VMware Fusion 4 Released | Hacker News Reader

VMware Fusion 4 Released

vmware.com

48 pointssciurus39 comments

They seems to change the EULA to allow installing on as may Macs as long as you own it[1], compared to previous license[2]:

    You are prohibited from installing and using the Software on more than one computer at a time

[1]: http://twitter.com/#!/VMwareFusion/status/113994645062684672

[2]: http://www.vmware.com/download/eula/fusion3.html

Can't edit my comment for some reason, but EULA now reads (from VMware Fusion 4 installation):

    VMware Fusion
    
    You may install and use the Software for personal, non-commercial use
    on any Apple-branded products running Mac OS X (“Mac Computer”) that
    you own or control.

Did they discontinue academic pricing? Anyway, Coupon: "FUSION20" gives you a 20% discount.

Looks like they have academic pricing, but it's the same as the promo price. $49.99: http://www.vmware.com/vmwarestore/academicstore.html

Release notes

https://www.vmware.com/support/fusion4/doc/releasenotes_fusi...

It runs Windows 8.

http://twitter.com/#!/VMwareFusion/status/113988639339450368

Mac OS X Lion and Mac OS X Lion Server are now supported as guest operating systems. Mac OS X Lion can be installed by dragging the Lion installer icon to the virtual machine wizard.

Nice! So, how exactly does one do this? The Lion Installer seems to be gone from my system since I upgraded to Lion...

Re-download Lion from the Mac App Store. You'll find it under the "Purchases" section. Everything in that section can be re-downloaded and reinstalled for free.

VMWare Fusion 3 customers, no need to fret. Unless you purchased after July 20th, you get to pay full price just like everyone else. ( I'd be happy to be wrong, but at this point, I feel a tad betrayed. To the point that I am considering dumping Fusion )

$49 full price isn't that bad compared to Parallels 7. Not only you have to pay $49 for an upgrade, it will also slow down your boot time drastically[1]. VMware Fusion user can get P7 for $29[2] but from my experience I'd rather not switch.

I upgrade to P7 few days ago, and today I'm switching to Fusion 4 hope to never become Parallel's customer again. (Unrelated note, it took Parallels 7 hours to send me an upgrade key after purchase while it only took VMware 3 hours to answer my question regarding Fusion 4.)

[1]: http://forum.parallels.com/showthread.php?t=113543

[2]: http://www.parallels.com/products/desktop/vmwareoffer/

That is an entirely fair point. I was going off the memory of an $80 price point from 2, and a fairly cheap-sh upgrade to 3.

[edit - instead of replying to myself]

In any case, I'll hold off a patch release or two. Heck, I haven't even installed Lion yet on my primary dev machine.

On my account page, license section, they've put this notice:

"Upgrades for the following products: View 5, Fusion 4, Workstation 8, Site Recovery Manager 5, and vFabric will be available on the licensing portal by the week of 9/19. If you have questions, please contact License support."

So maybe upgrade prices will be available next week.

Thank You!

Wow, from [1]:

I've been experiencing the same issue...this was the response from tech support.

"As I understand the issue that since upgrading from 6 to 7, OSX now requires login twice with filevault2 startup volume, and takes much longer to boot.

I regret the inconvenience caused.

In order to resolve the issue, please follow the steps given below:

1. Click on Apple icon on Menu bar and select 'System Preferences'.

2. Under 'Personal' you can see an option 'Security & Privacy' click on it.

3. Select 'FileVault' tab there you can see 'Turn off FileVault'.

Really, that is their solution? Ouch!

I am in similar situation. I thought there was 30 day money back guarantee on Parallels 7 - anyone has an idea how easy/hard Parallel's return process is?

I've been using Fusion since it first came out and disappointed there is no upgrade pricing.

I don't use it as much anymore and don't see 4 as compelling enough to upgrade at full price, so will be passing on it for now.

Full price of $49? Or just plug in the fusion20 code and pay $39. It seems it's really the other way around and that they are giving everyone the upgrade price until the end of the year.

I just logged in to vmware.com as I bought old Fusion. There is a message below. So an upgrade is coming.

