VMware Communities: Message List - VMware Fusion 2.0 beta 1 now available!

Re: VMware Fusion 2.0 beta 1 now available!

dp_fusion — Tue, 13 May 2008 05:12:19 GMT

Ok - I'll tell the buyers to keep you on the short list. There had better be some brochures out before the fiscal new year, though

Re: VMware Fusion 2.0 beta 1 now available!

etung — Tue, 13 May 2008 03:33:51 GMT

dp_fusion: I haven't seen the plans for hardware versions, so I'm speculating here (can't leak info I don't know), but I would expect at least the various hosted products to share the same format, at least as much as different release schedules allow -- interoperability between our products is one of the selling points. ESX is a bit of a special case, since it has different product requirements and background.

Pat: I thought Server 2.0 used hardware version 6? Everything I see on the web suggests this, but I'm not about to download it just to check this out.

Edited to remove reference to removed reference.

Re: VMware Fusion 2.0 beta 1 now available!

etung — Tue, 13 May 2008 04:13:52 GMT

That's better, though I don't think it'll stop people from figuring out what you originally said

Re: VMware Fusion 2.0 beta 1 now available!

Pat Lee — Tue, 13 May 2008 03:38:27 GMT

What other product?

Pat

Re: VMware Fusion 2.0 beta 1 now available!

Pat Lee — Tue, 13 May 2008 03:27:57 GMT

dp_fusion wrote:
Thanks for the clarification on hypervisor - it does become puzzling at some point with such a rich product line as alla y'all have. Regarding the revert procedure - is this a forever thing or will the various products come back together again so we can all share VM's without this nuisance step and the uncertainty it introduces? (by that I mean when things go wrong do I blame the original VM or blame the converter, or blame George Bush, what ever).

Well, WS 6.5, Server 2.0, and Fusion 2.0 all share the same VM format. We don't change virtual hardware formats lightly, bu we have to innovate to get the features that people care about like better 3D among other things.

I can't speak for other products, but I think that it makes sense moving forward to unify the format again. However, I can't speak for ESX at this time.

Pat

Message was edited by: Pat Lee

Re: VMware Fusion 2.0 beta 1 now available!

dp_fusion — Tue, 13 May 2008 03:22:33 GMT

Thanks for the clarification on hypervisor - it does become puzzling at some point with such a rich product line as alla y'all have. Regarding the revert procedure - is this a forever thing or will the various products come back together again so we can all share VM's without this nuisance step and the uncertainty it introduces? (by that I mean when things go wrong do I blame the original VM or blame the converter, or blame George Bush, what ever).

Edit: I just realized I've opened the door for one of those "We don't talk about the future" responses, but show some nads - a lot of us have budgets to cut for 2009 and this is a big question with real money on the line. When the answers about the future always comes out of a can Xen starts to look good.

Re: VMware Fusion 2.0 beta 1 now available!

etung — Mon, 12 May 2008 17:23:37 GMT

The format of the virtual machines has changed with the v 2.0 B1 release - what does this do to vm compatibility with other hypervisors such as Player for Windows and Linux?

You can revert back to the older format via Virtual Machine > Downgrade Virtual Machine... when it's powered off. If you don't do this, other VMware products that don't know how to handle the new format will refuse to run the virtual machine. I think that currently, the Workstation 6.5 beta is the only other product that knows about virtual hardware version 7.

Nitpick: We like to reserve the term "hypervisor" for bare-metal virtualization (e.g. type 1 hypervisor). We call Player/Workstation/Fusion/Server "hosted" products.

Re: VMware Fusion 2.0 beta 1 now available!

dp_fusion — Mon, 12 May 2008 16:41:54 GMT

I have a Firewire camera I'd like to use but have given up on.

The format of the virtual machines has changed with the v 2.0 B1 release - what does this do to vm compatibility with other hypervisors such as Player for Windows and Linux?

Re: VMware Fusion 2.0 beta 1 now available!

etung — Thu, 08 May 2008 23:18:52 GMT

The point is why bother when you can just as easily create a new VMDK that maps to a physical partition?

