Allison Sheridan of the NosillaCast podcast here, hosted at podfeet.com.
I’ve been doing some depressing reviews lately, but this week is different. It’s a HAPPY review this time. VMware Fusion 3.

Years ago I helped beta test the first virtual machine software for the Mac, Parallels. Let’s make sure everyone knows what a virtual machine is before I get in too far. A virtual machine is a 2nd operating system inside your main operating system. Your main OS is called the Host OS, and the second OS is called the guest. There are a lot of combinations you can do here, if your host OS is Linux, you can have a guest OS of Windows, or even a guest of another copy of Linux. If you’re running Windows as your host, you can run a guest OS of Linux, or another version or the SAME version of Windows. Some people make a guest OS of Windows and let their teenagers live in that guest Windows. Build the OS and applications just the way they want it, take a snapshot, and then when they booger it all up with viruses and spyware, you just restore the snapshot.

If you’re on a Mac, you can go even further because you can load guest OS’s of Windows and Linux. Unfortunately because of how Apple restricts usage of it’s Operating System, you can’t run Mac OSX as a guest OS on any host. That’s a shame really, a lot of people would love to do that. Well let’s move on from that, shall we?

I mentioned that I used Parallels in it’s early beta stages, and I followed it through to its production version which allowed me to live in a Windows world with a Mac. Later VMware, the giant from the Windows side for virtual machines, decided to move into the Mac world. I always felt a sense of loyalty towards Parallels because they started the revolution, so I never tried VMware Fusion, that is until now. VMware released VMware Fusion 3 last month and I just had to give it a try.

So I have early experience with Parallels, and I have recent experience with VirtualBox from Sun which is their free version of a virtual machine program ( virtualbox.org. You have to forgive a certain amount of dodginess when the VM software is free, and I’ve been happy enough with it so far. So now that I have it framed, let’s see what VMware Fusion 3 can do.

The first thing I noticed with VMware Fusion 3 was how much slicker and prettier it is than anything I’ve used before with clear and obvious icons and instructions. If you’ve never loaded a virtual machine before, I’m convinced I could hand you the software and walk away and you’d be successful with no help at all from me. The opening screen sets the stage from the beginning for how easy it’s going to be. You see three big icons for 1) install windows or another OS in a new VM, or 2) convert my existing Windows computer to run on a VM on this Mac, or 3) download a trial VM. If you had a boot camp partition set up you’d have had a fourth option - to run a boot camp partition as a virtual machine instead of having to reboot. I would love to try converting an existing Windows machine to a VM but since there aren’t any in the house that just won’t be happening I guess. I almost forgot, at the bottom of the window you can open an existing VM or import an existing VM that you set up somewhere else. I wonder if it can import VMs that were created for Windows? that would be cool.

I decided to install Windows 7 on my first VMware virtual machine. Clicked Install Windows or another OS, put in the Windows 7 DVD, and up popped a window showing me the defaults for the VM. In the old days you had to spend time answering a lot of questions, but now VMware Fusion 3 just picks everything for you and then gives you the option of changing the options. You can always change the settings later but I went in and changed the disk space option - they suggested a max of 40GB. That means Windows could grow but won’t start that big. I’m not giving enough to suggest W7 is allowed to be that big so it set it back to 12GB.

It’s hard to believe but pretty much the next thing you see is Windows installing itself, just like you’re looking at a “real” PC. And then…well, it worked! I have never done such a painless installation of such a complex program.

The one tricky thing on Virtual Machines is how to get it to talk to YOUR hardware since there’s no direct connection to things like your trackpad, mouse, screen resolution, graphics card, network devices and camera. VM software always has a separate package called Tools that you have to run after you install the OS. In the old days you just had to know you needed to install the tools, but with VMware Fusion 3, you can’t possibly miss it. I think they told me three or four times, and then it was showing in the bottom of the window till I executed it.

At first VMware Fusion 3 didn’t recognize the CD for installing the VMware tools but they warned this might happen and said to just open the CD from Windows Explorer and run setup.exe which worked fine. Notice that I didn’t say I created or inserted a CD, there was just sort of magically a CD sitting on the Windows desktop for me to select. Crazy easy.

Another thing that was problematic in the early days of VM on the Mac was how to get a folder shared between the VM and your Mac. Not so on VMware Fusion 3 - I only have a vague memory of the installer asking me if I’d like to share info between my VM and my Mac, and yet after running the Tools installation and rebooting Windows 7 - darn it if the desktop on Windows doesn’t show the same things as on the desktop of my Mac!

Next challenge is always how to get your VM to talk to your network card - and Windows on a PC usually makes that a challenge right? So with trepidation I opened IE8 on Windows 7…and it hopped right on my network! That means it not only recognized my network card, it used the WPA password from my keychain and got on my network without me having to do ANY work at all!

I was even able to use the 2 fingered scroll on my MacBook Pro immediately after installing the tools. I opened a document to print, and the print menu was already preselected to default to my home printer on the network, AND the document printed. Amazing. Brought a tear to my eye actually!

One thing I noticed was that VMware Fusion 3 was only taking about 30% of my processor resources when it was idle, which is a lot less than one web browser window open with Flash in it on the Mac. I also noticed that VMware Fusion 3 was only using one of my processors, but when I opened the settings I discovered I can address one core, two cores or four cores since I have a dual core, dual processor machine. Very cool.

If you’ve never used VM software before or not since the early days, you may not have seen one of the coolest features. Normally the virtual machine is one window floating around on your Mac desktop with the guest applications trapped inside that window. If you command tab to flip between programs, the entire OS is one application. But what if you could have the Guest applications look just like a “real” app on your host OS? Turns out you can do that. On Parallels they call it Coherence mode, on VMware Fusion 3 they call it Unity. While your VM is running you can flip on Unity and suddenly you can see IE8 as a separate application floating around on your Mac desktop as though it belonged there. Since I only gave Windows one core, and 1GB of RAM to entertain itself, so moving those floating windows around left some trails and wasn’t really smooth but I’m sure it would be better if I gave it more resources.

I did have a couple of instances where my machine slowed to a crawl while Fusion was running, but I couldn’t figure out why. In both cases I had Windows in Unity mode and I didn’t see it happen in Full Screen or Single Window mode. I didn’t experiment with upping the dedicated processors to the VM but that could have been it. I hope to eventually find a pattern to when it happens, but most of the time it worked really snappily.

One of the coolest features of VM’s is that you can get your machine tricked out just the way you want it and then take a snapshot. Now you let your teenager get on it and they go to some creepy site like Limewire and they get your system all gunked up with viruses and spyware, but it’s no big deal because you can simply restore the snapshot. VMware Fusion 3 has this capability of course but they have two options to bring the snapshot back - Rollback, and Restore Snapshot and for the life of me I couldn’t figure out what the difference is between them. I even read the documentation - almost pulled a muscle doing that.

So bottom line is that I am absolutely delighted with VMware Fusion 3 and can highly recommend it as an idiot proof way to install a guest Operating System on your Mac. Remember you don’t HAVE to install Windows, it could be Ubuntu Linux instead! Go check out VMware Fusion 3 at vmware.com. It will run you $80 US but I do believe this is a case of getting what you pay for.

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