CompFusion

Snow Leopard Update

2009-03-16T15:23:00.000-07:00

If you want to run the latest seed build of Mac OS X Server Snow Leopard (at the time of this post) in a VMware Fusion 2.0.2 virtual machine, then read this VMware Fusion forum post.

twoOHtwo

2009-02-13T00:45:00.000-08:00

VMware has released Fusion 2.0.2, a free upgrade for all Fusion users.

I contributed a few enhancements to that release:

Support for .dmg files as CD/DVD images

You can now use regular (unencrypted) .dmg files on your physical machine to install software in your virtual machines. You do not have to convert a .dmg file to a .iso/.cdr file, or burn the .dmg file to a physical CD/DVD anymore.

Support for Mac OS X Server 10.5.6 guests

In a previous post, I recommended you refrain from upgrading your virtual machines to Mac OS X Server 10.5.6. You can now safely do it.

Support for Mac OS X Server Snow Leopard guests

From searching the web, it appears that Apple has seeded at least 3 different builds of Snow Leopard:

1. This one

2. This one

3. This one

I have verified that Fusion 2.0.2 works quite well with build #2 above, with the exception of Shared Folders (which are disabled).

But unfortunately Fusion 2.0.2 cannot boot build #3 above yet. So it seems that I have some more work to do for the next maintenance release of Fusion.

Mind the update

2008-12-16T02:20:00.000-08:00

Apple released Mac OS X Server 10.5.6 today.

If you are using VMware Fusion 2.0 or 2.0.1, VMware recommends that you do not update your existing Mac OS X Server 10.5.x virtual machines to version 10.5.6 at this point. For details, hit this link.

The next maintenance release of VMware Fusion will take care of this issue.

Have a safe browse!

2008-08-12T04:22:00.000-07:00

At the Black Hat USA 2008 conference, Alexander Sotirov (full disclosure: Alexander works for VMware, Inc.) presented a novel way to bypass the web browser's security mechanisms in Vista (slides, paper).

While this does not mean Vista's security is game over, it does highlight how important it is to run your browser in a virtual machine to protect yourself against any browser vulnerability.

VMware Fusion 2.0 makes it so easy for you that it is just not worth taking any risk: click on a web link on the host, and the web page automatically opens in a browser in a virtual machine (video, application for web developers).

The Cat Is In The Bag

2008-07-31T12:26:00.000-07:00

Well, my precious is out, so now you too can play with True Leopard Server virtualization.

VMware Fusion 2.0 beta 2 supports running Mac OS X 10.5 Server inside a virtual machine on any decent Mac OS X version on the host:

Latest Tiger
Latest Leopard
Even the latest Snow Leopard!

To help you avoid the quirks of this beta, and until we fix them, the Fusion team has created a document that describes how to get the best out of your Mac OS X Server virtual machine.

But VMware Fusion 2.0 beta 2 does not stop there. Here are the videos demonstrating its numerous new features, such as:

Multiple snapshots
DirectX 9 Shader Model 2 support
Keyboard and mouse shortcuts mapping
Improved host/guest integration
Improved performance

We hope you will enjoy using it as much as we enjoyed making it!

True Leopard Server virtualization

2008-01-19T15:35:00.000-08:00

On the outside, Mac OS X looks beautiful. No wonder a lot of people want to run it.

Mid-August 2005, crackers from the OSx86 Project take a version of Mac OS X already installed on a physical hard drive, copy it into a virtual hard drive, modify it to run in a VMware virtual machine, and distribute it on the Internet, hence allowing unscrupulous individuals to run what they claim is Mac OS X on any PC with VMware software.

In the following days, they refine the process: they take the Apple install DVD for Mac OS X, copy it into an ISO image, modify it to run on any PC, distribute it on the Internet, allowing unscrupulous individuals to run what they claim is Mac OS X on any PC.

But is it really Mac OS X these people are running? Of course not. It is an illegal modification and distribution of Apple's copyrighted work. It is dubbed a hackintosh.

Fast forward to the end of October 2007: Apple releases Mac OS X Server 10.5, and change its licensing terms, allowing it to be run inside a virtual machine, as long as the physical hardware is an Apple-labeled computer.

From that point on, things happen very fast. I have been primarily working on that in the last seven weeks, and it was quite stressing :)

End of December 2007, Alex Graf demonstrates at 24C3 QEMU running Mac OS X. This is true virtualization (it is running the unmodified OS), so this is promising, but quite a few things do not work:

You cannot install Mac OS from the Apple factory-sealed DVD.

100% of the CPU is consumed.

No networking.

