Fusion 8?

[DeltaCharlieLim]

Hi, everyone.

I currently own Fusion 6, and have been thinking of upgrading to Fusion 7, but Yosemite seems to run v6 just fine.  I fully expect, however, that El Capitan will not run Fusion 6, and that I will need to upgrade.  What I don't want to do, though, is upgrade to Fusion 7 now, and then have to upgrade again in 3 months.  And, I fully expect that VMware will release Fusion 8 around the time El Capitan is released.

Has anyone heard anything about Fusion 8?  I've searched around for it and haven't seen any word about it.

Thanks.

[ColoradoMarmot]

They won't share schedule information, but past practice is that we'll see a Fusion 8 beta starting shortly with 10.11 support.

[wila]

Hi,

You are correct in that Fusion 6 will not get official El Capitan support, but it might still work.

I would however expect Fusion 7 to fully support El Capitan, as for timelines.

This document Frequently Asked Questions about VMware Fusion has a list of when Fusion was released in the past.

It certainly isn't a guarantee for the future, but it might give you the general idea.

VMware itself has a policy to not disclose information about future releases and features, so in that regards there is no answer for the moment.

Hope this helps,

--

Wil

[DeltaCharlieLim]

Thanks, guys.  I'll watch for a beta in the coming months.  I'm sure I'll have to upgrade this time...

And, Yosemite runs 6.0.5 just fine, so I'll stick with that for now.

[wackybacky]

I'm getting to start disliking annual bug fixes; with major version number changes that require payment.

6 to 7 was a con; as yosemtie worked fine on 6.

i've paid for every major version; and i'm getting kinda cheesed off with this lot.

so what's 8 going offer me that 7 doesn't do; other than work with my OS of choice?

don't tell me....

     it's faster... it can't be any faster than the dross i'm trying to run in it...

     it works with 3d games (better)... i was told the current version did that; so how can it be 'better'?

     it's more reliable... if t's unreliable, fix the one i've got; it's not old, less than 12 months..

and yeah... pull the other.

[Mikero]

Hi everyone,

(Sorry for the long post, but read on if you want to know some inside details on Fusion development 😃

I'm directly responsible for pricing and packaging VMware Fusion. (as well as the feature roadmap, among other things)

I recently took on the role, so I can't speak entirely for justifications with older versions, but let me put things into perspective.

Bit of quick background: Been with VMware since 2009 (was with Apple before that), been using Fusion since 2007 or so (i.e. the very beginning).

I started as the support lead for Fusion and Workstation.

I've since moved into Product Marketing as of 2012, and for a while was working on Cloud stuff (I also have a background in systems admin and development).

I was most recently managing part of the Technical Marketing for vCloud Air.

I also wrote a book on Fusion: Getting Started with VMware Fusion: Michael Roy: 9781782177883: Amazon.com: Books

(not tooting my own horn here, just letting the community know who I am and how I got here... further reading on our career blog if anyone's interested)

So with that...

I totally get the 'upgrade cycle pains'... It's tough for both sides of the table on this topic.

When we release a new version, we obviously have to charge for it, but it can be a tough balance between adding new feature, improving on existing ones, and supporting new OS's and use-cases.

The thing most folks don't see is the volume of engineering work that has to go into supporting something like a new OS.

It's a tremendous amount of effort for that little line item in the Guest OS type dropdown.

So, we have to make decisions... Do we add a new feature, or do we support a new OS?

It doesn't always come down to such a binary choice, but we have to pick and choose carefully where we place our dev resources given they are finite.

I agree that going from 6 to 7 wasn't the biggest of upgrades from an 'exposed features' perspective.

We did a lot of performance improvements, and some interesting things for graphics pros (over-allocating vRAM is cool, but not for everyone), but much of the work happened under the hood.

Our team is pretty small compared to other groups in VMware, but we're very tightly knit, the engineers are fantastically talented, and we all care passionately about the user experience and doing things 'right'.

We don't try to cut corners or design for particular benchmarks so they run better during demos...

We try to 'do the right engineering thing' and then 'make that easy for the customer'.

So, to your points:

I'm getting to start disliking annual bug fixes; with major version number changes that require payment.

I hope what I wrote above helps clarify the tough choices we make when introducing new major versions.

so what's 8 going offer me that 7 doesn't do; other than work with my OS of choice?

While we haven't announced an '8', the Tech Preview does not contain every feature that will be released with the next major version.

don't tell me....

     it's faster... it can't be any faster than the dross i'm trying to run in it...

But faster is better! We work hard to make things faster, from how we're writing to disk, suspending, snapshotting, drawing the UI, Unity mode.  All stuff happening regardless of the applications you're using. (I had to google dross btw... lol)

There does come a time where we're achieving diminishing returns with respect to performance... Do you think we've hit that point?

     it works with 3d games (better)... i was told the current version did that; so how can it be 'better'?

