VMWare Fusion, Windows 8, and Thunderbolt Port Support?

[dchin8656]

Hello everyone,

I need clarification to see if this is something that's possible with VMware Fusion.

Basically the company I work for has a hardware device that runs off a thunderbolt port.

Currently it works on Windows based systems that have Thunderbolt ports built into them.

Does VMWare Fusion offer a Windows 7 or 8 VM to communicate with devices over the Thunderbolt port?

Searching around the internet, I've heard of people using Disk Drives and Monitors, but I wanted to see if anyone can confirm for sure if there any limitations to the VM's access to the Thunderbolt ports.

Thanks for any information,

Dower

[ColoradoMarmot]

No, VMWare does not virtualize thunderbolt directly (no one does).  Neither does the competition.

Windows+Thunderbolt is a very very very rare and dying capability.  Most manufacturers are dropping support for thunderbolt on their machines.

[nakamoto]

Does anyone know if/when VMware plans to add support to Fusion for external Thunderbolt drives/devices? I totally failed to consider that Windows as a Guest might not be able to connect to an external Thunderbolt drive, for example, to use a Windows-only :smileysilly: utility to upgrade an SSD's firmware.

Thanks!

[ColoradoMarmot]

They do not have plans to do so that they have announced (nor would they).  Given the very very few windows thunderbolt devices out there, I suspect it's at the bottom of the list.

Besides, you still couldn't do a firmware update - you have to have native access to the device to do that.  Boot camp is your friend.

[SouthPawn]

I have to say, if there was thunderbolt pass through I think it would be an awesome feature.

For example, the whole egpu thing would really stand out, suddenly you could run a full performance gaming pc from OSX without bootcamp.

It's got my vote. 😃