First Looks: VMWare Fusion

In preparation for my monthly trips to Vancouver to appear on the Lab with Leo I installed the latest and greatest for the Mac from VMWare, Fusion. Suffice to say that only using this product for only the past 12 hours has already lead me to completely remove my install of Parallels.

Now don’t get me wrong, Parallels is a great product and work well but when you have an industry heavy weight in the virtualization world drop a hammer like Fusion things are bound to rock.

Right off the bat I’ve noticed a serious speed gain with Fusion, now I don’t have any detailed numbers, but just watching the system load brings quite a difference in speed as a factor.

If you already have a lot of work put into your virtual machine in Parallels and don’t want to start from scratch, you can follow a detailed step by step on VMWare’s forums to bring your Parallels machine over to Fusion. Take it from me; it’s not for the faint of heart but it works.

Then there’s Fusion’s amazing Unity feature, which allows you to run Windows applications side by side with you Mac applications. From what I’ve seen so far it’s even better than Parallels Coherence mode.

As a final thought; virtualization on the Intel based Macs is still at it’s infancy. First we had this break through product Parallels that allowed us to run other operating systems on our machines, then came Fusion with the entire stable code base that VMWare has become famous for. What will we see next year? Maybe operating systems that boot at the same time and can run seamlessly together. Only time will tell.

Frank's the editor in chief of tech.nocr.at. He can be found surfing the internet and playing with gadgets. Follow him on twitter @franklinhares