MacDirectory magazine is the premiere creative lifestyle magazine for Apple enthusiasts featuring interviews, in-depth tech reviews, Apple news, insights, latest Apple patents, apps, market analysis, entertainment and more.
Issue link: https://digital.macdirectory.com/i/838
114 MacDirectory REVIEW | CREATIVITY VMWARE FUSION 1. 1.2 > THE BEST OF ALL WORLDS Considering the amount of effort that most Apple customers have gone through to avoid using PCs, it's rather remarkable to look back on the long history of products designed to allow Mac users to run versions of Microsoft's OS. Starting in the early '90s, the Mac286 NuBus card brought MS-DOS to the Mac II. Connectix' Virtual PC let (very patient) Mac users run Windows. As soon as Apple made the jump to Intel CPUs, the race was on to find ways to get the new hardware to dual-boot into Windows, an effort that Apple finally blessed with the release of Boot Camp. Then, out of the blue, a new company called Parallels shipped a product that would let Windows and OS X coexist side-by-side. Being first out the gate, Parallels immediately caught the attention of Mac users, but waiting in the wings was a company that had long before taken the lead in the enterprise market. With its fast and flexible virtual server products that allowed any number of server OS's run simultaneously on "big iron" server hardware, VMWare launched a behind- the-scenes revolution in enterprise computing. With Workstation (now at Version 6), VMWare's advanced technology was scaled to desktop operating systems. Finally, in the summer of 2007, Fusion arrived for Mac OS X. For most Mac users, it was the new kid on the block, but in the enterprise sector it was simply a new face in an already familiar family. And that helped corporate IT departments start seeing the Mac in a very new light. Even if your home office doesn't figure prominently in the Fortune 500, VMWare's Fusion has a lot to offer. And, with the next version already in beta, it promises a good deal more. Setup is easy—actually simpler than installing Windows on a PC. There are some advanced options that you can configure that can help enhance the virtual machine's performance if you have the memory and disk space to spare. The installation itself is completely automated. Put in your Windows install disk (or point the installer at an ISO disk image), enter a username, password and product key and go off and have lunch However, if you've already set up a guest OS in Boot Camp, it will have automatically appeared in your list of Virtual Machines. Forget lunch for now; you're just about ready to go. Once your guest OS is installed, you'll need to add the VMWare Tools package. You launch this with a menu selection in VMWare and the rest is automatic. If you're installing one of the various flavors of Linux, installing the Tools package takes a bit more work. Now you have the choice of running the guest OS in a window or in what VMWare refers to as "Unity Mode." WORDS BY RIC GETTER