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VMWare's Parallel competitor, Fusion begins private beta

tuaw.com — Some beta testers that we won't name for their own protection have let us know that VMWare is now ready to take Parallels to task in the desktop virtualization market with Fusion.

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  • kwojniak, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6Some more screenshots are starting to pop up in this thread:

    http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?p=3014904
  • iAlex, on 10/12/2007, -2/+7Awesome features. Will it be free? One thing I am looking forward to is 2D/3D support, that will be awesome!
    • Quix, on 10/12/2007, -1/+7Free would be fantastic and would really help accelerate the number of switchers.

      Apple should throw a little cash in both VMWare and Parallels' direction to make these products cheap and/or free.
    • eean, on 10/12/2007, -2/+6VMWare has some hidden support for 3D. I read its not so great, but I haven't tried it yet.
  • hemo, on 10/12/2007, -3/+4I just need to run my existing VMWare Virtual Machines on my MacBook.
    A VMWare Player for Mac is just what I want, and it should be free :-)
  • ckr4282, on 10/12/2007, -2/+5I think that once it comes out of beta, it will be more popular than Parallels. So far, I've noticed features that Parallels doesn't have, such as multicore support. It seems much faster, too. If Apple ends up not including virtualization in Leopard as rumored, they will most likely endorse VMWare over Parallels. I think that it is time for Parallels to lower the price a bit.
    • DaffyDuck, on 10/12/2007, -9/+4"It seems much faster, too."

      It SEEMS much faster? Have you tried them both? Personally, I can't imagine Parallels being much faster on my MacBook Pro. VMWare sure does seem to have a fan following, or perhaps a busy astroturfing department.
    • ckr4282, on 10/12/2007, -4/+6@DaffyDuck: It is a Cocoa app, while Parallels has all the bloated Qt crap. A much slicker interface, too.
    • exobyte, on 10/12/2007, -9/+1Speaking about astroturfing, I'm glad to see DaffyDuck and Parallels made a showing here.
    • DaffyDuck, on 10/12/2007, -5/+3"It is a Cocoa app, while Parallels has all the bloated Qt crap."

      Well, the difference in speed remains to be seen.
    • astrosmash, on 10/12/2007, -1/+10> VMWare sure does seem to have a fan following, or perhaps
      > a busy astroturfing department.

      VMWare has been around for a very long time. People have been using their VM products on Windows and Linux for years, and they're becoming a fundamental tool of most serious software development shops. They've been competing head-on with Microsoft for the few couple of years, and MS failed to make much headway in either the server or desktop market. Even Microsoft developers use VMWare.

      The bottom line is that virtualization is certainly not a technically trivial product area. They have much more experience at this than anyone else, and I fully expect that VMWare for Mac will be technically superior to Parallels. The only difference is that this is the first time VMWare has moved into the general consumer market.
    • DaffyDuck, on 10/12/2007, -4/+4exobyte, I am not the one making unsubstantiated claims that one seems faster vs another simply based on the programming language used when I haven't even used both of them. I do, however, use Parallels and it seems mighty fast to me.
    • DaffyDuck, on 10/12/2007, -4/+4Astrosmash, you know I am really not here to defend Parallels. In fact, if VMWare allowed me to share a Boot Camp partition, I'd switch in a heartbeat. It just ticks me off a little that people make assumptions that VMWare is going to come to the party late and destroy Parallels. They may do that but I don't see anything compelling in the feature list yet. We have to wait and see.
    • shakin, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5"It just ticks me off a little that people make assumptions that VMWare is going to come to the party late and destroy Parallels."

      I think the assumption is that VMWare has many years more experience in virtualization than Parellels does. I'm not sure why you think they're the last ones when they are the company that popularized virtualization. I gather that nearly everyone who's into virtualization today was introduced to it by VMWare. All they're doing now is porting it to the Mac.
    • superkendall, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3I agree that being able to boot the VM off a BootCamp partition would be a powerful thing, it would let you run games in BootCamp but everything else in a window in OS X.

      If you were going to go the other way, I'd be interested in seeing a VM that supported sharing common Widnows files between VM setups. That way you could have ten Windows VM's set up in a fraction of the space.
  • TylerDurden0, on 10/12/2007, -2/+8Please post to the torrents!!
    • ckr4282, on 10/12/2007, -2/+3It's on the private trackers now, it should hit TPB not long from now.
    • georgemoore13, on 10/12/2007, -11/+2OK, sorry to abuse the reply, but I am at college and have a crazy fast internet connection (about 78 mbps down, 3 mbps up), and would love to share it. I have a lot of stuff I want to share, I am a little cautious about public trackers.
      If anyone has in invite to spare, please let me know, either on aim (georgemoore13) or my email, (georgedigg@gmail.com). Again, I apologize for the unresponsive reply. I am interested in any invites to good private trackers. Thanks in advance for anyones help.
  • kenthorvath, on 10/12/2007, -2/+1Any word on whether we'll be able to use CD/DVD burning capabilities? The only thing that I really miss about Windows is DVDShrink / AnyDVD. I know that there is FastDVDCopy and FairMount, but I have problems or objections to both.
  • TheRealStyro, on 10/12/2007, -2/+4Interesting and ambitious. I hope all the features listed are in the finished product.

    I would still like to run some windows apps, that don't have equals, in osx without installing (and buying a license for) windows. It just doesn't make any sense to pay the MS fee just to run an app on a mac. I hope the developers of crossover/wine get working; those products would kill these virtualization apps (next best thing to being native).
  • ckr4282, on 10/12/2007, -2/+13For my friends at digg:
    http://www.sendspace.com/file/h08tq5
    (please don't upload anywhere else)
    • DeusMachinae, on 10/12/2007, -2/+4Thank you for making this private beta public for the masses! You are the greatest!
    • DaffyDuck, on 10/12/2007, -5/+2OK, perhaps you have used both. I might give it a try and see if it truly is faster.
  • kwojniak, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5Some guy over at tuaw.com posted some notes about the current beta:

    - Debug code cannot be disabled (yet) causing some slowness and high proc utilization
    - USB2 support works well
    - Snapshots are not available yet but should be in final
    - There is no import/convertor for Parallels to VMWare. VMWare can probably make it happen, though, if it will help market share
    - Drag and drop works as advertised
  • cmer, on 10/12/2007, -2/+6Bye bye Parallels! While it served its purpose for a few months, I always missed good ol' VMWare! It has much more (useful) features, and better performance, too!
  • antigravity, on 10/12/2007, -7/+2Apple should have bought VMWare long ago and dropped the Windows Version.
    • DAE51D, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6You're a retard. Why would you possibly [a] bite the hand that feeds you and [b] say such an ignorant thing. If it weren't for the x86 (linux/windows) versions, you would NEVER have a Mac version of VMWare.
  • DigitAl56K, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4I just installed the official VMWare package last week and it already let me choose how many CPUs it would emulate.
  • superkendall, on 10/12/2007, -3/+4The first one that brings us full-speed DirectX support wins. Go!
  • DeusMachinae, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3Running it, it is slow as hell. Even dual-core support doesn't help.
  • dr3d, on 10/12/2007, -2/+0Cool .. so I can run OS X in a virtual machine too ?
  • ramsinks.com, on 10/12/2007, -2/+1Lame.
    Notice the "pro's" are each mentioned five times a piece.

    Competition is great, but I wouldn't get my hopes up of being "better" than P.
    Parallels and "converting" current VM's, - I'm sure isn't too far off. ;)

  • goodcompany, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1I can't speak to XP but Vista runs really poorly for me under VMWare on the Mac. Using Parallels it is much faster. I am sure VMWare will speed up over the coming months...but I'm also sure that Parallels is busy working on their version 3.0, which will probably include drag/drop support across host and VM among other things.

    In any case, It's good to have choices and to have competition between the two.
  • inkhead, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4vmware private beta is much slower, and doesn't show nearly the feature set that vmware plans to release.

    Not only that but vmware will allow you to use bootcamp partition, drag and drop into the vm (yes with any os), and will be much, much faster in the future version release to the public.

    I had the privilege of witnessing a private demo at VMware's headquarters of their latest builds, which are much further along than the build that was recently released as a test... Much better, more mac like interface, with sexy graphics, and super fast launching of vms. Not to mention it works with any virtual appliance that vmware makes so you can use all the stuff that workstation for windows already does.

    and to top it off when it's released it will be free.
  • varmit, on 10/12/2007, -2/+1Can this be used on a regular PowerBook. I only want to control my VMware machine remotely, not run one on this machine.
    • varmit, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2Nope, damn it, can't they relase something like VMware server where I can just turn on and off the damn machines without installing the web page manager.
  • streak, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1VMware allows individual virtual machines to be configured with multiple CPUs, a feature I'm drooling to have in Mac OS X.
    But I wonder just how far away from release Fusion is, if it will require Leopard? Software like VMware/Fusion is intimately tied to the host OS, and there are many kernel changes from Tiger to Leopard. It would be very expensive to support both OSes, with a smaller market share for Mac OS X to begin with and Tiger soon to be eclipsed by Leopard. (On the other hand, Mac OS X might be where VMware sees the most aggregate demand for their products, from millions of individual users who want to run Windows or even Linux). VMware first announced their intent to support Mac OS X at WWDC'06, which was also where Leopard was first shown. Maybe, just maybe then, Leopard and Fusion will be released at January's MacWorld Expo.
  • zhulien, on 10/12/2007, -1/+0Fusion is a Mac emulator for AmigaOS. First M$ takes Zune (the AROS GUI) as their name, now VMWare takes Fusion (the Amiga Mac emulator) as their name. What's next?
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