Reversing It Out
November 17th, 2007, 17:04
The first beta of VMWare Fusion for Mac OS X has just been released, and I am using some of my well deserved vacation time to give it a try 
. You can do the same by going to the official Fusion beta website here ("http://www.vmware.com/products/beta/fusion/").
I have to say that I have been really eager to try this out, and that I am a bit disappointed. First reason of my disappointment is the "Snapshot" feature: for anybody doing malware analysis, the ability to quickly restore a system to a clean state is a must. This is the reason I was waiting for Fusion and not buying Parallels. Guess what? The feature is completely missing from the beta, and from the information you can dig from the official forums, it seems it will not even be in the final release version. Bah. Of course, you can restore snapshots manually, but I love so much the Snapshot Manager of VMWare workstation that I will not even consider the manual solution.
Another lovely issue is the "Fullscreen" mode, that is not a full screen at all. After installing Fedora Core 6 (I know it sucks, but I had its dvd floating around and just used it for the testing ) and the VMWare tools, whenever I switch to fullscreen mode I just get a black screen with in the middle a small 800x600 VMWare window that reminds me of a stamp. Parallels do much better on this...
Luckily, there is always something good... For example, the drag & drop between different OSs works very well, making file transfer really smooth. Hope that Workstation 6 will be as good as Fusion regarding this particular feature.
http://photos1.blogger.com/x/blogger/272/2307/320/297007/Immagine%201.png ("http://photos1.blogger.com/x/blogger/272/2307/1600/962235/Immagine%201.png")
Also, I do really like the fusion GUI... It really fits the Mac OS X style Very good is also the concept of Virtual Processors, that allows to take advantage of the power of Dual Core processors... Of course, since this beta is a debug build, it is difficult to tell how this feature can really enhance performances... We will see.
Anyway, I will definetely play more with it, so expect another report soon.
PS: Merry Xmas
http://reversingitout.blogspot.com/2006/12/vmware-fusion.html
. You can do the same by going to the official Fusion beta website here ("http://www.vmware.com/products/beta/fusion/"). I have to say that I have been really eager to try this out, and that I am a bit disappointed. First reason of my disappointment is the "Snapshot" feature: for anybody doing malware analysis, the ability to quickly restore a system to a clean state is a must. This is the reason I was waiting for Fusion and not buying Parallels. Guess what? The feature is completely missing from the beta, and from the information you can dig from the official forums, it seems it will not even be in the final release version. Bah. Of course, you can restore snapshots manually, but I love so much the Snapshot Manager of VMWare workstation that I will not even consider the manual solution.
Another lovely issue is the "Fullscreen" mode, that is not a full screen at all. After installing Fedora Core 6 (I know it sucks, but I had its dvd floating around and just used it for the testing
) and the VMWare tools, whenever I switch to fullscreen mode I just get a black screen with in the middle a small 800x600 VMWare window that reminds me of a stamp. Parallels do much better on this...Luckily, there is always something good... For example, the drag & drop between different OSs works very well, making file transfer really smooth. Hope that Workstation 6 will be as good as Fusion regarding this particular feature.
http://photos1.blogger.com/x/blogger/272/2307/320/297007/Immagine%201.png ("http://photos1.blogger.com/x/blogger/272/2307/1600/962235/Immagine%201.png")
Also, I do really like the fusion GUI... It really fits the Mac OS X style
Very good is also the concept of Virtual Processors, that allows to take advantage of the power of Dual Core processors... Of course, since this beta is a debug build, it is difficult to tell how this feature can really enhance performances... We will see.Anyway, I will definetely play more with it, so expect another report soon.
PS: Merry Xmas
http://reversingitout.blogspot.com/2006/12/vmware-fusion.html