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VMware Fusion brings another virtualization product running on a Mac. With VMware Fusion, Mac users can run Windows, Linux or any other operating system seamlessly on their systems. Maybe it’s a PC game or an application that you want badly running on your Mac. No sweat. There is no need to switch computers or create a dual boot system, just install VMware Fusion and create a new virtual machine. You can even run multiple virtual machines all running different operating systems as long as your Mac has the available memory and the disk space. On top of that, VMware Fusion has a snapshot feature that gives you the ability to rollback to your last saved state.

Features

• Support for Mac OS X Leopard
• Use even more Windows 3D applications and games with experimental support for DirectX 9.0 accelerated 3D graphics (without “shaders”).
• English, French, German, and Japanese versions all in the same download
• Unity in VMware Fusion 1.1 makes Windows on the Mac even more seamless with:
  • Support for Windows Vista 32-bit and 64-bit editions
  • Support for Windows XP 64-bit edition
  • My Computer, My Documents, My Network Places, Control Panel, Run, and Search now appear in the Applications menu, Dock applications menu and Launch Applications window
  • Option to show/hide the Windows taskbar and Start menu in the VMware Fusion View menu
  • VMware Fusion “Launch Applications” window now only appears when you choose
  • Improved performance when resizing and dragging Unity windows
• Boot Camp integration even better with VMware Fusion 1.1:
  • Use Microsoft Vista Boot Camp partitions in VMware Fusion virtual machines
  • Automatically remount the Boot Camp partition after Boot Camp virtual machine is shut down
  • Improved support for detecting and preparing Boot Camp partitions for use as virtual machines
• Other improvements:
  • Ability to sync iPhone with Outlook in Windows virtual machines
  • Eject key now ejects the optical drive when attached to a virtual machine
  • VMware Shared Folders created with Windows Easy Install now defaults to “Read Only” access of the Mac’s home directory for maximum security
  • Option to hide the VMware Fusion status bar to take advantage of more screen real estate
  • Installation status and “out of date” status for VMware Tools made more obvious on status bar
  • Necessity to power off virtual machine to modify virtual hardware settings made more obvious.

Minimum Requirements

• An Intel-based Mac (to run 64-bit operating systems, an Intel Mac with a Core 2 Duo or Xeon processor is required)
• 512MB of RAM (1 GB or more recommended)
• 275MB free disk space for VMware Fusion
• 1GB free disk space for each virtual machine (10 GB or more recommended)
• Mac OS X version 10.4.9 or later

Guest Operating Systems

VMware supports 32-bit or 64-bit guest operating systems. Here’s a list.

• 32-bit guest operating systems
• 64-bit guest operating systems

Where To Buy

VMware Fusion is available for purchase online directly from VMware or from the Apple store, Apple’s retail stores, Amazon.com, Buy.com, CompUSA, MicroCenter, and from over 3000 VMware partners worldwide. VMware is priced at $79.99USD.

Test Drive

You can also test the latest VMWare 1.1 for 30 days trial period. In addition, VMware Fusion 2 Beta 2 is now available for testing as well. Just remember it’s beta and that it may contain a few bugs. Fusion 2 is scheduled for release in a few weeks. If you are looking for open-source equivalent, check out VirtualBox by Sun Microsystems.