Over on the blog for VMware Fusion, they've announced the release of version 1.1.2 which adds support for Time Machine backups of your virtual machines. Apparently 10.5.2 fixed some problem that prevented virtual machines from being backed up properly and they have now enabled it. They warn, however, that since Time Machine backs up anything that changes, and virtual machines tend to be rather large, you may want to exclude certain virtual machines to avoid losing too much space on your backup drive. The new version also adds support for the MacBook Air (fixing a problem with the virtual drive), Windows XP SP3 Boot Camp partitions, and simplified Chinese, as well as quashing various bugs.
VMware Fusion 1.1.2 is a free update for registered users and $79.99 otherwise.
Thanks to everyone who sent this in!
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
4-24-2008 @ 10:03AM
Frank Furter said...
Cool. My Time Machine backups were failing on something in the VMWare directories. Matter of fact, I had drive failures at the exact same time. Not sure which caused which, or if it was strictly coincidence, but it wasn't pretty.
Anyway, hopefully this stabilizes things.
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4-24-2008 @ 10:15AM
paul said...
weird... i was about to head to the vmware site to look for an update
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4-24-2008 @ 10:23AM
int411 said...
Does anyone know if Fusion allows you to change the windows filetype default program to a mac program. For example so that when you click on a .pdf file in Outlook it launches Preview rather than Acrobat.
And, has anyone heard any rumblings of whether either Parallels or Fusion will ever allow graphics to be copied across platforms through the clipboard. Is this an impossibility that I keep wishing for?
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4-24-2008 @ 2:25PM
Zimmie said...
Nope. VMware does not support cross-platform file associations. I'm actually glad it doesn't, because I want my Windows environment very strictly separated from my Mac environment.
As for copying graphics, I doubt very much that that will happen within the next year, possibly more. VMware has to be cross-platform, since they run on Windows, Linux and now Mac OS. The three operating systems handle "copying" graphic data in entirely different ways. Last I checked, there wasn't really a unified clipboard for text and graphics in Linux at all, and on Windows, it's mostly a per-application thing. They have far more users requesting things like proper support for multiple monitors, better support for running x64 versions of Windows in Boot Camp, better support for Vista SP1, those sorts of things.
4-25-2008 @ 12:29AM
int411 said...
How do people who use fusion and Outlook deal with attachments in Outlook? I guess just save to Mac folder and open natively from that location. I just can't stand Entourage and am stuck with Outlook - curious as to how Fusion users operate with Outlook.
4-24-2008 @ 1:54PM
samsonsu.mobile said...
Still need to exclude huge vmdk files myself? I was kind of expecting "Time Machine support" means VMWare and TM can communicate with some API, so that vmdk file changes can be detected and backed up at byte level... Guess I'm expecting too much here. But isn't that natural for an end user?
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4-25-2008 @ 2:29AM
Funke, Tobias Dr. said...
That's what I'm waiting for too, so oh well. For now I just keep all of my VM's in a folder that I exclude from Time Machine backups. Redundancy be damned!
4-24-2008 @ 2:53PM
Robert said...
You are not a regular end user when your talking about API's and bit level and backups :-)
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4-25-2008 @ 2:07AM
apeguero said...
Won't work after I upgraded to the new 8800GT graphics card. Oh well. Parallels works just fine though.
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4-25-2008 @ 11:26PM
magu said...
One thing that no one seems to care but me: ability to enable promiscuous mode on the network cards in guest operating systems, something that 1.1 didn't want to do (and complained about it).
Now, whenever I need to test a firewall appliance on Fusion, I get a nice dialog with a simple Yes/No to allow it. Genius!
Parallels is overrated. I switched over and am glad that I did. Props to VMware yet again.
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