VMWare Fusion Beta 3 Released
VMWare Fusion Beta 3 was released yesterday and with it came some pretty funky features.
The best feature in the new Beta 3 is support for Boot Camp. Now, as VMWare Fusion detects Boot Camp partitions, you can run your installed Windows XP without having to reboot. This version says isn’t compatible with Windows Vista yet, however I decided to give it a try.
Booting Vista.
Quicksilver over the top of Vista. Moving a mouse to the top of the screen brings in the contextual menu, allowing you to access any Mac OS X shortcuts (F1 for me is Quicksilver, so pressing that brought up Quicksilver).
iTunes giving a Growl notification over the top of Vista.
It should be made aware that even though it boots, as you can’t install the VMWare Tools there isn’t much you can do in the virtual machine. For example, it didn’t support any network connections compared to when I tried Windows XP, as soon as I installed the VMWare Tools everything just worked. Note: As this was just a quick test, I didn’t actually try to get anything working, I was simply testing what worked out of the box.
For more features, check out the VMWare Fusion Beta 3 release notes.
I’m starting to think I should have bought this instead of Parallels.
Update: After rebooting and going into Windows Vista, the settings will all be set to the lower virtual machine ratings (ie: no Aero). Simply allow it to re-detect your hardware and reboot once again; this will allow Aero and all the other pretty settings to be applied.
4:27 am
Eh, looks cool I guess.
1:45 am
Hey Steffan, how’s the performance while running Aero?
2:07 am
Ahh.. Yeah, you can’t run it.
Basically, Vista is still run inside a virtual machine and so it thinks you have a really bad computer. With the PC rating tool included with Vista, my iMac’s rating dropped from 4.7 (due to a 4.7 rating in RAM - 2Gb) to only 1.0.
Although I have no idea what rating is required to have Aero work, Vista thinking that you have a ‘generic graphics card’, lower RAM rating and a slower processor means that you just won’t get it with VMWare unfortunately.
2:30 am
Dang, I had my hopes up.
Just waiting for the day when graphics cards can be virtualised. Then I won’t have to reboot into Windows anymore for games.
Ah well…
12:20 am
I did it… I run vista boot camp on a macbook pro using vm ware fusion. Awesome tool!… thank you!
6:34 pm
i’m trying to use my Windows partition with vmware fusion, but it does not show in the library list, i am using the beta 3, is a clean install of macosx and windows , but… i did not use Boot camp, i did it with manual partition and refit.
any ideas? i think that if i get the configs files of a fusion VM that uses boot camp partition, maybe i can redirect it to my partition….
5:56 pm
I’m really sorry to have to say this but I have no idea!
I went Googling for some information but everything seems to point to ‘Use Boot Camp’. I really do hope you find an answer to this problem!
10:02 pm
is there a way for fusion to detect my bootcamp partition on a 3 partition system (1 common fat 32, osx and xp)
5:42 pm
Bought this? I just got the free beta. It lasts for four months. I install Home Premium in BootCamp and am now running it off both, no conflicts. Far better than VirtualBox!