VMWare Fusion for Mac

VMWare Fusion Experience

I have been playing with VMWare Fusion for a few weeks now. I am blown away by what I can do. I have around 7 virtual machines on my Mac. I was installing SAP and ran into problems, so I just dumped that 2003 instance, and imported a copy I had made and started over. Furthermore, Windows starts up faster on Mac than natively. It has not crashed yet and is easily the most reliable backup method (i.e. copying the machine) I have ever seen. Windows is in my future, but I don’t think it will be natively installed anymore, I will only virtualize it. Its just an API to programs now. Very cool stuff.

Most of the virtual machines below are just backups of each other. When installing complex software, backups are critical. The ability to start fresh can save many hours.

My virtual machines:

(once copied it needs to be imported into VMWare) Just like so.

It will then appear on the VMWare GUI

The Bigger Picture

What VMWare Fusion allows is for companies to begin migrating away from Windows as a platform. OS X can now be the platform and Windows can fall back to becoming an interface to programs. Companies that do this will see a massive increase in productivity, worker satisfaction, increased uptime and many other benefits. The research on TCO, productivity and user satisfaction with the Mac platform is incontrovertable. VMWare Fusion is still relatively new (as of this post April 2008), so it is not yet on the radar of many companies, but eventually it will be. So technically, the monopoly on operating systems by Microsoft has been broken. However, it will take people time to figure this out. There is always a lag between what technology can do, and people’s ability to uptake a new technology.

VMWare Tips

Once you begin using VMWare you will most probably find yourself making multiple copies of various operating systems. One issue becomes the installation of basic software. The best way we have found to deal with this is to copy things you want to install to a centralized directory and name it accordingly so you can find it when you need to install software again. Below you can see the Windows software that we have centrally located.

Applications

One thing to note, while Firefox and many other applications can be installed from a folder on the Mac (which appears within VMWare as a shared network folder) Oracle will not install this way. Its still useful to have it downloaded, but you will need to copy it to the C: drive of the Virtual Machine you will want to install it in.

Finally, its good to make copies of Virtual Machines once you have installed the basic software on them so you don’t need to continually reinstall software when you create new Virtual Machines.

OS Selections

Something to be wary about is using Vista as a Virtual Machine. Vista has not advantage over Server 2003 and its download is a pain from the Microsoft website (where the trial Server 2003 download is pretty straightforward). Furthermore, Vista is immense. Its install is around 33 GB and it provides no extra ability to run programs over 2003. Due to its size, making copies of Vista Virtual Machines is a problem. 2003 on the other hand is quite tidy. As you can see from the screenshot, this 2003 Virtual Machine with Oracle installed on it is still only about 5.28 GB, therefore there is no problem keeping a number of multiple copies of 2003 Virtual Machines on your computer.

2003 with Oracle 10g (with no data imported), JDK, JRE, TOAD and Tomcat still does not break 10GB.

By comparison look at the size of Vista. What is Microsoft doing taking up all that extra space? Hmmmmm….it makes one wonder who is managing development up in Redmond.

Application Virtualization

Here VMWare is doing something very interesting with application virtualization. This would mean that applications could be centrally installed and would not need to be installed on any particular machine. There screencam of this here out at this link:

http://www.vmware.com/whatsnew/thinstall.html#