VMware Fusion 2 Beta 2 Review

First let me say that my experience with Beta 2 has been much better than Beta 1. I guess it must be as it is still installed on my Mac.

The install process was straightforward and that went well. I did have a problem installing VMtools on 1 VM but so far it has just been 1 VM and I did finally manage to get the tools installed but on in “Typical” mode and not complete.

I would advise before doing the upgrade that you POWER OFF all your VM’s. The Beta cannot restart a suspended VM and it will power off the VM before powering back on and you could loose some data.
Some of the things in the new version that I like are

• Mirrored folders between a VM’s My Documents and Documents on the Mac
• This also works for Pictures, Music and the Desktop’s
• Virtual Hard drive expansion, this is very useful, see below
• The ability to add more Virtual Hard Drives
• The ability to add more Network Cards
• Shard printers between the host and the VM this will save me installing printer drivers on my VM’s
• Auto Protect Snapshots are nice if you have a VM you want to keep backed up
• You can set them to Snapshot every Half-Hour, Hour, Daily
• You can set the maximum number of snapshots to keep
• This feature will use a Minimum of 5Gb of storage
• The new Virtual Machine Library is much better

I did test extending one of my Virtual Hard Drives to see how well this worked

• First of the process can take some time, I extended a drive by 5Gb and it took about 30 mins.
• This does not extend your windows partition
• You will need to great a new Windows partition that will then look like a new Hard Drive with in Windows.

I guess that the benefits to this over adding a new Virtual Hard Drive would be keeping all your VM in 1 file; I am also guessing that this could hamper performance over adding a new Virtual Hard Drive.

The snapshot manager is much better in this version of Fusion and is more like VMware workstation with multiple snapshots

I now have copy and paste back between host and VM something I lost when I tried Beta 1 so I am more than happy about that.

So far I am happy with the install lets see how it goes going forward