Got the bits - installed and upgrading the VMs.

First impression is that the video quality is VASTLY improved.

Mod note: I deleted the posts in this thread that were about the downloads not working before we launched, and disagreeing about what day it is

Has multiple monitor support been added to this preview?

Also, can anyone tell me how to quote a message when replying?

Thanks.

No Multi-Mon this release.

Edit: My bad, Multi-Mon is in this release! I've had some buggy behavior with it personally, not sure if it's just me tho

Quotes are done in a reply-message with the quotation button in the toolbar row (rather than a 'quote this post in a reply' button)

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@Jerry_G wrote:

Has multiple monitor support been added to this preview?

Also, can anyone tell me how to quote a message when replying?

 

Thanks.

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So far, I've upgraded a Windows 11, Fedora Rawhide, and Ubuntu 23.04 VM.

My VMs start in Full Screen. When I started the Win11 VM, it appeared to do nothing. The dialog to upgrade encryption was in the space where my Virtual Machine Library is located rather than on top of the VM window. A minor nit, but a bit confusing.

The Win11 VM screen kept going blank until I shutdown, bumped the graphics memory to 1GB, and rebooted. (I'm using a Studio Display, so 5120x2880 native resolution.) I'm not sure if that fixed it or my playing with "Use full resolution for Retina display" since I turned that off and back on as well. While the display is now rock solid, Win11's Settings panel claims that the scaling is 450% which it's clearly not. But, if I try to change it, it says it's already 200%. Very weird.

Shared folders in Linux is amazing. A simple test showed it at about 10 times faster than a network copy. (My VMs are all using bridged networking.)

Thanks for the update!

Thanks for sharing

It's recommended to set the Graphics Memory setting to the max, 8GB or so. If the VM doesn't have 16GB or more, it will use half of the available memory as 'shared graphics memory'. Having it lower doesn't really do anything useful from a performance or resource perspective.

Heck, I even over-committed the heck out of a VM on my M1 MBAir... Machine has 16GB, I gave a VM 16GB (and 8GB of VRAM) and it all just worked. The screenshots in the flashy Mac images were taken from that setup, running the Firestrike benchmark in 4K.

The Mac reported 24GB of RAM in use and compressed a bunch of it on the fly. Wild stuff!

I never really saw any stuttering or sluggishness from the host... they really do some fancy memory management!

Thanks for the details on graphics memory.

I did forget to mention one more thing. "Enable Dark Mode Synchronization" is really cool! Thanks for that. (It's in the Advanced settings for Win11 VMs.)

Mikero, sorry, but I must be embarrassingly missing the obvious, but I don't see any kind of quote button.

Sad to hear that multimonitor support is still missing. The only reason I need Windows is to run a program that requires 3 monitors. Will this support be added in the future?

Should be right there

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@Mikero wrote:

 

Should be right there

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Thanks. I had to expand the toolbar to see it. 

Can you tell me if multi monitor support will ever be added?

Actually I think it's there now, I'm testing for correctness.

Try it

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@Mikero wrote:

Actually I think it's there now, I'm testing for correctness.

Try it

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My apologies for all the questions and confusion. One last question. Is multi monitor support present or not? If it's not confirmed to be there, no sense spending time installing everything.

It's there, Menu Bar > View > Use all displays in full screen.

I'm finding it behaving weird with my mouse cursor and am debugging with engineering to see if this is just something on my dev rig (I end up with a lot of corner cases, hard to tell sometimes what's a bug and what's just something unusual about my setup)

Again, this is a Tech Preview, so we don't expect everything to work everywhere. And if something is not working for you that you'd expect, we want to hear about it so we can address it!

There are so many scenarios that we just can't possibly test them all, so that's part of why we do TPs.

So far so good. I installed and upgraded my existing W11 ARM VM with the new tools. Nice to have the drag/drop/copy/paste working. Also like the soft power operations. Resume after a suspend now syncs the guest clock with the host (as long as you have time sync with the host configured).  That should make some folks happy. The resolution change in the guest when windows are manually resized or full screen is selected works as it does on Intel. Also should make some folks happy.

Not having printer sharing and Fusion shared folders is a bit underwhelming, but I can deal with those.

I don't have any 3D applications installed so I can't test the 3D support yet.

