Are there any successes out there?

[dfort]

Going through all the threads flying around on the new version it seems this release could be considered a disaster. I purchased v3 upgrade anticipating installing, but I'm probably going to hold off for now .. I haven't read anything positive yet. I know product forums tend to attract the problems and complaints and people happily running a product tend not to post much if at all.

So my question... Is there anyone running v3 with out any problems? Is it running better or at least the same as v2?

[Badtux]

Success, sort of. I have encountered the Linux console performance issue that others have reported, but it seems to go away once "X" starts up and the VMware X console drivers take over. One thing I would say is don't upgrade to 3.0 unless a) you want to run Windows 7 (my reason for upgrading) or b) you want to run in full 64 bit mode on a 64 bit kernel. Otherwise 2.0.6 is faster (at least for Linux) and definitely has fewer "interesting" glitches.

[wila]

Gosh was i wrong with estimating "a few hundred", according to this press release, there have been over 10,000 private beta testers.

--

Wil

_____________________________________________________

VI-Toolkit & scripts wiki at http://www.vi-toolkit.com

[GATmac]

I started using Fusion 2 in August 2008 and just upgraded to Fusion 3. I upgraded to Snow Leopard a couple weeks after release. In general I consider both Fusion 2 and Fusion 3 very successful. I have never experienced any sort of incompatibility or instability except as noted below (Aero). So far I haven't noticed much change in Windows 7 Pro.

Aero still doesn't work in Fusion 3. Everything appears to be enabled correctly, but Windows Experience indicates my graphics adapter is 2.0. I suspect this is resulting from my MacBook (4,1; Black, 2.4GHz 4GB) poor graphics chip. Does anyone else ahve experience with this on the early 2008 MacBook?

In Fusion 2 overall performance was pretty sluggish running both Windows 7 (1GB RAM) and Windows server 2008 (1.5GB RAM). Others on this forum report Fusion 3 handles memory better but I haven't tested yet on mine.

In general what guest settings works best running 1 or 2 VMs (as indicated above)? 1 or 2 procs? How much memory (4GB on host)?

[Freshies]

Upgrade successful here. It was actually the easier part of my 2 step upgrade.

Step #1 was to try to circumnavigate the iMac's (7,1) crippled 32-bit EFI to install 64-bit Windows 7 onto boot camp. There were some rather intensive workarounds & I found one that worked.

Step #2 was to install Fusion 3 over 2.0.6. That went well EXCEPT for having to delete the old virtual machine preferences. Had to look up that on the boards here.

But it's been working well for me. Windows 7 is WAY faster than crap-tastic Vista.

[Badtux]

Fusion 3 doesn't seem to handle memory any better, but it's definitely a more pleasant Windows experience than Fusion 2, especially in Unity mode. There's a few glitches with notifications appearing out of thin air and not being able to get to the notification items, but to be fair there just isn't a very good place to stash any of those in Unity. As for Windows 7... meh. The morons saying "it makes Mac obsolete!" are just that -- morons. Open up System Preferences in MacOS and compare with the new Control Panel in Windows 7. About the only way I can manage anything in Windows 7 is to type in what I want to do into the search box (e.g. "change computer name") and hope something pops out of gigantic tree of indecipherable gibberish that is the Windows control panel. I am moving towards eliminating the very last of my Windows dependencies but still have the very occasional IE requirement, meh. Aero works just fine on my Macbook Pro 5,5 BTW, the guy with no Aero just has a slow Macbook. I disabled Aero anyhow by loading a "classic" theme because Aero annoys me.

[DalePuckett]

Great Success here!

Ran the Tech Preview with both Beta 2 and RC. Now running Official Release.

Great performance index with Windows 7 on iMac 8,1 with 6 GB of memory. Giving Windows 7 1 processor and 2 GB of memory. Running four or five Mac applications at the same time. Running ActiveState Perl Development system on it with great performance using SQL Server Express.

Using Unity Mode now and really getting used to it with the new Windows Start Menu in the Mac Menu Bar.

Great implementation.

Thanks,

Dale

[GlennyG]

Errm, success measured by which parameters?

