Within a number of organizations there is at least one small group of people running hardware unlike anything the rest of the enterprise has: Apple Macs.
Often content creators these renegades have the audacity to fly in the face of the majority of staff who toil away on Windows PCs. Unfortunately, while these privileged few get to grin at their luck, CIOs wring their hands at some of the problems having a multi-OS environment creates particularly because they may have to run Windows software on their machines.
For them VMware Inc. has released Fusion 7 Pro for business Mac users and developers who need to run Windows apps like Microsoft Project or Access on Macs without rebooting. It also released a standard version of Fusion 7.
Fusion lets users run Windows and Mac software side by side without having to chose one at startup.
“As the popularity of Macs continues to climb, Fusion 7 and Fusion 7 Pro are a strong complement to help users bridge the operating system divide when switching from Windows PCs to Mac laptops and desktops.” Nicolas Rochard, VMware’s director of product marketing for end-user computing, said in a release.
The new features of Fusion Pro including
- Support for OS X Yosemite and Windows 8.1 for the desktop to Windows 2012 R2 for the server. For organizations and technical users that run the latest Linux distribution, Fusion 7 Pro supports Ubuntu 14.04, RHEL 7, CentOS 7, Fedora 20, Debian 8 and many more;
- Connection to VMware vSphere or VMware Workstation, allowing users to extend and scale virtual machines to a private cloud. Users can easily connect to hosted virtual machines and run, upload or download virtual machines directly within Fusion 7 Pro;
- For MacBook Pros with a discrete GPU as well as an integrated GPU, Fusion 7 Pro lets users choose which GPU to use for 3-D applications. Selecting the integrated GPU enables longer battery life, while selecting the discrete GPU offers high performance for 3-D applications in a virtual machine;
- Macs equipped with an iSight camera can now use it to conduct video conferences within a Windows virtual machine. Fusion 7 Pro also supports USB 3.0 for fast file transfers, HD audio with 5.1 surround sound, and Bluetooth 4.0 wireless technology
- The Fusion Pro Virtual Machine Library’s new power state indicator enables users to monitor and shut down virtual machines not in use to improve overall performance. Fusion 7 Pro also enables application-level, user-configurable shortcuts to easily open or switch to a specific virtual machine.
These features come on top of the standard new features of Fusion 7 including the ability to create virtual machines with up to 16 vCPUs, 8 TB virtual disks and up to 64 GB of memory. Graphics-intensive applications can now be given an additional boost by allocating up to 2 GB of video memory per virtual machine.
Fusion 7 and Fusion 7 Pro are available immediately for download and purchase from VMware or partners for US$69.99 and US$149.99 respectively.
Those who bought Fusion 6 or Fusion 6 Professional between Aug. 1 and Sept. 30, 2014 are eligible for a free electronic upgrade.