A couple of nits about the testing guide:

• You do not need to disable the OOBE network checks during initial VM installation from ISO. At the initial setup screen after the VM boots from hard drive, don't click anything yet. Use the Fusion GUI menus to Virtual Machine > Install VMware Tools. That will mount the tools ISO on the drive of the VM. Then go back to the setup window, click anywhere but on one of the buttons, and type Shift-Fn-F10 to bring up the command prompt. cd to the D drive, and execute setup.exe. The Tools installer window will appear (you probably will have to move the command prompt window to see it).  Answer the prompts to install the tools. Reboot when it asks after the tools install. You'll be right back at the setup window asking for country, and continue from there.
• I'm disappointed you still recommend uupdump and VHDX for Windows 11 ARM installation sources. The same w11arm_esd2iso tool used in the Unofficial Fusion 13 Companion Guide provides a Windows 11 ARM 22H2 release channel build ISO that works just fine with the Tech Preview. It's a much cleaner build process for the ISO (< 10 minutes) instead having to install Xcode, Homebrew and other open source packages and then use command line processes to create a hacked uup or pre-release flaky Windows version.
• DON"T TRY TO USE UBUNTU MANTIC DESKTOP ARM64 DAILY BUILDS. THEY ARE BROKEN. They don't boot properly to the live environment on arm64 architectures. That's an Ubuntu problem in their build process and has nothing to do with Fusion. I have a bug report in on this. Instead, install Ubuntu Mantic server daily builds. You can then "convert" the installed VM to Ubuntu Desktop using the advice in the Companion Guide for Fusion 13 if you want Ubuntu Desktop.
• Yum is deprecated and replaced by dnf in Red Hat family Linux distros. The updated syntax for installing open-vm-tools and open-vm-tools-desktop is 'sudo dnf install open-vm-tools open-vm-tools-desktop'. 

It also looks like one bug is fixed.

The fixed one: It looks like the developers have squashed the bug that blocked use of AirPlay while Fusion is running.

@Mikero Did the developers happen to fix the annoying "bug" where macOS throws a notificaiton message about background services each time Fusion is started because it deletes and recreates plist entries in /Library/LaunchDaemons for disk/id/and mount helpers?

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@Technogeezer wrote:

It also looks like one bug is fixed.

The fixed one: It looks like the developers have squashed the bug that blocked use of AirPlay while Fusion is running.

@Mikero Did the developers happen to fix the annoying "bug" where macOS throws a notificaiton message about background services each time Fusion is started because it deletes and recreates plist entries in /Library/LaunchDaemons for disk/id/and mount helpers?

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Just quit and relaunched the Tech Preview. No notifications. (And, for that matter, there were none when I first installed it.)

Thanks @palter - I just did the same and didn't see any messages either. I'll keep an eye on that to see if that too is indeed squashed.

Thanks @Technogeezer 

Shared folders and printing are on list. 

Re: OOBE, that's a perfectly valid path as well. I can look at updating the guide to put the 'install Tools before Windows' back in there.

re: VHDX and UUPDump, the objective here was to not introduce any changes to the way we advised folks to get and install Windows for now. 

Re: Mantic... I'm hoping more people take it up with Ubuntu to give weight to supporting the use case of Ubuntu in Fusion on Macs with Apple silicon. I have it booted OOTB right now with the LiveCD OOTB, but I just can't log into the thing as it wants a username and password. (which apparently isn't 'ubuntu' and blank and i may have a workaround by TTY'ing and making a new user account which IS ABSOLUTELY BONKERS but alas...) lol. 

Good catch on the yum/dnf. I should have caught that, as we use tdnf in Photon.

Chiming in with the next batch of comments:

Running 23.04 Lunar Ubuntu - desktops all updated fine, shared folder speed is insane.  Still requires toggling the shared folders off and on after booting before they appear in /mnt.

Win 11 - had an old VM that wasn't on 22H2, and had some very strange behavior.  Updated to current release, and all seems well.  Screen resolution/crispness is 10x better than V13 on my 5K monitor.  Drag/drop of files is incredibly fast, and a decent workaround until we get full shared folders.

I have had, twice, some odd video artifacts where the entire VM goes black, then flickers back and forth between black at the VM contents, windowed mode, computer under heavy load - 2 ubuntu VM's, 2 fusion win 11 VMs (one massive), and a parallels VM (also massive - that's the one I'm manually migrating to fusion...for games).  I managed to peg my M1 max on CPU when they were all running and had steam and gog both installing in the fusion vm at the same time.

Dragon Age Origins failed to launch, and had to manually install both directx and physx.  But still won't launch...continuing to troublehshoot.