| ![VMware Fusion [OLD VERSION]](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41G9fY5S8fL._SL500_.jpg)
| From: Smith Micro Software Inc.
List Price: $79.99
Buy New: $46.80
You Save: $33.19 (41%)
New (10) Used (6) from $36.90
Rating:  240 reviews
Sales Rank: 405
Format: Cd-rom
Platforms: Mac Os X, Macintosh
Media: CD-ROM
Batteries Included: No
Operating System: Macintosh
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.4
Dimensions (in): 0 x 0.1 x 0.1
MPN: VMFUSMBX2
Model: VMFUSMBX2
UPC: 717103140372
EAN: 0717103140372
ASIN: B000UK3GVA
Release Date: August 20, 2007
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: Expedited shipping available
Condition: New. Out of packaging. Ships asap. Customer satisfaction is our goal. We offer a 7 day return policy on anything that is defective or grossly misadvertised. Make contact within 7 days and receive a full refund. You will also be reimbursed for the return shipping. There is a 15% restocking fee for all orders cancelled by buyer or returned non-defective. International/APO/FPO/PO addresses are welcome here. Bulk discounts are also available. Orders are shipped via USPS First class mail (1-7 days). Expediated is available on select items and are shipped via USPS Priority Mail (1-3 days). Larger items may be shipped via UPS Ground (1-6 days), insured. Tracking is available on UPS shipped orders. All orders are shipped within 2 business days from Iowa.
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| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 21-25 of 240
 Great product February 20, 2008
Derek (New York, NY)
9 out of 9 found this review helpful
I'm not qualified to write a feature-by-feature review of Fusion, but I've been using it since it first came out (and Parallels before that, until version 2.5) so I have some VM experience on the Mac.
In short, Fusion does everything I could every want. I use XP with Fusion on almost a daily basis and it's never let me down. It's fast, runs every app I have ever thrown at it, utilizes both cores, plays nice with OS X with respect to shared devices (like printers, DVD drives, USB peripherals, etc.), doesn't hog resources, and offers a very seamless workflow in Unity mode.
It's also nice that VMs created with Fusion run in WMware Player on Windows boxes, though that's a feature that I benefit from more at work than home.
If it's this good now, I can't wait for 2.0. Fusion has truly mitigated all of the reasons I had for not buying a Mac, and all without cumbersome rebooting (though I keep a Boot Camp partition for the occasional game, as native 3D is still superior to the support in Fusion and Parallels).
Best Virtualization Solution Without A Doubt October 12, 2007
Craig Wright (Oakland, CA)
7 out of 7 found this review helpful
I have been using VMware Workstation for about a year and a half now, primarily on Linux (Ubuntu) hosts but also on Windows hosts. I have used Workstation primarily to host Linux guests, with Fusion the focus has shifted to the Windows BootCamp guest primarily for webdev testing. I loved Workstation, and Fusion brings essentially the same product to Mac, with optimizations for running a Windows guest.
The user interface of Fusion has been revamped from the ground-up apparently, and I think it is overall an improvement. The main benefits of the new UI show up in the "Unity" view. In this mode, the running windowed applications of a Windows guest show up in the Mac OSX context, without being confined to the guest console. Fusion even shows the icon of running Windows apps in the Dock.
Integration with Boot Camp is excellent. The only issue I have experienced is that dual-booting into BootCamp/Windows allows you to use a later version of DirectX that VMware does not support. This means that DirectX apps will crash if you attempt to run then in Fusion (unless there is some fancy system profile setup you can work out of which I am not aware). This only applies to those of us dual-booting for our computer games. If you are using VMware's experimental DX8.1 support, you can just install the DX8.1 drivers and you should be good to go.
