Virtualization Daily

VMWare has released the Beta 3 of VMWare Fusion their virtualization solution for Mac OS X. With this release they also announced that the final product will indeed be called VMWare Fusion. Fusion was originally just a code name.

This release brings a number of improvements, the biggest of which may be the ability to turn off debugging information to improve performance. Among other things, they also added host only networking, the ability to configure the machines without booting them, support for booting directly from a BootCamp partition and the ability to turn VMWare virtual machines into Mac OS X packages.

I’ve been running this for a couple days now and so far it’s worked quite well. However, other than the snapshot feature, there’s still little reason to switch from Parallels for the vast majority of users. Those power users who need snapshots or the ability to expose two CPU cores to VMs will use VMWare, those who just want to run Windows apps on their Mac will be well served with Parallels. Still no word from VMWare on pricing.