VMWare has now released the first Beta of VMWare Fusion. A little more info is available in this blog post. On the surface it doesn’t seem much different from the earlier friends and family release, although it has a few improvements under the covers. This sounds like a particularly interesting feature.
We realize that once you start using this product, you will want to push the envelope and run multiple environments at the same time so we included a patented page sharing technique to reduce the total amount of memory required to run multiple virtual machines. When you run multiple virtual machines concurrently, we check each memory page and if they are the same, we only use one memory page. This translates to a very efficient use of memory - the total amount of memory consumed is significantly less than the sum of the parts.
Thankfully, this release does support bridged networking which is pretty critical to it actually being useful. Unfortunately, it also only works with wired ethernet so it’s not that useful yet. There are a fair number of known issues with this release and there are a number of missing features (like the ability to attach hard disk images, actually VM configuration overall is kind of limited), but it’s good to have a VMWare product to work with on the Mac platform even if I do think they’ve made some mis-steps along the way.
If you use the Beta it may be a good idea to check out the discussion forums as well.
Update: The reason my Beta of fusion didn’t look much different from the friends and family release is because it was the same version. I ended up downloading the same version again. That’s what I get for clicking on the first link in the email they sent out. The email contained a number of links that all look the same, I assume for tracking clicks, but it makes it very unclear what the links are for. The build number for the public beta is 36932. The interface is actually quite a bit different now, but the limitations I cited above still exist. It’s much better than the last release, but obviously still needs some work. Until the wireless issues are worked out it’s not that useful, but I’m looking forward to future releases.
Virtualization and Virtual Appliance news, tips and opinions. 
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Sorry about the confusing email — I personally dislike obfuscated tracking URLs in our outbound emails, but we like the data.
I also have some thoughts about the Mac, market share, business models, and virtualization to respond to your earlier entry, but it just hasn’t gelled enough to publish yet. The Fusion development team is certainly not willing to cede the Mac market to anyone. It’s almost a cliche, but a little competition is good for customers.
Competition is definitely good. I’m looking forward to seeing what Fusion evolves into and it seems the Mac may provide a real catalyst for innovation in virtualization on the desktop.