I know you’ve written rather extensively about Parallels as a virtual machine environment for Mac OS X, but I’m wondering what you think of VMware Fusion and whether you know if it works properly with Microsoft Vista?
I recently wrote a feature piece for Linux Journal where I talked about running a pure Linux installation (Ubuntu, in this case) within a virtual environment on a PowerBook Pro laptop and that was my excuse to test out VMWare Fusion, the new flagship product for the Apple platform from long-time virtualization experts VMWare.
My conclusion? We Mac users are blessed with two superb virtualization solutions. Whether you choose Parallels Desktop or VMWare Fusion, you’re going to find a powerful tool that lets you run just about any operating system smoothly and efficiently.
Now, on to your specific question. Can you install and run Vista with VMWare Fusion? You betcha.
Here’s how I did just that…
The first step was to download the demo of VMWare Fusion (though I have a full operating license, you can run it for 30 days with a free temp license)
Start it up and you see perhaps the saddest, most depressing screen in the world of virtualization:
No operating system installed. So sad.
Fortunately, a click on “New…” gets us here:
You can get a sense of the many, many operating systems supported by VMWare Fusion in this next step. I’ll choose Vista so we can install a full home edition:
Now you’ll go through the typical steps of picking a name for your virtual environment (I’ll ingeniously call mine “Vista”) and where you want to have it installed on your computer:
Now you can configure how VMWare Fusion builds and manages your virtual hard disk. Remember that if you preallocate all the space, you’ve just eaten up 15-20GB or more of the real disk space on your computer. My advice? Let the VM system increase the size of the disk as it needs, so that you can get by with less than the full file size.
As a tip: with Vista installed but no other apps added, the VM virtual disk for Vista is 5.9GB. If I would have pre-allocated the 20GB VMWare recommends (Microsoft recommends 40GB for Vista!) I would have wasted a huge amount of disk space.
Next is one of those features of VMware Fusion that makes it such a pleasure to install operating systems in this particular app: it knows when you should be entering different data and can automate the process for you. No waiting ten minutes to click “OK” and then fifteen minutes to click “Yes”, then five before you enter your license key. Yeah!
That’s what they call “Windows Easy Install” and it’s well worth selecting in this process:
You will need to enter your full product key, as you can see I’m doing here.
Next step is to agree with the installer that, yes, you do want to actually do the installation:
Finally, finally, click on “Finish” (not “Proceed”?) and you’ll start the actual installation process:
Oops. You need to actually put the Microsoft Vista install disk in the computer at this point. 🙂 I’ll try again…
Many moons later (about 30 minutes on my Macbook Air) I saw:
…and still the wheels slowly spun…
until, after quite a while, I saw:
Log in and after 2-3 minutes the system automatically starts installing the custom VMWare Fusion Tools:
Finally, it wouldn’t really be a Microsoft operating system unless it included one key critical application, as shown here:
As you can see, Microsoft Vista works just fine on the Mac, either in full screen mode or as an app window mixed in with all the other apps on the computer.
Hi, I purchased a MACBook a couple months ago and I am running bootcamp as well. now that I am comfortable working with MAC I wanted to install VMFusion so i didnt have to hop in and out of OS’s. I understand that I will install VMware on the MAC side but will it blow up my Bootcamp drive, will I loose all that data and files when it asks me to install XP/vista?
Have tiy tried installing Windows on an external drive in Fusion, I have been able to do it in Windows through the VMware, but have not been able to do it in Fusion.
thank you…….reza.
Hi,
Which is better, XP on Fusion or Vista on Fusion. Vista’s over-head makes me a bit concerned.
please advise.
reza.
Thanks for a great article, really helpful!
I can’t seem to get Vista to recognize my internet connection through my macbook airport. I don’t have a clue what I am doing wrong. I have tried every possible combination of settings on the VM Fusion application. Please Help!
Thanks,
Hi Dave,
Wonderful tip, but it can even get better: I have a core duo macmini with Mac OSX Leopard and Vista on a separate partition via Bootcamp. I decided that bootcamp was’nt very handy because I had to switch from Leopard to Vista and back. Enter VMWare Fusion: instead of creating a virtual disk, I instructed VMWare fusion to use my bootcamp partition for Vista… Vista came up in Fusion rightaway and after it did some juggling with the drivers and asked for activation because of changed hardware, I was done… I tossed in some extra RAM and have Leopard, VMWare Fusion and Vista running happily alongside eachother since…
and yes id be happy to buy you a chai
PLEASE HELP!!! Vista installed and operates perfectly on VMFUSION, until I shut down and restart..then I get an “disk read” error on top left of screen when I try to log back on to Vista. Please help thanks
While I found installing Vista in a VM to be an interesting experience, I quickly tired of waiting and waiting and waiting and waiting. Unless you can afford to give the VM lots of RAM, it just hurts to use Vista in a VM. I’ve got a 3GB MacBook Pro (can’t get any higher unless I buy a new one), and with Leopard, some apps, and Vista, I’m tapped on RAM.
Oh well, until I can get a laptop with 8GB RAM, I’ll stick with XP for now.
Hi – thanks for all this. I installed Vista Home Premium on Fusion (MacBook Pro) and share the same experiences. The only thing I am asking for some time now: after some moths of use w/o installing anything, I feel the startup of programs gets rather slow – about 20 s for the Solitaire f.i. Is there anything I could do for help?
mk