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jessedylan
Contributor
Contributor

Leopard just announced - will current version work?

I just ordered a copy of VMWare Fusion and didn't pause to think that maybe it wouldn't work on the new Leopard operating system. A quick search online hasn't yielded me any direct answers - so I'm hoping to find out here. My iMac order will be placed in the next week (complete with Leopard) and my VMWare will be here in the next couple of days? Will they play well together?

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SMB1
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Expert

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jessedylan
Contributor
Contributor

That link says "Yes, VMware Fusion has experimental support for running on developer releases of Mac OS X Leopard. VMware Fusion will work to support Mac OS X Leopard officially when it is released later this year."

This sounds ambiguous to me. It doesn't tell me if I buy a version now that I won't have to pay later for the upgrade that supports Leopard, nor does it say that the current program will work on Leopard as-is.

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rcardona2k
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Immortal

I'll pile on with these references:

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Pat_Lee
Virtuoso
Virtuoso

VMware Fusion 1.1 is free for all paying 1.0 customers and it will include support for Mac OS X Leopard. VMware Fusion 1.1 is in beta now and we can discuss dates further, we will let you know.

Best,

Pat

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jfriesne
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

A related question: how will Fusion interact with Leopard's "Time Machine" feature? On the Apple developer's web site ( http://developer.apple.com/leopard/overview/apptech.html ) I see the following notice:

The second guideline you should follow is to avoid putting small

amounts of volatile data into otherwise large and static files. If you

have data files that are updated frequently to change a small

percentage of the data in that file, Time Machine will copy the entire

file, taking up more space on the backup disk.

A Fusion .vmdk file sounds very much like the problem case mentioned above. Does this mean that every time I use my VM, Time Machine will copy the entire (2GB+) .vmdk file that got modified by the guest OS? If so, it seems like that would cause my backup drive to run out of space very quickly.

Is there some clever way to use Time Machine to back up my virtual machine without using too much space? Or is the only solution to tell Time Machine not to back up my virtual machine, and do the backups manually?

Thanks,

Jeremy

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davidb2
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Is there some clever way to use Time Machine to back up my virtual machine without using too much space? Or is the only solution to tell Time Machine not to back up my virtual machine, and do the backups manually?

I am hoping that at least until things are sorted out, someone will market something like Timeless, similar to Spotless (for those of us who don't want to use Spotlight).

David

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walterwatts
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

I just ordered a copy of VMWare Fusion and didn't pause to think that maybe it wouldn't work on the new Leopard operating system. A quick search online hasn't yielded me any direct answers - so I'm hoping to find out here. My iMac order will be placed in the next week (complete with Leopard) and my VMWare will be here in the next couple of days? Will they play well together?

Let's see here: New hardware version of the iMac + new "Major Release" of OS X + VMware Fusion 1.1 Beta 1.

And the question is: "Will they play well together?"

Some introductions are in order here.

jessedylan. Murphy. Murphy. jessedylan.

Walter Smiley Wink

PS...To be fair, between Vmware's virtualization software expertise and the outstanding dedication of the people on these forums (both in and outside of Vmware Inc.), I think you stand a pretty good chance of getting them to "play well together".

That's JMHO though........

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rcardona2k
Immortal
Immortal

Time Machine is probably built for what Job's demoed: pictures you "lost" in iPhoto or Ellen Feiss's beep-beep term paper, NOT for VMs. Whenever Apple gets real byte-level, incremental file updates (aka de-duplication technology) in TimeMachine then maybe it will work for VMs. Hopefully I can exclude VMDKs, snapshots, etc from TimeMachine as to not waste backup space on multi-gigabyte content.

Also TimeMachine won't have a snowball's chance of protecting Boot Camp partitions.

Everyone thinking Leopard is panacea for computing, should be very wary. It's just another OS update, speaking from running MacOS 0.98 on a 128K Mac to now. Smiley Happy

my two cents--

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ik8sqi
Contributor
Contributor

I just upgraded from OS X 10.4 to Leopard. *HUGE* problems with Fusion however. While it was running perfectly under Tiger, now in Leopard Fusion does run correctly, but is incredibly slooow. The guest OS (Windows XP) is completely unusable in these conditions.

For the configuration, I'm running Boot Camp, and Fusion (1.0.51348) is configured to start the Windows XP boot camp partition.

Roberto F.

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admin
Immortal
Immortal

Or is the only solution to tell Time Machine not to back up my virtual machine, and do the backups manually?

You can tell Time Machine to exclude certain directories - I'd recommend excluding ~/Documents/Virtual Machines/ (or wherever you keep your VMs).

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