VMware Fusion

Ryan Marimon, testing infrastructure manager and VMHero blogger in Cleveland, talks about why he can't live without VMware Fusion.

I had been a PC person all my life. When it came time to get a new computer, I wanted a MacBook Pro. In my work, I use virtualization quite a bit, and I feel it’s the next big thing in computing. At home, I wanted to justify buying a Mac by finding a way to still run all my PC applications. I participated in VMware’s beta test of Fusion and loved what I saw. I had tested its competitor, Parallels, but it didn’t perform as well.

I like Fusion’s “Unity” feature, which allows me to put Windows apps on the same desktop as Mac apps. I also like VMware as a company and the way that they support their products. The company is committed to releasing updates, fixes, and new versions in a timely manner. In fact, it just rolled out Fusion 2.0, which will add multiple Snapshot capabilities. Snapshot lets you preserve a state of your virtual machine and return to it.

I also like that Fusion offers support for Apple’s Boot Camp, which comes with the Mac’s latest operating system. Sometimes you just can’t use a virtual environment, such as when you’re gaming. The beautiful thing about Fusion is that you can take a Boot Camp partition and start it as a virtual machine.

I’m passionate about virtualization. I started a blog, VMHero, to aggregate all the information about virtualization in one place. The direction that VMware is headed will literally change the face of computing in the next few years. Fusion is just one piece of that puzzle. I think one day we will look back at computing as it is today and wonder why. Ultimately, someday you should be able to have your same “PC” at work, from the Web, at home on your Mac, or even on your mobile device.