I upgraded to the production version about two weeks ago. I installed a late beta of VMWare Fusion on my MacBook a short time before the production release. It’s set up to run the Boot Camp partition in a VM. I still haven’t found a need to run Windows on OS X but the VMWare beta was about to expire so it was time to upgrade. The upgrade was simple and consisted of the following steps:
VMWare Fusion Upgrade Checklist
- Backup the Mac
- Mount the VMWare disk image that was downloaded
- Run “Install VMWare Fusion.pkg” from the disk image.
- The serial number will be pre-filled from the current installation. Change it if necessary or continue to click through the wizard.
- Start the Virtual Machine and run the VMWare tools install (upgrade) when prompted.
VMWare Fusion First Impressions
I still lack any real need to run Windows software so I haven’t given either VMWare or Parallels a thorough workout. But VMWare impresses me. While VMWare is new to Macs they’ve got a long history with VM software which shows. Crave (at CNet) gave the performance edge to Fusion. I like the ability to configure Fusion to only use specific CPU’s (or CPU cores).
I tried installing a couple of old games under VMWare (The Sims 2 & Star Wars: Galactic Battlegrounds). This was on my MacBook which has a low end video chip set. I also didn’t change any VMWare default settings. The Sims 2 wouldn’t install because the VM didn’t meet the video requirements. Star Wars GB installed but the video is funky (a technical term). Both run fine under Boot Camp which seems a better choice for gaming anyway.
What’s your experience with VMWare Fusion?