There are Firewire devices other than external drives

Re: VMware Fusion 2.0 beta 1 now available!

BP9906 — Thu, 08 May 2008 23:15:46 GMT

Agreed. The point is why bother when you can just as easily create a new VMDK that maps to a physical partition? I currently do that for a fat32 partition on my firewire drive. Works great! If anything, adding a GUI to the whole process of setting that up (for less technical users) would be beneficial. I suppose I'm only counting firewire HDD in my suggestion.

Re: VMware Fusion 2.0 beta 1 now available!

WoodyZ — Thu, 08 May 2008 21:54:39 GMT

At the present time no one offers the virtualization of FireWire in a Virtual Machine and this has been discussed many times before and the bottom line is it's just not going to happen any time soon!

Re: VMware Fusion 2.0 beta 1 now available!

AlienFan — Thu, 08 May 2008 21:06:19 GMT

What about firewire support? Is there anything planned in this direction? Gaming sounds nice, but I guess a decent firewire support would satisfy more.

/AlienFan

Re: VMware Fusion 2.0 beta 1 now available!

rachel — Tue, 06 May 2008 12:53:51 GMT

Addendum: Networking doesn't work either, despite vmxnet building and installing OK during the config stage.

Oh well.

BTW, an alternative way to just install open-vm-tools for now even though Ubuntu removed it from packages for being too unstable (it works well enough) is to just download and install the .deb files they build manually. They can be found here: https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/hardy/+source/open-vm-tools/+builds and I'm about to try that. I just used the open-vm-tools on their own before during Hardy's beta period and it was sufficient for my purposes and involves less messing about than the 'yank the module sources out of open-vm-tools and merge with proper vmware tools' method.

Edit: No, that doesn't work at all. networking still dead, mouse still dead, display seems to be magnified!

Re: VMware Fusion 2.0 beta 1 now available!

rachel — Tue, 06 May 2008 12:28:12 GMT

Gave it a whirl with a fresh Ubuntu Hardy install.

VMWare tools almost worked! It all installed fine, building kernel modules fine except vmsock and vmxnet3 which were expected I think. However, on reboot, while the graphics, resizing, et al seemed to work fine, as did the keyboard, the mouse was non-responsive.

Then read the release notes and saw the bit about it not working on Hardy - will probably try the suggested workaround later, I just mention it because it seemed to work better than that might imply, with maybe only the vmmouse driver not working? I'm not sure (until I do try that workaround) but I've a feeling that replacing the modules with open-vm-tools versions and otherwise doing a normal vmware tools install won't affect the mouse driver which isn't a kernel module?

Re: VMware Fusion 2.0 beta 1 now available!

rcardona2k — Tue, 06 May 2008 01:59:08 GMT

Thank you Pat! Some of these features are out of this world. Downloading now...

VMware Fusion 2.0 beta 1 now available!

Pat Lee — Tue, 06 May 2008 01:48:41 GMT

VMware Fusion 2.0 Beta 1 is now available! VMware Fusion 2.0 will be a free downloadable upgrade for all VMware Fusion 1.x customers when released.

New features in VMware Fusion 2.0 beta 1 includes true multiple display support, experimental support for DirectX 9.0 with Shader Model 2, virtual printing support, integrated import of Parallels Desktop, Virtual PC VMs and Boot Camp partitions, and greatly improved user experience.

For more details, go to:
http://www.vmware.com/landing_pages/fusion2_beta.html

There is a separate beta forum/community for the VMware Fusion 2.0 beta program that includes bug reporting. Please refer to the VMware Fusion 2.0 beta community at:

http://communities.vmware.com/community/beta/fusion

We are excited to bring make VMware Fusion 2.0 beta 1 available to you and look forward to your feedback.

NOTE: As with any beta release, there are known and unknown issues. We recommend beta testing only for those who want to use the latest and greatest software and can afford potential downtime and issues.

Pat Lee
VMware