As we prepare for Macworld 2008, a look back at the last year...

Pat Lee — Sat, 12 Jan 2008 16:05:00 GMT

This time last year, we had just shipped our first public beta of VMware for the Mac, codenamed "Fusion" and I had just joined VMware and the Mac team right before Macworld. VMware had its first Macworld booth ever and the Mac team talked to thousands of Mac users looking for a way to run Windows on their Mac (or maybe they talked to us get the free t-shirt that we gave away! )

The Mac team came away from Macworld pumped and got back to work making VMware for the Mac even better. We added DirectX 8.1 accelerated 3D graphics , the first hardware acclerated 3D graphics in the Mac virtualization market when released in beta 2 in February 2007. In April, we announced we had a name for our Mac product: VMware Fusion (TM). In June, with beta 4 we introduced Unity , the most seamless way to run Windows applications like Mac applications. In the end, there were over 250,000 beta downloads of VMware Fusion before we launched VMware Fusion 1.0.

On August 6, 2007 we launched VMware Fusion 1.0 and brought the following exclusive features to the Mac platform that still aren't shipping today in other products including a Cocoa-native user interface with customizable toolbars, support for 2-way Virtual SMP for multiple processors in a virtual machine, ability to run both 32-bit and 64-bit operating systems in a virtual machine, and no limits on the number of virtual machines runnings at a time, you are limited only by available memory.

In November 2007, we released VMware Fusion 1.1 which added experimental support for DirectX 9.0 (without shaders) 3D graphics, full support for Mac OS X Leopard, and simultanously shipped a single installer for English, French, German, and Japanese. In addition, we also released beta 1 of VMware Importer , which allows you to easily migrate your Parallels Desktop for Mac virtual machines to VMware Fusion.

Earlier this week, we released beta 2 of VMware Importer which adds support for importing Virtual PC 7.0 for Mac virtual machines in addition to improving support for importing Parallels Desktop for Mac virtual machines. I recommended checking out VMware Importer , it is great tool to get you up and running in VMware Fusion quickly.

It was been an incredibly busy year and I can't be prouder of being part of the Mac team at VMware. The Mac team is building products that we as Mac users want to use and are happy our users love. The acceptance of the VMware Fusion to date has been incredible. Thank you to the Mac community for your support so far.

VMware Fusion received many great reviews including three I want to call out:

Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal said "Fusion has a much smaller impact on the Mac’s overall performance"

Rob Griffiths at Macworld said "I currently prefer Fusion for its low impact on other OS X applications, support for multiple virtual CPUs, and huge library of virtual appliances."

Daniel Begun at CNET Crave said "From a pure performance perspective, Fusion proves to be a faster performing platform than Parallels. Additionally, in our anecdotal hands-on testing we found Fusion to be somewhat more stable than Parallels"

In addition to the many great reviews, VMware Fusion has won eight awards to date including the 2007 Macworld Eddy! See below for the list of awards won so far:

2007 Macworld Editor's Choice Award
2007 Pogie (David Pogue of New York Times Technology Award)
Macworld UK Editor's Choice
PC Pro Recommended (PC Pro UK)
Amazon's Best of 2007
Lifehacker Top 10 New and Improved Apps of 2007
Redmond Magazine Editor's Choice Award - Biggest \\\\\"Wow\" in an IT product
IT Enquirer Editor's Choice

We can't thank the Mac community enough for how you have embraced VMware Fusion and we look forward to making 2008 an even better year for Mac users.

Please come by our Macworld booth to meet me, Pete, and other members of the Mac team, we are in booth #2717 .

Pat

When Redmond Magazine Thinks Fusion, They think "WOW!"

petekazanjy — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 18:33:00 GMT

The awards keep coming fast and furious at the end of the year.

The latest? Redmond Magazine ("The Independent Voice of the Microsoft IT Community") has awarded VMware Fusion (and VMware ESX Server, and VMware Workstation...I see a trend...) an Editor's Choice Award .

The best part? We won the "Biggest 'Wow' in an IT Product" award (i.e. "Your jaw just dropped when you first used this product"), beating out Vista's "Instant Search" and Ubuntu 7.04.

Before everyone says it, yes Redmond Magazine is a pretty geeky enterprise IT publication, but we'll wear that as a badge of honor. VMware has had great success over the years by winning the hearts and minds of Sys Admins the world over, making their lives easier and helping them get things done, first with VMware Workstation, then VMware GSX, and then with VMware ESX Server and VMware Infrastructure.

We're honored to be noted by the IT geek community, and hope that as more and more Macs, both personal and company-owned start flooding into the corporate IT environment, they'll think of VMware Fusion as the most seamless way to run Windows apps and peripherals on those shiny new Macs, using XP and Vista virtual machines they already built with VMware Workstation.

Team Fusion

As we prepare for Macworld 2008, a look back at the last year...

When Redmond Magazine Thinks Fusion, They think "WOW!"