Sep 03 2008
VMWare Fusion 2 RC
I’ve finally upgraded VMWare Fusion on my Mac to the latest release candidate for version 2. I had been holding out for the final version but I got tired of waiting.
The main reason for upgrading was that I’m using VMWare Fusion for running Windows 2008 Server on MacOS as my work development machine. The downside of using VMWare Fusion 1.x is that whilst 2008 server will run very happily, it doesn’t have support for audio.
Normally this wouldn’t both me as I normally watch BBC iPlayer, YouTube, etc. under MacOS. However, I’ve been doing some SharePoint research and watching a lot of SharePoint related screencasts and it has been really awkward flicking between watching a screencast on one virtual desktop and trying out code on another – I didn’t want to use Unity because I like my development desktop to be free from clutter and my MacOS desktop is very cluttered.
I also wanted to try VMWare Fusion 2 as it says on the tin that it is much more resource efficient. When you’re running MacOS native and two or three VMs, you need to start thinking about what effect that is going to have on performance. I’ve been tweaking CPU and memory settings on the VMs to the n’th degree but my system still drags when starting and stopping VMs… maybe a new MacBook Pro will be required 
How is the RC version going? I have been thinking about trying version 2 since the first beta. As I currently have 3 Server 2008 installs and an XP install running my Mac is begining to lag a little bit!
So far everything seems to be working… wel, almost. My Windows 2008 VM now has an audio output device that works, although the sound is jittery on it, despite having 2 CPUs and 1Gb RAM and not being under load.
Starting up the VMs does us less resources, so MacOS doesn’t lock up, however the down side is that it takes the VMs longer to load. I really should get into the had of suspending the VMs instead of shutting them down every time.
One annoying problem I have on Windows 2008 is that Visual Studio 2008 keeps throwing up “Memory access violation” error messages. Visual Studio keeps running but I does get a little irritating, and I have no idea what is causing it.