No rosetta (i.e. no support for PowerPC-only binaries).

On Jan 9th 2008, Parallels announces that they can run Mac OS X Server in a private beta version of their software. They subsequently demonstrate that capability at Macworld. They do not publicize the extent of their virtual hardware support, but various sources report that, like QEMU, they fail to install Mac OS from the Apple factory-sealed DVD.

On Jan 14th 2008, VMware announces and demonstrate at Macworld that they can, in a Technology Preview version of VMware Fusion:

Install Mac OS X Server from the Apple factory-sealed DVD.

Run Mac OS X Server with support for most virtual devices: mouse and keyboard, IDE and SCSI hard drives and optical devices, Gigabit ethernet, USB 2.0 devices. Sound is not working at this point, but who needs sound in a server anyway? :)

Virtual Leopard Server Gets Legit

Show floor video: VMWare demos virtualization of Mac OS X Server

Macworld: VMWare Fusion's Virtual Insanity

Usability is everything

2007-12-08T14:53:00.000-08:00

In the video below, somebody combined 3 ideas

Use the accelerometer in your Mac to detect a tap
Use a tap to switch Spaces (Apple's marketing speak for "virtual desktops")
Run Windows in VMware Fusion, on one Space, in full screen mode

And came up with a nice solution to the usability problem of working with several computers.

Abstract objects, when manipulated using tools available to us in the real world, immediately become much more concrete.

Watch innovation in action! The video begins with the nitty gritty implementation details. Skip to 1:50 to watch the demo.

Tetris book shelves

2007-11-09T22:12:00.000-08:00

We moved in our new, green, beautiful campus a few months ago.

But a few days ago, somebody decided that the whole company really needed ugly bookshelves which look terrible in an otherwise classy building.

So a few members of the Hosted UI team (the team which encompasses the Fusion UI team) took on hacking the shelves, in honor of the famous Russian game on which we spent so many hours as kids.

I'm starting to think that this team has too much time on its hands. Get back to work already!

One more reason not to use Boot Camp

2007-09-14T22:49:00.000-07:00

One of our customers recently complained that VMware Fusion was preventing Windows XP to see all the RAM available in his Mac when booting natively from the Boot Camp partition. This didn't make any sense to me, so I investigated.

It turned out that VMware Fusion was not the cause of the problem. Apple's Boot Camp was the cause of the problem:
I've got 3GB of RAM in my MP, yet WinXP only recognizes 2GB.

It seems the issue affects all versions of the Apple software (up to 1.4 as of this writing). It might be a problem in the legacy BIOS part of the Mac's EFI.

Funnily enough, it also turned out that VMware Fusion was a solution to the problem. When booting your Boot Camp partition in VMware Fusion, Windows XP will see exactly the amount of RAM you have configured for that virtual machine, and you can crank that value up to 3.6 GB, at which point you will hit Windows XP's limit (the article claims the limit is 4 GB, but it actually is 3.6 GB).

So if you were planning to run a memory-intensive workload (like a database or a digital media authoring application) in Windows XP natively on a Mac, consider doing it in VMware Fusion instead.

For almost all devices, a VMware Fusion virtual machine is actually closer to a PC than an Intel-based Mac is. Currently there is one obvious exception to this rule: modern 3D GPUs. But if you attended VMworld 2007, you might have seen that we are actively working on removing that last hurdle...

Delivery

2007-08-06T20:32:00.000-07:00

In January 2006, I started porting the VMware hosted virtualization engine to Mac OS X by myself. I had never touched an Apple computer before.

A year and a half later, we have built a world-class team of Mac engineers, and on behalf of the team I'm happy to announce the general availability of VMware Fusion 1.0.

It has been quite an adventure, with its share of frustrations and nights of sleep deprivation, but there is nothing like user satisfaction to make you forget about it. The fine folks over at MacInTouch certainly seem to enjoy it:

we're quite impressed with Fusion. Windows integration is excellent, and the fact that Linux has VMware Tools integration at all is fantastic — not to mention support for less common OS's
[...]
Fusion is an outstanding first release for the Mac that builds on the company's long history of virtualization.
[...]
the development team focusses on stability and reliability.
[...]
VMware appears to be rock solid. The user interface is polished, attractive and well thought out, and the setup assistant makes it fast and easy to set up a usable Windows environment. Fusion makes Windows behave as close to a Mac as is reasonably possible — and that's really quite something.

Effective now, you can order from

By mid-August, you will also be able to buy the Fusion box at any of these stores: Apple retail stores, Fry's, Office Depot, Staples, CompUSA, Best Buy, Buy.com, Microcenter, ...

