DABCC Radio is a podcasting show geared around Virtualization and Server-Based Computing News and Support interviews, editorials, and tips & tricks pertaining to technologies such as, Citrix, VMware, Microsoft, SoftGrid, Performance Management, application deployment and much, much more.

In episode 30, Douglas Brown interviews Pat Lee, Senior Product Manager for VMware Fusion.  Doug and Pay will discuss VMware's recent upgrade release of VMware's Desktop Virtualization solution for the Apple Macintosh (Mac) called VMware Fusion 1.1.  Doug and Pat will also discuss topics such as what's new in VMware Fusion 1.1, VMware Fusion's support for Windows games on a Mac, enhancements to Fusion's Unity feature which allows Microsoft Windows and Mac windows to run seamlessly side-by-side, and how VMware competes with technologies such as Parallels Desktop for the Mac.

About VMware Fusion:

From the proven leader in desktop virtualization comes VMware Fusion--the most seamless way to run Windows applications on your Mac. VMware Fusion combines a clean and intuitive interface that Mac users expect with a virtual platform trusted by millions of users today. VMware Fusion allows you to launch your Windows applications from the Dock and switch between Windows and Mac applications using Exposé. With the industry's most advanced virtualization technology VMware Fusion lets you leverage all the hardware available on your Mac to simultaneously run 32- and 64-bit operating systems, use two processors at the same time, run select 3D games and utilize USB 2.0 devices.”

What’s new in 1.1 includes more than 25 enhancements and updates, including: 

• Robust support for Mac OS X Leopard (VMware actually pushed our launch a smidge to ensure that they could bang on VMware Fusion under Leopard good and hard to get the kinks out…and there were a couple, to be sure.  But Mac users expect it to “just work” so it was a must-have.)

• Upgraded experimental 3D support (9 month old demo video) (we’re up to DirectX 9.0 without pixel shaders), and the VMware Fusion community does a pretty good job of indicating what games work with what caveats, here.

• Improvements to Unity (video), or the ability to run Windows apps in single windows, floating above the Mac desktop.  Big movements there are that Unity now works with Vista 32 and 64 bit virtual machines, and Windows XP 64 bit virtual machines. We’ve also exposed the option to show the Windows Task Bar in Unity mode—you could do this before, but you had to edit the VMX file by hand.  Now there’s a UI knob there to do it.  (Switchers who are new to the Mac OS X interface often like to use the Windows Start Menu to navigate their Windows apps…we listened and fixed it)

• English, French, German, and Japanese localization in a single download, for all our non-English speaking users.

• And, of course, everyone’s favorite, you can now sync your iPhone w/ Outlook in Windows virtual machines (think about that for a sec: synching an iPhone, into a Windows VM, because of outlook….sounds kinda weird at first blush)

• And another biggie is the release of a beta version of VMware Importer for importing Parallels virtual machines to run under VMware Fusion.  So all that work that people have put into building up their perfect XP virtual machine running under Parallels won’t have to be redone as they migrate to VMware Fusion.  Free download, natch: http://www.vmware.com/download/fusion/importer_tool.html

For more information please visit: http://www.vmware.com/mac

About Pat Lee

Pat Lee is the Sr. Product Manager for VMware Fusion, VMware’s first virtualization product for the Mac platform.  Pat has over fifteen years of experience as a product strategist, manager, and marketer.  He joined VMware to drive the company’s entry into the Mac market, starting with VMware Fusion.  He personally runs a MacBook Pro running a Windows XP virtual machine in VMware Fusion.