Free Fusion12 player license confusion

[Woodmeister50]

I currently have a standard Fusion 11 license (have purchased multiple upgrades

over the years).  I was using it for Windows apps that were needed for work.

Since retiring, I no longer use Fusion for work purposes any more and more

for as a hobbyist.  Can I simply get the free license and upgrade without issues?

Other than being a new Fusion version and need to update support tools, will all

VMs work as they did before. 

[Mikero]

Hi there

Can I simply get the free license and upgrade without issues?

Yep!  Some users have been renaming their Fusion 11 app from 'VMware Fusion' to 'VMware Fusion 11' (which is fine to do) so you have the option to use the older version if you needed to for whatever reason.

Other than being a new Fusion version and need to update support tools, will all VMs work as they did before.

Yep! Theres some nuance with Big Sur that changes things a bit (nested VMs need certain hardware, there's a macOS networking bug we're waiting for a fix for), but we didn't explicitly drop any features.

You can get your free key from here: https://my.vmware.com/web/vmware/evalcenter?p=fusion-player-personal

[Woodmeister50]

Thanks Mikero.

If I decide to do any "real work" again (which is doubtful), I will purchase a license

to be all legal (I'll deduct it come tax time).

I will likely make sure all the VMs are backed up and make sure I have a

Time Machine backup and if anything obvious is afoul, just do a quick restore

before the upgrade.

[Mikero]

Cool Cool 😃

[...] and make sure I have a Time Machine backup [...]

Strongly discourage using Time Machine to back up VMs... It would be better just to make a full copy of the VM on the TM drive itself.

Reason being is how TM uses time stamps to only backup changes... this messes up virtual disks and makes it difficult to restore (i.e. you have to manually piece together all the .vmdk files from across time and hope they still add up)

TM... Good for the OS, bad for VMs

[rvanderveer]

Strongly discourage using Time Machine to back up VMs... It would be better just to make a full copy of the VM on the TM drive itself.

Reason being is how TM uses time stamps to only backup changes... this messes up virtual disks and makes it difficult to restore (i.e. you have to manually piece together all the .vmdk files from across time and hope they still add up)

Interesting about Time Machine & piecing together .vmdk files.  But that actually brings up another question:

My assumption about the split .vmdk files was to make it easier for the OS to defrag as needed, moving disks (back at the time when portable drives were smaller, or networks were less reliable).  But with SSD's, defragging goes away, and I read somewhere that there's a slight performance advantage having the .vmdk as one contiguous file (although truthfully I can't really tell a difference, I just trust that it's there somewhere).  So the question is, is there any advantage to split .vmdk disks anymore?

[Mikero]

That was one reason. The main one was to be able to put a VM on a FAT32 disk and have it still work.

Way back I used to recommend folks use single-disk and pre-allocate to get the max performance because it would allocate all the blocks contiguously on the a spindle disk.

But yah, with SSDs, it hardly matters anymore.

[scott28tt]

This tool (created by a VMTN user and moderator) is used by many to backup their Fusion VMs: https://www.vimalin.com/

[wila]

Hi,

The ability to save VM's on FAT32 file systems is one reason.

IMO a much more important reason is that any disk operation, such as creating and committing snapshots, extend disks etc.., only needs the free disk space of your maximum split disk size whereas with single vmdk you need the free disk space of that entire disk with these type of disk operations.

For example with a 100GB virtual disk you need > 100GB free disk space vs about 4GB of free disk space.

There's less chance of getting into a "all data lost" scenario when something bad happens such as running out of disk space.

Yet another reason to use split disks is that in the case when a disk ends up corrupted, the chances that you can repair it with a split disk are better.

For VMware Workstation and VMware Fusion it is much easier to repair a split disk than a single growing disk.

--

Wil

[Woodmeister50]

I never include VMs with Time Machine backups (for obvious reasons).  I do that separately as individual backups

and also when I do a weekly entire clone of my SSD using CCC (the clone is also an SSD).  Also, data (sans VMs)

is backed up to my home server hourly.  I meant to use Time Machine to restore the rest of the system to the pre-install state.

[GarySchiltz]

Wow, that's really cool! I had no idea that this existed. I haven't dug into it yet, but I *hope* it is possible to use Time Machine to backup whatever files are produced by Vimalin. The fewer manual steps, the better.