VMware Fusion officially available today

How is VMWare's support? I have Parallels 3.0 and had a few problems in the beginning and the free e-mail support is a joke. They never wrote me back and it's been 3 weeks. The forums are also not very helpful at all.

Okay, the instructions are in the FAQs on how to upgrade from RC1 to retail version. Uninstall old one using uninstall package file and install the new one.

...and it's good for running Linux and Solaris!

Haven't tried Windows on it and I don't have much need. I have CrossOver for that.

@Otto:

Yes, I've got the beta running Windows off Bootcamp just fine.

Funny how I never read anything good or bad about a product called VirtualBox. I've got an Intel iMac 2Ghz Core Duo Processor and 1GB RAM. I keep a lot of apps open all the time and still have no problems running Windows in a separate window. This lets me view websites I'm designing in Safari, Firefox, and Windows IE 6 and 7 all at the same time.

I tried both Parallels and VMWare Fusion. They both slowed me system to a crawl. VirtualBox slows it too... of course... but not as much.

Best of all, VirtualBox is free. Those interested can find it at virtualbox.org

Joshua, people might think from your comment that Parallels only runs windows but it supports Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, Sun Solaris, OS/2 Warp and MS DOS nowadays... On top of that I haven't found any problems running USB 2.0 devices with it.

I think at this moment both are extremely close concerning features and I'm very interested in seeing the performance charts. Hope they're available soon!

can you use boot camp with vmware?

I upgraded to Parallels 3 for the express purpose of using my Macbook Pro's Boot Camp XP partition as a VM. After I installed the upgrade, it totally hosed my partition. After having to reformat and reinstall windows, it would boot once but then would corrupt its own registry entry, preventing any further booting in Parallels. (Boot Camp still worked.) Support personnel were not able to suggest a fix other than to manually delete the registry entry each time it happened from within Boot Camp...which obviously wasn't a good solution. I then installed the VMWare Fusion beta, and it's been rock-solid ever since. Their "Unity" mode works better than Parallels' "Coherence" mode, too. I purchased Fusion and I'm not looking back...

VMWare has been providing virtualization for corporate users since 1999 and is still the defaco standard for virtualization on Windows and Linux, despite competing head-to-head with Microsoft's own virtualization software, into which Microsoft has devoted a large amount of resources (Microsoft doesn't want people running other OSs)

It isn't surprising to anyone familiar VMWare that Parallels wouldn't compare.

From what I can tell, VMWare can support more than the 1500MB of memory that Parallels restricts to. It can also virtualize more than one processor which would be useful for performance-based applications.