In his blog, Srinivas gives more info about the design of the box.

Buy one, get half of one free

2007-08-01T23:54:00.000-07:00

"The Kingmaker: Walt Mossberg makes or breaks products from his pundit perch at a little rag called The Wall Street Journal", Wired, May, 2004.

Well, Walt gave his verdict on VMware Fusion:

I've been testing Fusion, and I've found it works well. [...] Fusion is allowing me to simultaneously run several popular Windows programs -- Microsoft Outlook, Windows Media Player and Internet Explorer. Each is running in its own window, just as if it were a native Mac program. I can switch from one to the other rapidly and smoothly. Their icons show up on the Mac's "Dock," just like the icons for Mac programs.

Hurry up! Time is running out to buy VMware Fusion at $ 40! Really soon, it will only be available at its normal $ 80 retail price! Consider yourself warned... :)

One step closer

2007-06-07T23:10:00.000-07:00

If you enjoyed the Unity in VMware Fusion video we released yesterday, you will be happy to learn that you can now try it for yourself!

That is right, VMware Fusion beta 4 is fresh out of the oven. Go get it!

Of course, this is a beta, so things are still a bit rough around the edges, but it will only improve from there, and as usual your feedback will drive how we prioritize improvements.

Starting with VMware Fusion beta 4, we have begun the performance tuning. Among other things, we have dramatically improved the speed at which you can move or resize guest windows. Try it!

For a more complete list of the things we have improved in VMware Fusion beta 4, I encourage you to take a look at the release notes.

Leapfrogged!

2007-06-07T00:01:00.000-07:00

In an interview with Ars Technica, our esteemed Mac competitor's Director of Corporate Communications, Ben Rudolph, said

Coherence is one of the great things that we have done that VMware has not done yet ...

Our customers agreed with that statement.

... although maybe they are looking at something like that

Our customers told us they loved the feature. We listen to our customers: if we don't take care of them, somebody else will. So you bet we have looked at something like that.

While our Mac competitor was busy fighting a threatening lawsuit and cloning our Multiple Snapshots feature, we have been busy cloning their Coherence feature. That is only fair game. In the end the customer benefits.

But we didn't stop at copying the feature. We went ahead and improved on it. Introducing Unity in VMware Fusion. Taking a page from the highly successful 3D support in VMware Fusion video (190 000 viewers so far), we decided to make an official video of Unity in VMware Fusion. Me and 3 other Mac teammates had a blast producing it. If you like it, digg it!

So yes Scott, this is very real. Competition is a good thing indeed, and it has just started...

Did I mention we are hiring? If you are a kick-ass Mac OS X developer looking for a challenging job in a pre-IPO company, send your resume my way.

Double Dragon

2007-02-07T19:50:00.000-08:00

Today was one of these surreal days where you are high on adrenaline and nothing gets accomplished.

First, at 12.59 PM Pacific Time (i.e. exactly 1 minute before the East-Coast-based market closed) VMware's President announced that EMC, VMware's parent company, would sell 10% of VMware in an Initial Public Offering. Apparently, that is what Wall Street wanted, as the EMC stock price immediately gained 7% in after-hours trading.

Second, the cat came out of the bag. Somebody managed to get a hand on an internal beta build of VMware Fusion whose UI offers a way to accelerate 3D graphics in virtual machines, and even made a video of some serious 3D gaming action in Fusion.

This video kind of caught us by surprise. The timing is somewhat bad, because one piece of news shadows the other.

I have been looking for clues in the video to find out who made it. The video is clearly amateur:

No tripod was used. The image constantly drifts as if somebody was trying to hold the camcorder still.
The transition effects are typical of off-the-shelf iMovie on the Mac.
The video is a bit too long at times, some sequences could have been shortened.

The author of this video (a woman if the female voice-over is any indication?) is obviously a dedicated VMware and Mac zealot. While I wish we had done this video ourselves, given how well the video has been received so far, I can only say "Thank You".

VMware products have had a semi-hidden switch for some sort of 3D support in virtual machines on Linux and Windows since VMware Workstation 5.0, which was released almost 2 years ago (April 2005).

Since then, work on the 3D front has been progressing steadily, with DirectX 8.1 support in VMware Workstation 6 and VMware Fusion (both are built from the same code base).

Internally, our goal is to support DirectX 9 for Windows Vista's Aero.

Update: Renamed iVideo to iMovie.

Update: Aero requires DirectX 9, not 10.

Ship it

2007-01-04T00:03:00.000-08:00

I spent a significant part of yesterday loading virtual appliances onto an iMac to demo VMware Fusion at Macworld (Jan 8th - 12th, Moscone Center, San Francisco, CA). Just in time: the box shipped today!

