[Macworld]

Post your comments for First Look: VMware Fusion 2.0 Beta 1 here

[AussieBoy]

I hope that one of the fixes is the renaming of the VMs! Its not a clean thing to have to manually modify the .vmx file.

[SamGumgee]

I'm voting for full support of Vista x64 in Fusion 2.0 given that Apple has done so with Boot Camp 2.1 (Hooray for Apple!)
Also resolution to the window resizing issues that should already be superfluous but isn't requiring an edit to the VM preference file that only partially solves the problem.

[AllanMarcus]

Don;'t count out the newcomer to the Mac VM race: Sun! Take a look at VirtualBox: http://www.virtualbox.org/

[hayesk]

I guess DirectX coordinates start in the upper left corner, and Mac coordinates in the lower right.

[AllanMarcus]

Oh, I did I forget to mention that VirtualBox is free? :-)

[akulavolk]

The one thing this article didn't cover is how VMWare compares with the latest Parallels.
I run Parallels, but am not happy with some things about it. It's not really usable for gaming, for example, which means I have to run both BootCamp + a Parallels image (one for games, and one for quick-access Windows apps...mostly for web design testing). Both need a full copy of Windows since Parallels' performance running off a BootCamp partition is strangely much slower than running off of an image on disk.
If VMWare's gaming, or at least general speed and stability, are a lot better than Parallels, I'd think of switching...
Oh, any idea how GuildWars runs in the VMWare beta? If I could get GW running fast and playable in a VM, I'd ditch BootCamp forever.

[montgomery_burns]

I would also like to see support for more than 2 virtual CPUs.

[griffman]

"The one thing this article didn't cover is how VMWare compares with the latest Parallels."
That's because it's not supposed to do that. This was a "first look," which is just what you would think it is based on its name: a first look at the features in a new or upcoming piece of software. It's not meant to be a full review or a comparative analysis. And since it's beta, I intentionally stayed away from running any sort of performance figures.
-rob.

[lrivers]

I'm curious about Oblivion's performance in Fusion 2...

[montgomery_burns]

My gripes with Parallels:

Installs files that are poorly named, with no way to tell that they belong to Parallels. For example, what is "helper.kext"?

Scatters various support files all over the Extensions folder instead of placing them in its own folder.

Num Lock is not enabled by default, and there no visible Num Lock indicator in the status bar.

My gripes with VMware:

Application interface does not provide access to all settings. Users are frequently told to open the virtual machine package and manually edit configuration files. For example, you can't even rename a virtual machine without hacking around in configuration files.

Putting VM files inside a package makes configuration tasks such as removing virtual disk files more difficult than using regular folders.

Num Lock is not enabled by default, and there no visible Num Lock indicator in the status bar.

[akulavolk]

That wasn't meant as a criticism. Just curious how the update places Fusion in comparison to Parallels. Is it ahead of Parallels in general, or catching up? Not looking for in-depth speed benchmarks, just interested in finding out how the two compare based on new features in the beta.

Guess I'll just wait for the 2nd look :-)

[griffman]

Because both do the same thing, and both do it very well, it's very hard to choose between the two. An earlier reply here listed some of the pros and cons of each, which I generally agree with. The improved settings screen and VM manager screen address a couple of my bigger complaints about Fusion; I'm going to dig into it some more and see if they've made renaming VMs any easier. The importer now being a one-step solution is another nice change.

In the end, it really comes down to which one you're most comfortable using -- I don't think either one crushes the other on speed or features. I personally prefer -- as of today :) -- Fusion, mainly because the install is neater (as described above) and they have a huge library of VMs you can download.

-rob.

[Kees]

I have a very simple gripe with Fusion. I don't want my bootcamp partition to show in the vm list. They still haven't made this possible it seems.
I tried this beta and it is for all practical purposes unusable (with the new graphics support enabled anyway) I had weird screen artifacts all over, parts of the screen going black and not any apparent improvement in speed.
1.1.2 is running quite well, though, and, although parallels starts up XP much faster, in use, it does seem it bit snappier.
Hard call between the two.
Oh, and they still need to change the huge screen with the giant start button for suspended vm-s to something more subtle.