Fusion 2 worked; I installed Fusion 3 hoping for better performance. I didn't get that.

Fusion 2 had some bugs/features such as the useless library GUI thing. I didn't get that.

Fusion 3 promised better performance. As you need to re-install XP to get this (yeah, right, I'm going to spend weeks installing all my XM VMs -- wake up and smell the coffee). I didn't get that.

Fusion 3 has introduced some new bugs; recent menu doesn't work. I did get that.

Fusion 3 has introduced some new features, unfortunately as I use Fusion extensively for work, generally using XP and have about 25 VMs none of which are used for playing, I didn't get any benefit from the video drivers.

So the benefits are fairly limited for me and sure as hell aren't worth paying for an upgrade. Lets face it; if it's a bug, I expect it to be fixed.

My advice; unless you're using Fusion for play, there's little or no reason to upgrade.

And to answer your question: yes, the Fusion 3 upgrade has been a massive success -- for VMWare's cash flow although probably not such a success for their reputation.

[GlennyG]

Forgot to mention that the Dock fails to work with Fusion 3 running in full-screen mode.

And that you have to edit a settings file to get rid of the pointless black menu thing (a-la the windows version).

[TheRealBernieB]

An upgrade on a Mac Pro from v2.0.6 to v3.0 completed without any problems. I have several VMs with various Win OS varieties including Server 2003 x86 and x64, XP, Vista, and 7. I mainly use XP on which I do Windows development work with Visual Studio 2008. The other OSs are used for testing. After the update all of the VMs worked as before, networking, sound, USB device access all function OK.

With regard to performance, I don't know that I can detect any significant differences based mainly on the performance of the compilers used with Visual Studio, but certainly the upgrade didn't slow things down on the XP VM. I run VMs in full screen mode in a separate "Space" so I haven't done any testing of Unity. I was annoyed to find a new VMWare title bar with menus being displayed at the top of the VM screen in full screen mode, but was relieved to find instructions in another thread for removing it and returning to the previous behavior of having the Mac menu bar pop down when the mouse pointer is moved to the top of the screen.

The bottom line is that all is working OK so far and while XP doesn't appear to have been given a speed boost for computationally intensive tasks, v3.0 certainly did not cause any detectable slow down. Subjectively, I get the impression that XP boots a little faster, but then it has always booted in an acceptable time.

[davidb2]

So my question... Is there anyone running v3 with out any problems? Is it running better or at least the same as v2?

Yes--I upgraded from 2.0.6 (OS X 10.5.8, MacBook Pro Core 2 Duo 2.33 GHz, 3 GB RAM, XP Pro SP3 previously imported from Parallels; 1 GB RAM given to XP). The VM is definitely snappier with 3.0.

The only difficulty I had was that I didn't receive a confirmation e-mail, so I didn't have a serial number. I searched this forum and found the following link, where my serial numbers for the previous version and this one were listed: .

David

[Badtux]

??? Baffled. On the black thingy in full screen mode I clicked on it, selected 'View', told it to "Hide/Show', but I could have also told it to 'Hide'. And it promptly hid until I moved my mouse up there, where it promptly showed itself. No editing of settings files required. This is with Windows 7 freshly installed into VMware 3.0.

I'm not aware that the dock has ever shown in full screen mode? Or that I would want it to?

I've been using Windows 7 fairly heavily over the past three days and it's just worked. The only real irritant I have is nothing to do with VMware Fusion and everything to do with Windows 7, i.e., that it locks a gigabyte of my system memory as unswappable.

[m_c_crockett-1]

I had no problems with the actual update from VMware Fusion 2.0.6 to VMware Fusion 3.0 on my Mac Pro 3,1 at home. The only problem that I had was with the link that VMware provided for the update in a message announcing that the update was available. The web page didn't handle errors from the background process that was supposed to look up your serial number/license to validate your right to purchase an upgrade.

As a Unix user I don't make extensive use of VMWare Fusion at home. It's only used to boot a Windows XP Professional VM to run Quicken. When Intuit gets around to providing a version of Quicken for Mac OS X that doesn't require editing 40 years of financial data, there won't be much need for VMware.