If you want any of these:

Learn more about global virtualization leader VMware
Discover the power of Fusion
Share your experience so far using the beta version of Fusion
Chat with members of the Fusion team around a beer
Win cool stuff
Land a challenging Mac job at a fast-growing company

Then swing by VMware's booth S339. I hope to see most of you forum posters there!

Buckle up!

2006-12-22T21:09:00.000-08:00

The reception of our VMware Fusion for Mac beta has been unbelievable!

Ben's blog entry describes it better than I ever could.

Today I have worked towards solving the issues 3 and 4 he mentions. Issue 4 turned out to be an Apple bug.

You guys, Mac lovers, have no life! You should be in the middle of preparing your end-of-the-year celebrations instead of trying out VMware virtual machines on the Mac! Well, I plea guilty too: I spent the rest of the day thanking you for your feedback and responding to it.

Headless virtual machines in Fusion? Check!

One of you was complaining about the fact that Fusion didn't have all the new and nifty features of VMware Workstation 6, in particular the ability to run a virtual machine headless, a typical use scenario if your virtual machine runs a bunch of server processes, for example if it is a virtual appliance.

Well, it turns out that we did build that feature in Fusion, but it is kind of indirectly exposed. We have confidence in our user interface code, but as the saying goes:

No program is completely bug-free until the last user dies.

We knew you guys would push the Fusion user interface and potentially crash it. When that happens, you gentle user are annoyed, and we developers are embarrassed. The last thing we want in that case is to also lose whatever you were doing in your virtual machines.

So we actually implemented the headless feature in Fusion: if the user interface crashes, then we make sure all your virtual machines immediately become headless. That way, all you have to do is restart the user interface, re-open your virtual machines, and you see them exactly where you left them off!

The corollary feature is that if you want to start a virtual machine headless in Fusion, all you have to do is open it up in the user interface, then go to the Apple menu and select the "Force Quit..." item.

This is the design philosophy we have adopted everywhere for Fusion:

Keep the user interface dead simple and easy to use for users who use a Mac because they just want their computer to work.
Expose the power of the VMware platform for technical users and developers.

Good Day

2006-12-21T19:45:00.000-08:00

Exactly 1 year ago, after having spent 7 years at VMware, I wanted to do something new. My manager was nice enough to let me be the technical lead of the Advanced Project I submitted: porting our hosted virtualization engine to Mac OS. I cherry picked a surgical team of VMware engineers, some of them experts with the VMware code base, some of them expert Mac users.

4 months later, we had our first VMware virtual machine running on Mac OS, with a GTK+ user interface (borrowed from the Workstation product for Linux) running on top of X window. Management and marketing liked what they saw, and asked us to productize this. I came up with a codename for the project: Fusion.

Over the next 8 months, we hired a Mac user interface person. We thought Mac users would not settle for less than a Mac native look-and-feel, so we rewrote the user interface in Cocoa. We completed the VMware platform to make it as rock solid as it is on Windows and Linux.

We publicly demonstrated an alpha version of Fusion at Apple WWDC 2006. Hundreds of people left the convention center to see it in a nearby hotel suite.

The Fusion team at Apple WWDC 2006. I'm in the upper-left corner.

We publicly demonstrated it again on our booth at VMworld 2006.

VMware's booth at VMworld 2006.

If you were not one of our 7 000 attendees, you can watch the video of a fellow blogger who taped me. I wish I was this thin, but it is just the video's aspect ratio that is weird!

Today, we announced our first public beta version of Fusion. This is VMware's early Christmas gift to the Mac community. I can finally explain to my Mac friends what I work on every day, and what the VMware buzz is all about!

Just to give you an idea of how badly people want Fusion, about 2 100 persons petitioned for it and 70 000 people registered on our website to be notified when they could start downloading it.

Fusion beta pre-registration banner.

You can download and use this beta version of Fusion for free. Please register on our discussion forum and give us your feedback. We are listening. But keep in mind that it is a beta, not the final product we will deliver:

It has all the debugging code in it. It is too soon to do any meaningful performance comparison.
We still have a bunch of stunning features to implement.

Today, I'm also writing my first blog entry ever. I'm planning to keep them coming, on the topics of Fusion, Mac OS internals, and virtualization in general.

Yes, today was a good day.

Oh by the way, we are hiring big time, as we have been doing for 8 years. If you think you know Mac OS or Cocoa inside out, and you want to work on exciting and challenging projects that change the way people use computers, drop me a comment.