June 24

vmwarefusion: @bethejustin Staaaaayyyy tuned... ; )

vmwarefusion: New Blog Post! Replace your blurry, ugly Windoze icons in Fusion with pretty Mac ones: http://snurl.com/2o6za

vmwarefusion: @olleolleolle Hey! Glad we won out. What made you ditch them for Fusion?

vmwarefusion: @tossayo Eek! It's a trap! Nope. VMware Fusion 2.0 will be a free upgrade from VMware Fusion 1.x for all useres.

vmwarefusion: @BadServo You have the option to synch clocks turned on in VMware Tools?

February 5

To help support a more rich blogging experience for our readers, we've decided to move our team blog over the VMware's typepad implementation. From here on out, the Fusion blog will be located here: http://blogs.vmware.com/teamfusion/

Come check us out!

January 12

This time last year, we had just shipped our first public beta of VMware for the Mac, codenamed "Fusion" and I had just joined VMware and the Mac team right before Macworld. VMware had its first Macworld booth ever and the Mac team talked to thousands of Mac users looking for a way to run Windows on their Mac (or maybe they talked to us get the free t-shirt that we gave away! )

The Mac team came away from Macworld pumped and got back to work making VMware for the Mac even better. We added DirectX 8.1 accelerated 3D graphics , the first hardware acclerated 3D graphics in the Mac virtualization market when released in beta 2 in February 2007. In April, we announced we had a name for our Mac product: VMware Fusion (TM). In June, with beta 4 we introduced Unity , the most seamless way to run Windows applications like Mac applications. In the end, there were over 250,000 beta downloads of VMware Fusion before we launched VMware Fusion 1.0.

On August 6, 2007 we launched VMware Fusion 1.0 and brought the following exclusive features to the Mac platform that still aren't shipping today in other products including a Cocoa-native user interface with customizable toolbars, support for 2-way Virtual SMP for multiple processors in a virtual machine, ability to run both 32-bit and 64-bit operating systems in a virtual machine, and no limits on the number of virtual machines runnings at a time, you are limited only by available memory.

In November 2007, we released VMware Fusion 1.1 which added experimental support for DirectX 9.0 (without shaders) 3D graphics, full support for Mac OS X Leopard, and simultanously shipped a single installer for English, French, German, and Japanese. In addition, we also released beta 1 of VMware Importer , which allows you to easily migrate your Parallels Desktop for Mac virtual machines to VMware Fusion.

Earlier this week, we released beta 2 of VMware Importer which adds support for importing Virtual PC 7.0 for Mac virtual machines in addition to improving support for importing Parallels Desktop for Mac virtual machines. I recommended checking out VMware Importer , it is great tool to get you up and running in VMware Fusion quickly.

It was been an incredibly busy year and I can't be prouder of being part of the Mac team at VMware. The Mac team is building products that we as Mac users want to use and are happy our users love. The acceptance of the VMware Fusion to date has been incredible. Thank you to the Mac community for your support so far.

VMware Fusion received many great reviews including three I want to call out:

Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal said "Fusion has a much smaller impact on the Mac’s overall performance"

Rob Griffiths at Macworld said "I currently prefer Fusion for its low impact on other OS X applications, support for multiple virtual CPUs, and huge library of virtual appliances."

Daniel Begun at CNET Crave said "From a pure performance perspective, Fusion proves to be a faster performing platform than Parallels. Additionally, in our anecdotal hands-on testing we found Fusion to be somewhat more stable than Parallels"

In addition to the many great reviews, VMware Fusion has won eight awards to date including the 2007 Macworld Eddy! See below for the list of awards won so far:

2007 Macworld Editor's Choice Award
2007 Pogie (David Pogue of New York Times Technology Award)
Macworld UK Editor's Choice
PC Pro Recommended (PC Pro UK)
Amazon's Best of 2007
Lifehacker Top 10 New and Improved Apps of 2007
Redmond Magazine Editor's Choice Award - Biggest \\\\\\"Wow\\" in an IT product
IT Enquirer Editor's Choice

We can't thank the Mac community enough for how you have embraced VMware Fusion and we look forward to making 2008 an even better year for Mac users.

Please come by our Macworld booth to meet me, Pete, and other members of the Mac team, we are in booth #2717 .

Pat

January 11

The VMware Fusion team is proud to announce the release of VMware Importer Beta 2, for the importation of third-party Mac-based virtual machines to run using VMware Fusion.

We're especially excited about this release, as users can now import virtual machines created with *Virtual PC 7.0 for Mac*!

Even though we live and breath Intel-based Macs here on Team Fusion, it's important to remember that Intel-Macs have only been around for a little under two years now.

