Any positive/uneventful experiences with upgrade to Fusion 5?

[MacSheep]

Running a Win7 VM for work is mission critical for me and I'm concerned about the apparent severity of some issues I've seen posted here. Add to this a very fast release of 5.0.1 (definitely appreciated, but a bit concerning) and Mossberg's 3-freeze WSJ column and I'm not sure about doing the upgrade from v4 to v5. Version 4 has been flawless for me -- coming up on 12mos without a single app crash -- and speed and performance have been great on 2010 MBP 2.53/8GB.

Anyone have a positive experience with the transition from v4 to v5? The forum understandably attracts more users who are having problems, but I suspect I'm not the only fence-sitter lurking here who would appreciate hearing the upside.

Thanks,

John

[WoodyZ]

MacSheep wrote: Version 4 has been flawless for me -- coming up on 12mos without a single app crash -- and speed and performance have been great on 2010 MBP 2.53/8GB.

Then why upgrade!?  If using Windows 7 in a Virtual Machine is mission critical and VMware Fusion 4 has worked that well for you then I would leave well enough alone!

[AbortRetryFail]

I've been running a trial for a couple of weeks with an iMac with 12 GB RAM, Mountain Lion, Fusion 5.0.1, and WinXP Pro SP3.  I upgraded my VM image from Lion + Fusion 3.1.2.  I've allocated 768 MB of RAM to the image.

This is my production work VM, so I run ancient Office 2003 versions of Outlook, Excel, Word, and Powerpoint all day long, and Microsoft Money Sunset periodically. I also run Windows versions of Firefox 15 and IE 8.

It's been a straightforward experience so far.  Despite all of the marketing claims, it seems a bit slower than Lion + Fusion 3.1.2.  Some screen refreshes visibly paint, as opposed to simply appearing. I experienced one crash when attempting to print to an Adobe PDF driver; the VM lost its pipe connection and required an entire restart of the iMac. The crash surprised me, as I never had that happen with either Fusion 2 or 3. 

I do not love the slightly laggy two-finger scroll with my Magic Trackpad, which I've reported here; apparently I'm the only one experiencing this issue:

Lack of two-finger scrolling responsiveness in Fusion 5 + WinXP

Aside from those minor issues, I've been happy enough with it to go with VMware rather than Parallels.  I'm leery of Parallel's ad-serving behaviour and cost, and I'm lazy enough that the thought of rebuilding my setup again in Parallels makes me weary.

At some point I'll build an equivalent Win7 image to see if the performance is any snappier. Since the amount of time that I spend doing that will far outweigh the millisecond-level performance issues I think I'm seeing, doing that is low on my list of priorities.

[Dr_Gary]

Here is my opinion.

I have been using VMware Fusion since version 1.  I generally like VMware products...I use ESX/vSphere as well.

I was using Fusion 4.1.3 to run many VM's...from XP to both x32 and x64 bit versions of Windows 7 and Windows 8 RTM,  All were working fine.

I purchased Fusion 5....I performed a clean install of OSX 10.8.1 on a 2008 Mac Pro with 24 GB of RAM.  I then installed Fusion 5.01...no other applications...just Fusion 5.  I next migrated 2 of my existing VM's...Windows 7 x64 and Windows 8 x64 RTM to the newly built machine.  I upgraded the tools for both VM's.

Although there were no "show stopper" issues for me....many bugs/quirks have been introduced with version 5.  So many, in fact, that I have restored my system to Fusion 4.1.3 and restored the virtual machines as well.

I measured performance under Fusion 5 and I saw no difference in boot times, Windows Experience Index, etc., whatsoever between 4.1.3 and 5.01.

My final opinion is this...if you don't have a retina MBP and don't use USB 3 devices...I see no advantage in upgrading to version 5...I do, however, see many disadvantages.  I have no plans to abandon Fusion...I'm sure that they will get version 5 fixed in time...but as of now, I would not recommend updating to version 5...save the $50 and try it at version 5.1....especially on "mission critical" installations.

I am disappointed wih VMware on this one...I believe that Fusion 5 was released before it was ready simply to counter the release of Parallels 8.

[MacSheep]

Thanks for sharing details of your experiences. Decided I'm going to hold off doing the upgrade until the grass on that side looks a little greener.

John

[rvanderveer]

You'd think with all the problems people are posting to these forums, that this upgrade is a train-wreck.  I certainly don't doubt or question any of the issues others have been facing; but I will say that I've upgraded several personal machines, as well as a couple clients.  So far I haven't seen or heard of any problems like what I've read here.  As a matter of fact, everyone has appreciated the MUCH faster suspend and resume times!  Personally, I have several different configurations of Windows XP, an CentOS 6.2, and Ubuntu machine.  I haven't seen any quarks with any of them.

I will agree, however, with others who have posted here-- if your VM is mission-critical and has been working flawlessly for you, that's really no reason to go tempting fate.  🙂    Leave well enough alone and wait an update or two.

On the other hand, if you have good backups (i.e. Time Machine or Carbon Copy Cloner), you should be able to easily test the upgrade and roll back if you notice anything flaky.  That's what I'd probably do...  😉

-Rick