMs that have snapshots! I regained around 10-15 GB of real disk space by doing a disk cleanup on a couple of VMs.
* Unity feels much more responsive than it did in Fusion 3.
* No stability issues.
* The snapshot timeline and hierarchy view is quite handy.
* Works in both 32-bit and 64-bit kernel mode on Snow Leopard. Not sure if it supports 32-bit on Lion; VMWare's knowledge base implied that it didn't but I haven't personally checked.
* VM encryption support. I don't recall seeing that before. Haven't tried it so I don't know what the performance penalty is.

The bad:
VMWare made the choice with Fusion 4 that eye candy was more important than responsiveness and functionality. They created window animations in front of all the major functions. From poking around, it seems that it is supposed to mimic Lion's behavior. Unfortunately, the pretty eye candy makes doing VM management downright painful.

The new Virtual Machine Library window is no longer a list. Instead it is a large thumbnail for every machine. If you have any information noted with the VM, like user / password info for a seldom used virtual machine, it was plainly visible when you selected the VM to launch it in Fusion 3. In Fusion 4, now you have to bring up the VM Library window, click to select the VM, click to bring up the settings for the VM, then click to go into General. Every single one of those clicks wastes 3-5 seconds displaying a completely useless window animation on a Mac Pro.

The Snapshot management window requires bring up the VM Library, selecting the VM, then going up to the menu to Snapshots (or using Cmd-S). That then launches a pretty animation that makes what was the VM Library window now a window for the selected VM. The VM window then has a pretty animation that converts it to the Snapshot window. It then starts yet another pretty animation to fly the individual snapshots into place. More snapshots == more animation == longer time before you can actually do something productive. When you're done with the Snapshot window, click Close. Wait on another animation while the snapshots fly away. The window then switches from Snapshot back to the VM. However, if you happened to move the Snapshot window while you were working on it, when the animation for closing it finishes, the window for the VM jumps back to where it was when you opened the Snapshots.

That brings up a key point. The VM Library window is now almost useless for anything beyond launching a VM. Where in Fusion 3 and prior, the VM Library window was a real, independent window, in Fusion 4 it is simply a front for whatever VM you happen to click on. As soon as you do -anything- with a VM in the window the VM Library window is gone, replaced with another useless animation as it becomes the VM's window. Not really a problem if you only have a couple VMs since you don't go there that often. However if you have several VMs, and I have about 15 on one machine, it's a completely different story.

Remember the good part about Fusion 4 supporting disk cleanup on VMs with snapshots? Well, after I found that I wanted to go through my VMs to see which ones had space that could be recovered. Here's the process:
1) Open the VM Library
2) wait on useless animation to bring up the window
3) Click a VM
4) Click on the Settings icon
5) wait on a useless animation as the VM Library window miraculously transforms itself into a blank VM window with the play button
6) wait a little bit longer while another animation slides in the settings window
7) Click on General
8) wait a little bit while the settings window transforms into the General window
9) Look at the disk info at the bottom
10) Wait about 5-15 seconds for Fusion to scan the VM and show the amount of Reclaimable disk space
11) If applicable, click Clean Up Virtual Machine
12) repeat from step 1 and increase frustration level

It's obvious that when they were making the animations that they wanted to ensure each animation took at least a certain amount of time, say 2 seconds, for the animation to run to ensure that everyone had at least that much eye candy. Unfortunately, someone didn't realize that adding pretty at the expense of function was a Bad Idea. Pretty is nice the first few times, after that it just gets in the way. Even better? All those animations? They aren't completely smooth.

Remember the status bar in Fusion 3 and earlier that let you see things like disk activity and network activity when in Window mode? Well, it's still there, but no longer a status bar at the bottom of the window. Now it's at the top of the window in a bar that extends from the settings button at the upper left. Tad annoying since when I'm looking for status I expect to see the status bar in its proper location at the bottom of the window. I keep looking down there, not seeing anything, and remembering that I have to go look at the opposite corner of the screen.

The so-so:
You still can't clone a snapshot like you can in Workstation. And there still isn't any official support for linked clones.

Oh, side note. I did shift over to Parallels 6 before upgrading to Fusion 4. One of the things I noticed was that Coherence in Parallels 6 behaved a bit differently than Unity in Fusion. In Parallels, when I hid an application that was running in Coherence mode using Cmd-H, it hid all of the Parallels windows instead of just that one application. In Fusion, both version 3 and 4, when hiding an application running in Unity mode via Cmd-H, only the application is hidden. That one difference in behavior is what shifted me off of Parallels and back to Fusion full time.

Overall:
So, overall, what do I think of Fusion 4? Well, it works reliably and well. I use it daily and haven't had any functional issues. For that, I give it a solid 4 stars, maybe 5. Unfortunately, it's wrapped inside completely useless, time-wasting, frustrating eye candy that is impossible to get rid of. That knocks it down to 3.

Update Feb 17, 2012:
I've had Fusion die on me a couple times now. Never when running a single VM, only multiple. And it may be tied to using Unity. The last one I know I had Unity mode running on one of them, but I'm not certain if that was also true for the prior one. The recent one was running 4.1.1, but I don't recall if that was true for the prior one as well.

There is a bit of good news here though. The way Fusion operates, each running VM is an independent process that is started by Fusion. The main Fusion process is what lets you see and interact with each VM. If it crashes, the VMs continue to run without a problem. When you restart Fusion, it reattaches to the running VMs and lets you see and interact with them again. Still annoying, but thankfully the way it operates means the crash doesn't cause you to lose anything inside the VMs.