Vmware Fusion From a Mac IT guy
September 13, 2016

Vmware Fusion From a Mac IT guy

Gabriel Duff | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with VMware Fusion

VMware fusion is used here mostly for testing environments or replicating a network that can be easily wiped out and rebuilt without issue. For many years it has been used for development testing of operating systems and applications in those operating systems. It is the go to app for virtualization and quick testing of anything needed.
  • Quickly creates virtual machines for testing.
  • Easily allows management of VMs even in other VMware products.
  • The user interface could use a little update, but mostly it works fine.
  • It would be nice to have the option of having network templates for commonly used setups to make testing easier.
  • Compression of virtual machines would be a nice option also, making them take up less of a footprint.
  • It saves time in testing network configurations and allows you to spend less money to test certain kinds of setups.
  • It's not difficult to set up and is pretty user friendly.
  • Customers see a value of using it to dual boot operating systems without having to do a native setup.
All of this changes from year to year, too. Parallels and VMware both require that you buy an annual license every year to get updates that pack in performance gains and feature improvements. These annual updates are great in theory, but they’re not cheap, and they come every year without fail. This is a bit tiresome, especially when they lock out newer versions of Windows behind those paid upgrades. Provided you don’t need to be on the cutting edge, they’re usually pretty incremental, though, and you’re okay skipping one or two—as long as a new version of Windows doesn’t come out.
It is my preferred virtualization tool to use on Mac OS for constantly staying updated and supporting the latest operating systems. It's great for sand box testing of your own private networks and also supports net boot for building VMs off network servers.

It's less ideal for large scale setups of virtual machines for users in a large Mac user base. VDI setups are better for this.

VMware Fusion Feature Ratings