>Upgrade Entitlements Timing >Upgrades for the following products: View 5, Fusion 4, Workstation 8, Site >Recovery Manager 5, and vFabric will be available on the licensing portal by the week of 9/19.

Does anyone know if this supports the the vmwgfx Gallium3D driver for accelerated opengl in linux guests?

UPDATE: VMware responded (within 6 minutes) on Twitter and the answer is no. https://twitter.com/#!/vmwarefusion/status/11402734522400768...

As a new Mac convert, why would one use this, instead of VirtualBox?

I've had VirtualBox freeze on me a few times in just the last month or so I've tried it, but can't remember any Fusion lock-ups in almost 2 years of use.

That's the reason I've switched to Fusion - too many of those random freezes was too much for my virtual Windows to handle, and it just plain stopped working. File system or disk image corruption, most likely.

Fusion and Parallels both are a bit faster than VirtualBox and have more features.

Also, VMWare VMs will work with any VMWare product so if you are working with a team that uses VMWare elsewhere its nice to have.

If you are just trying to run a Windows app or two you are probably better off with VirtualBox since its free.

Except for OSX VMs built using Fusion's built-in capabilities. The other VMware products don't ship the required libraries to boot them.

You have to downgrade the vmx to prep a fusion vm to be loaded into esx. Or you can download the vmware convertor app that will transfer the vm, convert the vmx, and register the vm in esx.

I use the application weekly for this task.

I meant OSX as a guest OS.

For that you'll need a machine with SMC and only Macs have it.

My reason: I've been using VirtualBox for running dev server environments. What happened: VM shutdowns, without any way to start them again (buttons just gray), files corrupted, interfaces lost, ....

Because of freezes and VM corruption. I've been using Fusion for years and never had any problems. It's worth the $40 (look around for a $10 off coupon code), if you're using the VMs for anything more than hobby/testing random OSes.

I prefer VMware's method of handling dual screen guests better. VirtualBox creates two windows that each have to be manually full screened, Fusion just magically handles both monitors from the same window when you tell it to use both in full screen.

Fusion is much more "Mac-like" and feels at home on OSX. Virtual Box is great if you can't afford something else (and often sufficient), but Virtual Box on OSX feels too much like Virtual Box on Windows or Linux, it just feels slightly out of place.

Free update for those who bought Fusion 3 after the release of Lion! [1]. No word on pricing for old clients as of yet.

[1]: https://twitter.com/#!/VMwareFusion/status/11410952248165990...

What happen with DirectX 11?

"The WDDM driver for Windows 7 and Vista now includes support for DirectX 9.0EX with Aero and OpenGL 2.1. Windows XP now includes support for DirectX 9.0c and OpenGL 2.1."

I've just given it a quick go and gone straight back to v3. Fusion on Lion still lacks native full screen and the interface feels a lot slower. Nevermind, maybe a rush to compete with Parallels?

I wish Fusion worked half as well as VMware Workstation does on Windows. OS X's memory management appears to shoulder most of the blame.

Darwin loves to hold on to recently wired memory as long as possible and does not gracefully dump out 2GB of inactive memory at a moments notice. The performance of snapshots as well as multiple VMs even inside 8GB of RAM totally sucks compared to workstation.

Still no 3D support on linux, and I don't see any mention of pause/resume support for Boot Camp partitions. Disappointing. Parallels has had both of these for a while.

Useful (but not updated for 4): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_VMware_Fusion_and...

There's a good reason why you can't. If you suspend Boot Camp in VMware and then try and reboot into it it could cause corruption of your Boot Camp partition. If you really want to do it though I seem to remember reading about a plist tweak that adds the options back in.

Edit: http://communities.vmware.com/thread/108022

VMware Fusion 4 has a migration utility to upgrade from 3, really nice

http://twitpic.com/6kwhhs

I tried out P7 when it was released, and immediately migrated back to Fusion 4 today when it came out.

I don't even get how people can use VMware. I've tried it on my macbook and it's unbearably slow. I bought a cheap PC off of craigslist because VMware was too slow to use. 4 gigs of ram and still lagged like all hell.

I found my 2010 MacBook Pro with 4Gb unbearably slow even without running VMware Fusion. Mac OS X really requires 8Gb these days, unless you're running an SSD.

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