The thing that I would like to know is if VMware Fusion 3.0 will install a new DVD/CD-ROM driver to an existing virtual machine. One of the VMware Fusion 2.0 updates corrupted the driver on the system at work and I haven't been able to access the DVD/CD-ROM from Windows. Can't even access an ISO disk image.

[Kurite]

Once I went to using an ISO of WIndows XP installer, everything has been terrific. XP is super snappy and ArcGIS loads remarkably fast (why shouldn't it?). Unity works nicely for the most part (some program start-up dialogs throw it for a loop) and I love having access to Windows apps using the menu bar icon. I have not had any crashes yet. The only run-time problem I've had is really likely just ArcGIS being painfully big so that resuming from a suspended session was very very painful. I'll close it out before suspending for now on.

I've never used Fusion 2.0 so I cannot compare or provide results of upgrading.

[dagobert39duck]

Can you tell me the secret of your success or a hint about what I might have done wrong? Here is my hardware config

Hardware Overview:

Model Name: iMac

Model Identifier: iMac6,1

Processor Name: Intel Core 2 Duo

Processor Speed: 2.16 GHz

Number Of Processors: 1

Total Number Of Cores: 2

L2 Cache: 4 MB

Memory: 1 GB

Bus Speed: 667 MHz

Boot ROM Version: IM61.0093.B07

SMC Version (system): 1.10f3

Serial Number (system): W865002UVGP

Hardware UUID: 00000000-0000-1000-8000-0017F2C79BBB

my restore times with Windows 7/Fusion 3 go into several minutes. Moreover, working within Windows 7 makes you fall asleep.

Regards

[Badtux]

Not enough memory. Windows 7 requires 1GB of memory to work well. If you don't have 4GB of memory in your iMac (which is dirt cheap for iMacs nowdays, I paid something like $35 from my local electronics store for 4GB of memory for my PC), don't even bother trying to run Windows 7 under VMware.

[GlennyG]

"??? Baffled. On the black thingy in full screen mode I clicked on it, selected 'View', told it to "Hide/Show', but I could have also told it to 'Hide'. And it promptly hid until I moved my mouse up there, where it promptly showed itself."[/quote]

You don't use multiple monitors. If you did, you'd find that as soon as the full-screen VM looses focus, e.g. you click on something in the other screen, the ugly black thingie comes back despite the settings.

In any case it's utterly pointless on a Mac as we have the single menu bar. Only when VMWare is running on a Windows host does the ugly black thingie make any sense.

[SvenGus]

Personally, I find Fusion 3 an excellent release!

Some problems I would like to be solved, anyway:

- full Aero support also for legacy video cards (such as the Intel GMA 950);

- sound support also in OS X VMs, and better OS X Tools (and possibly also OS X client support, even if that is primarily an Apple licensing question);

- status icons in the Mac menu bar also for Linux VMs in Unity mode;

- simplified Linux Tools install process;

- Fusion's new full screen view menu bar, when set to autohide, ideally should not leave a black border;

- etc. etc.

Anyway, a big improvement over the previous release...

[cjtinkle]

I had this problem also on my 2nd machine. I had attempted to do an upgrade from Fusion 2.06 to 3 on it, install of a clean install, and ran into the same problem. I did a clean install and everything was fine.

CJ

www.createdbycj.com<http://www.createdbycj.com

[RS232]

I'm a convert from running Microsoft Windows 7 Professional 32 Bit on Parallels 4.0. The import feature on Fusion 3.0 worked flawless... though I did uninstall 'Parallels Tools' via Windows Control Panel before as precaution.

Aero works great, network works great at work+home and shared folders works too. Windows 7 Professional did not run smoothly on my Parallels as comparison... it worked but did not have snappy performance!

I'm nearly 95% going for Fusion when my trials runs out... unless Parallels pull their finger out and get 5.0 out (if they can do better of course!).

I'm impressed!

[brucoder]

I have been following this discussion and I think that I see pattern

emerging. Someone throw in if I missed something, but it appears

that all of the users with issues are running from their BootCamp

partition while those with success are either running from a VMDK or

have reimported their BootCamp partition after upgrading / installing

Fusion 3.0.

Maybe something for you all to look at...