That means there's a lot of Mac users out there using Virtual PC 7.0 on their trusty PowerBook, iBooks, G4 and G5 Towers, and more. When it comes time to upgrade to a shiny new Intel-Mac, well, we on Team Fusion want those users to have a smooth upgrade process to the most seamless way to run Windows on a Mac.

VMware Importer Beta 2 allows for the importation of Virtual PC 7.0-based virtual machines with the following operating systems:

1. Windows 2000 Service Pack 4
2. Windows XP Service Pack 2
3. Windows Server 2003

VMware Importer Beta 2 also lets users import virtual machines created using Parallels Desktop for Mac 2.5 and 3.0, including:

1. Windows 2000 Service Pack 4
2. Windows XP Service Pack 2
3. Windows Server 2003
4. Windows Vista

Check out the VMware Importer Beta 2 landing page here, and give it a whirl!

And, as always, users looking to convert a physical PC to run as a virtual machine under VMware Fusion can use VMware Converter Starter Edition to do just that in a snap.

Questions and comments are always welcome at the VMware Fusion community forums, where Fusion users come to talk Mac virtualization.

January 9

It might not be a moose, but it's still pretty cool. VMware Fusion was named to Amazon's Editor's Pick \\"Best of 2007\\" list, along with other notables like Mac OS 10.5 Leopard, Dragon Naturally Speaking for Vista Ultimate (which will run under VMware Fusion) and more!

Amazon is a great partner, and we've always been happy to see ourselves consisently up on their constantly updated "Mac Software Bestsellers" (as of today, we're #4, just behind Microsoft Office 2008 and 2004 for Mac and Mac OS X Leopard...great company to keep!) all while gettting solid user reviews.

Thinking it's probably gonna be a tough row to hoe to get past Mac OS X Leopard and Microsoft Office for Mac, be it 2004 or 2008*. But a guy can dream, right?

*But why run Office for Mac, when you can run your current office for Windows, under VMware Fusion? ; )

Combing through my Google Alerts this morning, I was pleased to see that VMware Fusion had garnered another positive product review in the blogosphere .

I was that much more excited when I clicked through, only to realize that the Alaskan Apple Users Group had awarded VMware Fusion their highest accolade for a Mac software product: the fabled "Five Mooses" (pictured above).

Excellent! The team is honored to add another positive highlight to the growing stack of reviews and award, and would like to thank the Alaskan Apple User's Group and the reviewer, Ronald Schoedel, for their support!

January 4

The awards keep coming fast and furious at the end of the year.

The latest? Redmond Magazine ("The Independent Voice of the Microsoft IT Community") has awarded VMware Fusion (and VMware ESX Server, and VMware Workstation...I see a trend...) an Editor's Choice Award .

The best part? We won the "Biggest 'Wow' in an IT Product" award (i.e. "Your jaw just dropped when you first used this product"), beating out Vista's "Instant Search" and Ubuntu 7.04.

Before everyone says it, yes Redmond Magazine is a pretty geeky enterprise IT publication, but we'll wear that as a badge of honor. VMware has had great success over the years by winning the hearts and minds of Sys Admins the world over, making their lives easier and helping them get things done, first with VMware Workstation, then VMware GSX, and then with VMware ESX Server and VMware Infrastructure.

We're honored to be noted by the IT geek community, and hope that as more and more Macs, both personal and company-owned start flooding into the corporate IT environment, they'll think of VMware Fusion as the most seamless way to run Windows apps and peripherals on those shiny new Macs, using XP and Vista virtual machines they already built with VMware Workstation.

Welcome to the new blog for the VMware Fusion team here at VMware. We'll be covering all sorts of topics on the blog, from the product itself, Mac virtualization as a larger space, "Fusion in the news," and more. Pretty much anything we want to have an open conversation about, we'll try to get up here to spur it on.

Up to this point, we've been using the main VMware VMTN blog as our "home away from home" and had some success with some fairly well-received posts like "Top Ten Things You Can Do with VMware Fusion on Your Mac " (front page of Digg! W00t!) and others. But it's time for us to move out on our own. We'll still show up there from time to time, but our goal is to have a place on the web that is "all Fusion, all the time." And this blog will aim to be that.

We'll see what sort of cast of characters we get up on here. We'll definitely see our fair share of Pete Kazanjy, as the product marketing lead (hi!), my boss, Pat Lee, our product management lead, and Group Manager of Consumer Products at VMware. But ideally we'll be getting some of our rock star engineers up here too. You may have met Ben Gertzfield already, either through his blog, or other places on the web, like this killer tech talk he gave at Google on "Inside VMware Fusion ." Or Regis Duchesne , another one of our coding machines.

Of course, there's a whole slew of others here "behind the curtain" and hopefully I'll be able to get them out here to have a chat and talk some about what we're doing.

As always, feedback is gladly appreciated. Feel free to note in the comments things you'd like to see us cover!

~Pete Kazanjy
VMware Fusion Product Marketing