VMware Fusion 3

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The guys at VMware have really improved VMware Fusion.

Most of the claimed improvements were apparently made for Windows 7, which I’m not running yet, but it’s a major improvement even without that. With version 2 (at least on this MacBook Pro), hard drive accesses from the VMs were extremely slow, though the virtual machines ran at essentially bare-metal speeds otherwise. I bought version 3 very early yesterday, and after fixing a minor problem with the VMware Tools installation script on Ubuntu 9.04 64-bit, it ran beautifully — and disk accesses are much faster now, with both it and my Windows XP VMs. Ridiculously so, in fact… they seem to be at near-bare-metal speeds too now.

I’m seeing some odd behaviors with memory on my Ubuntu (64-bit) VM. Memory usage climbs to well over 90% usage over about fifteen seconds sometimes, for no apparent reason, then later drops back to less than 50% at about the same rate — again, for no reason I can find. But the VM seems to work fine throughout it, so maybe it’s not a problem.

In addition to the speed improvements, several minor irritations when running some programs have been fixed: shift-select operations (which didn’t work at all in v2), Windows mouse cursor stuff (the cursor would appear in odd colors, or only appear as a solid black block, in 8-bit color mode in v2 — required by some games), and various occasional screen resolution bugs. Probably others too, those are just the ones that I’ve noticed so far.

I’m very happy with the upgrade. Well worth the money, in my opinion.

3 Comments

  1. I don’t think it’ll run 64 bit operating systems without intel-VT though, like VMWare Fusion 2, which means that it won’t run my Windows Vista or Windows 7 64 bit partition (free upgrade will be 64 bit too), though I can live with it running 32 bit Linux.

  2. I don’t know the technical details, only that it has no problem with 64-bit Ubuntu 9.04 on this MacBook Pro (which presumably does have Intel-VT). I only have one other 64-bit computer; it’s more than five years old now, and is pretty slow (64-bit Windows XP had just come out when I got it), so I rarely turn it on for anything.

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