The interface to Fusion is very streamlined. The bulky one-window UI of Workstation (and Server Client) gives way to a variety of smaller widgets (the Library, the Launch Applications widget for Windows Unity, and seperate console windows for each VM). Unfortunately VMware also streamlined out multiple snapshots and snapshot trees (seems you can have one snapshot per VM). This is not a feature I use very often so it seems a fair trade for the price difference between Fusion and Workstation. You can even run Fusion headless if that is your thing (by booting a VM from the command line and killing the UI PIDs).
Installation note, with Boot Camp you will need to call Microsoft to re-activate your copy of Windows. Otherwise the process was relatively painless. Porting over my Linux VMs was also painless, those have been copied and ported from Linux hosts to Windows hosts to other Linux hosts and now to Mac Hosts, which is one reason I love virtualization so much.
VMware also has a strong discussion forum on their website. I have not tried their Customer Support numbers, but there has not been a problem I could not solve (well, at least the the definitive answer to) from their forums.
 One Sweet Product. October 29, 2007
W. Daniel Doran (New York, New York)
7 out of 7 found this review helpful
Having tried the other Windows-on-my-Mac options, Fusion simply rocks. Unity - which let's you treat each windows "window" like any other mac app (sits in your dock, move around like other mac apps, etc) is great.
Only downfall - seems that there are some networking bugs to workout still. I'm running Windows XP Pro on my mine, and there are definitely some bugs when trying to connect to your local network vs. wan connections. In my case, in bridged mode I connect to the internet fine but not the local network.... in NAT I connect to the local network and not the internet. Argh!
When all is said and done, though, this is a slick program that really expands the Mac platform in a very natural way.
 Easy installation, Slows down your system December 25, 2007
DC (US)
6 out of 7 found this review helpful
I have a MacBook Pro bought in the summer of 2006. Installation of Fusion was straightforward and exactly like any other installation on a Mac. Installing Windows XP Pro on the virtual machine was also very simple. It was actually easier than installing XP on a PC. I have only been using it for a couple of days but there are a few major issues I have:
1) McAfee Antivirus Plus could not be installed on the Windows virtual machine. I have an installation disk, and it would not work. I ended up downloading free antivirus and rootkit from AVG (by Grisoft).
2) Running the virtual machine significantly slows down your computer, both the Mac and the Windows systems.
3) I installed Windows on my Mac because there are several applications that just work better on Windows than on the Mac. One of those is Palm Desktop. The other is PowerPoint. Powerpoint files crash my Mac everytime I try to open them. Switching to the Windows machine is annoying everytime I want to use the apps I have on there. It's more efficient to work on either one OS or the other.
If you must have a Mac with Windows, Fusion accomplishes that task with easy installation and access. However, it is not an efficient process and slows everything down. In hindsight, I am not sure that I will be using the Windows machine very often.
Fusion the best choice! December 28, 2007
Bruce E. Wampler (Glenwood Springs, CO USA)
6 out of 6 found this review helpful
I am a professional programmer, and have used both Parallels and VMWare Fusion. Fusion is clearly the better product. It is much more stable, performs much better, and simply works.
I use Fusion on a Quad Mac Pro with 4 GB RAM and a bunch of hard disks. I currently have Vista Ultimate on Boot Camp with a corresponding VMWare machine. Both work perfectly. (I did have XP Pro, but recently upgraded to Vista [did in place upgrade, worked perfectly, no issues], and find that Fusion supports Vista very well - there is the double activation issue, but that just take a simple phone call to Microsoft - just be sure to say you are using Vista only on one machine, the one you bought the software for).
I also have a pure XP VM and a Ubuntu workstation/server VM, and it works like a charm. Perfect platform for web development - run a complete server on the Ubuntu VM, and live on the Mac, with Windows available when needed.
Fusion has not let me down, unlike Parallels. Fusion seems much more professionally done, while Parallels seems a bit like a big hack.
If you like to play with different systems, and haven't tried Ubuntu Linux, give it a try. Doesn't take much work (you can download a working version ready to go from VMWare!), and is a bit fun to play with. If you're a developer, then the Mac Pro / VMWare Fusion platform might the the best development platform ever built!
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