Connection to remote virtual machines?

[sonicboom]

Will Fusion support the client/server model, allowing the creation/execution/control of virtual machines on remote VMware server machines (running either VMware Server or ESX)?

[sonicboom]

I can't do much for your disappointment but I infer from your writing-- it's all about

expectations and cashing a reality check against them.

That seems to be the case, yes.

Given that Server is "free" it may hard to justify all the porting effort for no

revenue.

Last time... I'm not asking for Vmware Server on mac.

I'd be happy to pay for Workstation though... a real VM development platform.

I'm very appreciative and thrilled at VMware taking the leap to even offer a product

on the Mac.

I was too until I saw what it was.

Leap of faith? Parallels paved the way and showed there was a mass market for VM technology on the Mac, bringing-in $1.5 Million a month in revenue. Vmware is now paying for their reluctance to enter the OS X market sooner, as a strong competitor has emerged and is eating their lunch.

I'm marking this as "Yes, my question has been answered", as there is nothing new for me to learn here.

Thanks.

[HPReg]

Folks,

We hear you. No need to fight. The Mac team within VMware has to juggle with several parameters:

o Native UI

o Time to market

o Ease of use

o Exposing all features of other products

o Price

Today we deliver a simple product, Fusion, which is between Player and Workstation in terms of functionality (there is more to come than what you see in this beta).

Our hope is to be able to buy some time, and deliver more complex products in the future on the Mac. But we cannot do everything at once. It takes one year to rewrite a Workstation UI.

[HPReg]

Parallels paved the way and showed there was a mass market for VM technology on the Mac,

bringing-in $1.5 Million a month in revenue. Vmware is now paying for their reluctance to

enter the OS X market sooner, as a strong competitor has emerged and is eating their

lunch.

I would like to say something about this one. Parallels has a good product, but it is showing very little in terms of market to VMware:

o The market they are adressing right now is that of the early adopters (mostly technical people) who have upgraded to Intel Macs. There are much more Mac users out there, much less technical, who will upgrade in 2007.

o They make $ 18 million a year. VMware makes $ 1 billion. I don't think Parallels is eating VMware's lunch, nor that VMware is "paying for its reluctance".

Parallels had to move to the Mac market as a matter of survival. VMware is just taking more time, to take the temperature, and to do things right. Native UI anybody?

Now of course, I'm biased

[arnaudsj]

Thank you HPreg for putting things in perspective. Fusion is very exciting, but as many I have waited so long for VMWare to OS X, it can be confusing and frustrating to see the current beta of Fusion where a lot of many great features of VMWare are not present, and where it looks currently to be a dummed down product. I guess we are all too impatient

I am going to keep good faith in VMWare fusion though as it hopefully evolves quickly into a pro product so that I don't need anymore my SFF opteron to run my VMs

Cheers!

[iay]

Our hope is to be able to buy some time, and deliver

more complex products in the future on the Mac. But

we cannot do everything at once. It takes one year to

rewrite a Workstation UI.

Sounds about right, even if we might wish it weren't so. The idea that the "platform" has been ported and it's a question of selecting which parts of the GUI it was worth targeting first came up in another thread, I think.

I realise that companies like VMware are allergic to pre-announcing future products and functionality, but I think you'd be doing yourselves a favour in this case if when you release the Fusion product you're clear about a roadmap towards a full Workstation-level product for the Mac. I'm probably a Fusion buyer when it comes out even if it is not much enhanced beyond the current beta, but I'm likely to invest more time and effort in using it if I know it's going to morph into Workstation further down the road.

[blackpuma]

I'm likely

to invest more time and effort in using it if I know

it's going to morph into Workstation further down the

road.

Hear, hear!

The sole reason that I'm investing as much of my precious time as I am is because I have a vested interest in seeing a product that meets my minimum requirements ASAP. (No promises have been made at this point, I know.) What I see right now I think I can hack around (yeah, kind of messy and risky), so I decided to make the leap and see what Fusion can do.

For the record, my minimum requirements at this point are multiple snapshots. An OS X Server Console would be a bonus, but I can run that in a client OS, so it's no big deal at this point.