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I have for some time been fascinated by virtual machines. I have been reading a great deal about the possibilities that are available for sand-boxing, testing, and otherwise by the use of virtual machines. But this past week was my first true adventure into this new world, and I have to say that I am pretty pleased at this point.
VmWare just announced its full Beta release of Fusion which is their virtual appliance for OSX. Now being a mac guy I could have used Parallels but I was specifically waiting for VmWare to release their version, simply due to the trust that I have in their name and other appliances.
I began by installing VmWare Fusion which could not have been more simple. I have been using Bootcamp for several months now for those rare circumstances when I just had to have Windows. But, it was always such a pain to reboot the machine for that five minutes that I really needed to do something. And was even more painful if I had to be there longer since I no longer had access to all my music. Thus the beauty of Fusion which allows you to run the virtual machine within the same session that you are in currently, in my case OSX.
The first OS that I tried installing was Windows. I must say that it came off without a hitch. Windows installed beautifully and worked right out of the gate. I limited the drive to 8gb and gave the VM 1 gig of my 2 gigs of RAM. It is a little pokey but I must say it is not all that bad to use. I discovered early on that it is important to install VMTools on the new virtual machine as it allows you to change the window size on the fly and allows the mouse to move in and out of the virtual machine seamlessly. Having done all this my experience with installing Windows was almost pleasurable which is the first time I can say that about a product from Redmond.
I have also been wanting to take the opportunity to work in Ubuntu. I am not a Linux guy by any stretch of the imagination but I have the desire to learn more. I have read great things about Ubuntu and wanted to give it a try. I just did not have the spare machine to dedicate to my experiment. Ubuntu was only slightly more challenging than Windows. I began by trying to download a pre-installed version from the VMTN website. This is a great resource of already installed virtual machines that are pre-configured and ready to go. I could not find a good one of the new version of Ubuntu and thus downloaded the 6.06 version. I moved the new virtual machine into the vmware folder on my machine, double clicked, and away we went. It was truly amazing. VMTools was already installed on this machine and so all the cool window resizing and mouse tricks worked out of the box. The only thing that did not work was my sound which I imagine was a driver issue with my iMac and could have been fixed but I did not take the time to do so since I was feeling cocky and ready to get the latest version 6.10.
I downloaded an iso of the latest version of Ubuntu and began the full installation process. The process was very speedy with only a few hitches. It took a few minutes to get VMTools working on the machine. I had to do the update process several times and was aided in that by this article. The only inssue that I had beyond that was getting the mouse to work properly. It turned out that the mouse driver that Ubuntu was using was the default and not the vmmouse that is requried. I found this article quickly on VMTN and was again “good to go.”
I have to say that the entire experience has been very positive. I am looking forward to working in x11 on Ubuntu and not having to reboot for those times that I need Windows. Fedora is next so I will post about my experience with it. All in all a great experience.

[tags]VmWare, VmWare Fusion, Fusion, Mac, OSX, Parallels[/tags]