VMware Fusion Beta 2 now available

VMware, the top banana in the virtualization market though relative new comer to the Mac, has just released Fusion Beta 2, their Mac virtualization client. Fusion, much like Parallels, allows you to run Windows (and many other operating systems) on your Mac just like you would any other application.

Fusion Beta 2 adds some interesting features:

Support for DirectX8.1 on Windows XP virtual machines (DirectX is Microsoft's APIs for multimedia applications, i.e. games that use graphics acceleration).
Snapshots of virtual machines: take a snapshot of one of your virtual machines, and you can always recover to that point in time.
Support for Vista (both 32 and 64-bit flavors)
Much better networking: including seamless switching between Airport networks and support for up to 10 virtual network interfaces (very cool, if you ask me)

All in all, Fusion is shaping up to be very nice, though they are still missing Coherence mode which is Parallels killer feature. The Fusion Beta 2 is free (while it is in beta).

Update: It is true that Fusion Beta 2 is available now, but it was also available a few weeks ago! I am the victim of a poor memory and a tardy PR email. However, now is a good chance to check Fusion if you haven't (see how I saved this post from irrelevance? That's the mark of a pro blogger).

View Tags

Source: http://www.vmware.com/products/beta/fusion/

Categories

Software

VMware, the top banana in the virtualization market though relative new comer to the Mac, has just released Fusion Beta 2, their Mac...

Add a Comment

Sign in »

6 Comments

Filter by:

mathie

Yeah, I got excited when I got the email, thinking "ooh, new beta", went to download it and while reading more of the email thought, "wait a cotton picking minute, didn't they introduce DirectX support in the last beta?" So I launched it, checked the about screen and sure enough they were the same version. Bit of a disappointment, really...

-- Graeme Mathieson
http://woss.name/

March 23 2007 at 7:40 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Ryan

Yeah sorry for jumping the gun on submitting this one.

March 20 2007 at 9:46 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Christopher Price

VMWare send this "tardy" email to all VMWare downloaders. I suspect the delay was to minimize bandwidth usage... early adopters browsing MacUpdate (sites) flooded VMWare, that has subsided, and now they send out the email so everyone else can update.

- Christopher Price
http://www.phonenews.com

March 20 2007 at 4:36 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

neckaros

Maybe it's old news but thanks to your reminder i'm testing it and loving it :)

March 20 2007 at 4:20 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

hibiscusroto

If VMWare can create coherence-like functionality and can access a boot camp partition then Parallels will be in real trouble. Perhaps VMWare will purchase Parallels in order to achieve this.

March 20 2007 at 3:51 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

thecompkid

I don't think you have to explain what directx is. :)

March 20 2007 at 3:50 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply