Millwood Online

As a new user I cannot compare VMware Fusion with VMware Fusion 2 Beta, but so far I'm impressed. I am running Windows XP pro on a Mac Pro and Ubuntu on a Macbook Pro and both were very easy to setup and configure.

Windows XP
When installing XP I selected the ISO image it knew I was looking to install XP and by using the easy install setting I was able to choose display name, password and enter product key all within VMware's New Virtual Machine Assistant. On the next scren I was able to select my sharing choice, the choice was mirror folders, where all my Mac folders where the same on XP, share home folder, where a link to my Mac folder appeared in XP, or none. I chose to Mirror folders and it works great, my desktop and my documents are the same on both Mac and XP it makes sharing files between the two a breeze. The next step displays the virtual machine default settings, with an option to customise them. When customising it is possible select how the network, printers and folders are shared as well as how many processer cores and how much ram XP is able to use.

When clicking finish the virtual machine fires up and the installation begins. This is very painless becuase I specified many of the setting before hand.

Standard Vs. Unity
There are two ways to run Windows using VMware fusion, Standard or Unity. Untity allows Windows to run invisibly, this means that Windows applications can run as if they were Mac apps. They can appear in the dock and be ran along side mac apps. It works very well especially if you have mirrored folders so the XP / Mac line is blurred even more.

Although, whilst running this Beta of Fusion 2 for the last week or so I have had more crashes, and speed issues whilst running in unity mode. So I have resorted back to running the application in the Windows XP window.

Ubuntu
If I didn't have an iPhone that needed all the iTunes support I would probally run Ubuntu as my opperating system of choice. Apart from the work it takes to find drivers and plug-ins (like with all flavours of Linux) there isn't a bad work to say about it.

So from a virtualisation point of view from within VMware Fusion 2 it was just as good. It runs very fast, and is very responsive. The setup is a little different because there is no easy install options or folder mirroring. Although the virtual machine settings can be customised to share folders, printers and networks as well as the processer and ram settings. Once the virtual machine is up and running it is just like running an installation of Ubuntu on a real machine. There is supposedly buggy Unity support now for Linux in VMware Fusion 2, but I have not yet tested it. I may have to have another look into it and report back.

Summary
Overall VMware Fusion 2 is a great bit of software and maybe not a must have for Mac users, but very useful for me. I work in near 99% Windows XP office and some things just won't work on a Mac. Also as a web developer testing on other platforms is a must. This enables all the platforms ever needed on one machine.

Yes it is a little buggy, but its a Beta. If these bugs get ironed out in the final release 5/5.