Will Fusion run properly on host with whole disk encryption installed?

[tonylclayton]

My company requires laptop encryption to protect company and client data. I am running VMWare Fusion on a MacBookPro OS/X Leopard with a single WinXP vm. PGP offers a whole disk encription product for OS/X. If I use that to encrypt the entire OS/X boot drive, will Fusion run proprerly? Should I install PGP whole disk encryption on the WinXP client only? My desire would be to encrypt the entire mac boot drive, but the majority of the data I need protected is in my WinXP vm.

[ACGough]

Just been looking into this myself. There's a bunch of entries in the PGP forums that indicate that there will be no problem.

[John_Gledhill]

I've used VMWare Fusion VMs on an OS X 10.5 host with PGP 9.9 Whole Disk Encryption implemented. It works fine.

You can also install PGP WDE inside the VM and just encrypt the contents of the VMDK, if that's what you prefer.

[tonylclayton]

John, that's great to know. Thanks for the reply.

[webfrasse]

As a side note I just played around with putting a Fusion VM inside an encrypeted Sparse disk image. Worked just fine. The disk image is encrypted with a looooong password. Added security is that only Mac's can open this type of image should someone get hold of the image file with the VM inside....

/Mikael

[davidb2]

I've used VMWare Fusion VMs on an OS X 10.5 host with PGP 9.9 Whole Disk Encryption implemented. It works fine.

How, if at all, does this affect backups? What about clones of your entire hard drive?

David

[John_Gledhill]

Not sure about whole disk images. I know Acronis 10 doesn't work on my PGP encrypted Vista box. Not tried any cloning on the Mac.

Time machine works OK though. Unless the drive to which you back up has been encrypted, your backups will be unencrypted.

One you've booted and authenticated to PGP the operating system is essentially unaware that your data has been encrypted, so applications should work exactly as before, as long as they interact with the disk properly though the operating system.

In use I can barely notice any difference in performance.

[davidb2]

Not sure about whole disk images. I know Acronis 10 doesn't work on my PGP encrypted Vista box. Not tried any cloning on the Mac.

Time machine works OK though. Unless the drive to which you back up has been encrypted, your backups will be unencrypted.

One you've booted and authenticated to PGP the operating system is essentially unaware that your data has been encrypted, so applications should work exactly as before, as long as they interact with the disk properly though the operating system.

In use I can barely notice any difference in performance.

Sorry--I should have specified that what I meant was clones of your Mac hard drive, using SuperDuper, for example.

David