MWSF '09: Joe Kissell on VMWare Fusion 2

During my "lunch break" on Wednesday, I headed out to Moscone to catch one of Joe Kissell's many talks about VMWare Fusion 2:

Joe Kissell, Take Control of VMWare Fusion 2

I took some rough notes on my iPhone (which I have cleaned up significantly for this post):

• Joe started out with an overview of virtualization on the Mac, and why you'd actually want to do it. He also mentioned the competition, and I was surprised that he actually mentioned Sun's free alternative, Virtual Box.
• One thing that I was interested to learn was that you can mirror folders between Mac OS X and Windows. So for example, if you mirror the "Desktop" folder, any files placed on the Windows desktop will show up on the Mac OS desktop, and vice versa.
• It's possible to set global file associations - so that you can open all text documents in a single application (for example, BBEdit), regardless of which OS you double-click on the file in.
• When asked about Parallels 4 vs. Fusion 2, Joe called out the excellent ArsTechnica review of Parallels 4. The basic conclusion is that if you require OpenGL acceleration, then Parallels might be worth a look. Otherwise, stay away. :)
• One thing that I was a bit confused about was when Joe talked about support for resizable disks in Fusion. I'm aware that if you allocate a 20Gb virtual disk, you can choose to have Fusion allocate space on your disk only when Windows demands it. But Joe seemed to imply that if you started with a 20Gb virtual disk, and it got full, you could dynamically it to a larger size, and Windows would figure it out and grow the filesystem. While that seems like it could be plausible, I'm not sure if it is really that easy. However with resizable disks, there is apparently a maintenance command that can be launched which will reclaim some disk space on the Mac OS X side.
• In the eternal Windows XP vs. Vista debate, Joe recommends XP.
• One feature that I knew about, but after seeing Joe's talk I want to explore further, is Fusion's ability to boot from Bootcamp partitions. It seems like if this works well, it might provide an opportunity to "have your cake and eat it too". As in, with one Windows license, you could run moderate tasks inside of a VM, and when you wanted to play a game, you could reboot directly into the same Windows install.
• It's possible to mount mount virtual disks in finder (which as I recall, is based on MacFUSE).
• Joe mentioned that VMWare Fusion also includes a vmrun" command-line utility, which can be used to script VM operation, and even perform commands within Windows, from the UNIX side of Mac OS X. I have filed this away for future reference. ;)

All-in-all, it was a decent half-hour talk about VMWare Fusion, and I learned a couple of things to boot. And now I have a face to match to the name whenever I read an article by Joe on TidBITS. Additionally, due to the in-show discount, I also ended up buying an electronic copy of his book. :)

-Andy.