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Richard Garsthagen, who is a Technical Marketing Manager for VMware in EMEA also runs a blog focused on virtualization – http://www.run-virtual.com. Before leaving VMworld, he put together a nice video report about the event and also visited a few vendors in the Solutions Exchange to get a rundown on their products. One of these vendors was VMware who was showing off their in-progress progress for Mac, codenamed “Fusion”. Check out his post and view the video here. As a beta tester, I was waiting for someone else to “break” the news so I could blog about it, and Richard has provided me just that opportunity.

I’ve been using a beta version of “Fusion” for a week or so now, since the limited beta began for the product. Having been a Parallels for Mac user since its beta, I was interested to see what spin VMware would put on their solution. “Fusion” is built on the VMware Workstation 6.0 virtualization engine (coming soon), so it has all of the capabilities of the existing workstation product and a few more new things being introduced in the new version. Though it appears that features like snapshots and virtual machine “teaming” won’t be available in the Mac release.

The biggest thing VMware has going for them, of course, is the wide range of products/platforms their virtual machines will work on. Theoretically it’s possible for someone to create a VM and use it with VMware Workstation on Windows or Linux, VMware “Fusion” on Mac or VMware Server on Windows or Linux. That by itself isn’t terribly exciting to the target audience for a Mac virtualization product. Most folks that will be running VMware “Fusion” will be end-user types who have switched to Mac or want to switch to Mac but have one or two Windows applications that they just have to have for whatever reason. Virtualization makes this easy by allowing them to run Windows on OS X and therefore have access to those critical applications.

From what I have seen with “Fusion”, it’s this use case that the VMware development team has focused on in building the product. Instead of building a very complicated, console-looking application with lots of knobs, levers and switches, they opted for a very “Mac” feel. “Fusion” has a very simple UI (screenshot to left) that removes much of the complexity of VM management. The creation of a new virtual machine is achieved through a very simple wizard which guides the user through configuring the virtual machine and setting options such as memory usage, processor count, disk size, etc.

As another example of this Mac dedication and attention to detail in the shadows around the virtual machine’s window which sets it off from the host desktop it’s running on:

This is a very different approach than other solutions (like Parallels Desktop for Mac, Windows or Linux and VMware Workstation on Linux/Windows) have taken where they expose a lot more functionality via the UI:

For novices, I agree that this needlessly complicates the process of just running a VM to access their needed data or applications. I wonder, though, that for a lot of potential users of “Fusion” that the interface doesn’t provide enough access to the product’s functionality. I know many IT administrators and developers that have “made the switch” to Mac, for example. They will want to run Windows and other OSes on OS X using products like Fusion. They will also want to be able to leverage some of the more advanced capabilities of the product without resorting to editing configuration files. When I downloaded a virtual appliance from VMTN, for example, it required some modification of the Ubuntu virtual machine’s VMX configuration file to make the ethernet connection work properly.

My first test was to load up Windows XP Professional. Things went smoothly with the installation of the OS and configuration of the “VMware Tools” within the Guest OS. The VM was even able to see the two cores running in MacBook I was running on!

“Fusion” was also able to easily handle an installation of SuSE Linux 10.0 (Enterprise Desktop) without any issues. The setup took quite a long time but I’m relatively sure it was the amount of data SuSE was moving to the disk rather than a performance glitch with “Fusion”. By the way, it was my first look at SuSE 10.0 – I was pretty impressed with the fit and finish of things over previous versions.

Lastly, I decided to try downloading a virtual appliance from VMTN since the VMTN link was staring me right in the face from the “Fusion” console. After downloading Ubuntu Linux 6.06, I was able to get up and running quickly with the pre-configured image inside of “Fusion”.

I’m excited to see a VMware virtualization product for Mac hit the market – even if it is in beta form. From what I can gather, a larger-scale beta will be open soon. From what I’ve seen, the product looks extremely promising. Be sure to also check out Scott Lowe’s post on his first impressions of the product. And Scott, I agree – a version of VMware console on OS X would be wonderful!