3D Games is a big deal for a huge number of our users, many of whom never bother coming to the forums.

With the 2015 Tech Preview, we added DirectX 10 support, which actually took years of development effort!

     it's more reliable... if t's unreliable, fix the one i've got; it's not old, less than 12 months..

More reliable is better, yes no?  We can't fix every conceivable bug before we find out about them, so work is done throughout the lifecycle of the product to improve reliability and make it crash less, and behave smarter.  It's important that we continue to deliver the stability that VMware customers expect, and that's something that will be ongoing for the life of the product. 

Maybe the concern is not calling this out as a feature so much, make less of a big deal about it?

I don't want to NOT say that we made it more reliable, right?

Let me ask you then... What new features would make paying for an upgrade feel more worthwhile?

I'm listening very keenly as I build out the strategy for the product's roadmap, and I really want to know what matters most to you (and all our users).

If anyone at any time needs to send me a line, you can email me directly at mroy AT vmware DOT com (I think my email in my profile is public).

It's possible I won't see it for 24 hours as our spam filters can be overly aggressive, but I check the spam report every day to make sure nothing is missed.

Sorry for the rant, but I really look forward to everyone's feedback as we take Fusion to the next level!

[wila]

Hi,

As I'm just a user of the product, not affiliated with VMware let me give you a personal opinion on it.

1. The revenue model for being able to work on VMware Fusion as a commercial product is yearly updates. It is up to VMware to make those updates attractive enough for most users to actually buy the update. If the customer decides the update is too dear or just not worth it, they'll cut in their revenue model. FWIW, it's not an uncommon revenue model.

As a user of the product you can normally still get a discount if you skip a version and as 2 versions at a time keep to be supported, that's a reasonable way of a) keep to run a supported environment and b) spent less money

BTW, Fusion 6.0.5 had an important Yosemite patch and was released after Fusion 7.

Other Fusion 7 features that mattered for me personally are: support multiple GPU switching (eg. saving battery on MBP) and connect to vSphere VMs. A more detailed list of feature comparisons is here: Compare VMware Fusion 7 to Fusion 6

2. Marketing likes to use words like "Faster", "better", "more reliable" .. if I would call anything dross then it is that marketing verbage, but again it is common in the industry to throw around reasonably meaningless words. Unfortunately marketing works so you can choose to listen to that or just do what I do and sing "lalalala" when reading it.

A counter argument is that hardware DOES change (like newer CPUs/GPUs) and VMware will optimize for newer hardware. A possible side effect is that your faster betterer new version of Fusion will actually run slower on existing hardware. Although I'm sure that VMware tries to minimize that side effect.

Anyways.. in short, it's a commercial product and in order to keep on running in a supported environment you end up paying for the product, it is how the world turns.

--

Wil

[DeltaCharlieLim]

Thank you for your reply.

I know your question wasn't directed at me, but: As to what features would make me buy an upgrade, that's a tough question.  My only need is for x86/x64 VMs on my Mac (I run many Unix-like OSes 24x7: Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, the list goes on), and my wants are that my solution have guest support for the latest version of OS X (but, this is not a need), and even more ideally that it have host support for the latest version of OS X (again, not a need).  Fortunately for me, the latest version of Fusion 6 runs with Yosemite as host OS, and in my experience, both Yosemite and El Capitan run just fine as guests in Fusion 6.  I imagine that will not be the case with the release of El Capitan: I imagine that Fusion 6 will not run on El Capitan.  This leaves me with two options: pay for an upgrade to Fusion, or stay on Yosemite (or, a third option: do without Fusion, but this is a non-starter for me).  With Yosemite, I stayed on Mavericks until I was able to confirm that Fusion 6 supported Yosemite as both a host and a guest OS; I only updated from Mavericks 1-2 months ago.  The reason I had to do that is that my budget is extremely tight, and wants do not currently get funding: I could not upgrade to Yosemite if it was going to cost any money.  Unfortunately the same will be true for me of El Capitan.

[ColoradoMarmot]

Given that Fusion 7 has issues on 10.11, it's a safe bet that they won't go back and update Fusion 6 - it's unclear if they'll even do that for Fusion 7.   So you're probably going to have to either stay on 10.10 or pay for the upgrade.

[jameslmoser]

It still seems a bit expensive. I have bought every version of Fusion (and even some versions of workstation) but I may skip this one as long as 7 works. There really isn't any additional feature that makes me want to have it.  Upgrading to 8 Pro is the same price from both versions of 7? That also doesn't seem right.  Users of 7 Pro should get some additional benefit when upgrading to 8 Pro.

[foolcat23]

‌I concur, ~91 euros for an update from 7 pro to 8 pro is still a bit steep, even if it's at a reduction already. I do not want to forgo the pro features, because I make good use of them, so updating to the non-pro version is out of the question.

I guess I'll have to bide my time until a handy coupon code comes along.