Fusion Feedback and Fixes

VMware Headquarters, Palo Alto, California

What an exhilarating day!  I'm über-pleased that the public reception of VMware Fusion for Mac has been so positive.  I'm still running on adrenaline here—between making the front page of digg.com, discussing with the illuminating readers of this blog, and answering the excellent feedback from the Fusion Discussion Forums, there's just so many folks who are as excited as I am about VMware virtualization coming to the Mac.

I just wanted to point out a few of the more common issues folks have run into, and do a quick link rundown.

1. I can't use the mouse in my virtual machine!
• Folks have reported a conflict with certain Wacom tablets, as well as the Keyspan RF Front Row remote.  Try disconnecting these before using a virtual machine.  You'll know you're running into this issue if you see a message like "MKSHIDMOUSE: Failed to open mouse, result -536870206" in the vmware.log file in your virtual machine's directory (in ~/vmware/ by default).
2. I can't find my serial number!
• You can get your serial number by going through the flow at http://www.vmware.com/fusionbeta again.  Apologies—there's currently no email with your serial number.
3. I get a gray screen telling me to restart my Mac!
• As this is a beta release for a new platform, there's still some debugging code to ensure all the logic in our new Mac drivers is in top shape.  If you see a gray screen telling you to restart your Mac, this means our debugging code sensed something was out of order.  After rebooting your Mac, please open the file /Library/Logs/panic.log and post the contents on this blog, send me a private message, or email fusion-feedback (at) vmware.com.
• Some folks are reporting a panic.log with a line like "vmmon: ASSERT bora/modules/vmmon/macos/pageHiddenMap.cpp:307" .  So far, we've only seen this on a few machines, but please do report this if you run into it.
• If anything seems at all weird or unusual, please do file a support request.  Our support team is top-notch.
  
4. If I switch my virtual machine to Bridged mode, I can't access the virtual machine over the network from my host!
• This is a known issue, described in the VMware Fusion for Mac Release Notes.  We're working on it and plan to have a fix ready for the next release.  For now, you can use NAT mode and follow the Linux Workstation 5.5 NAT configuration instructions if you need a server in the virtual machine to be accessible from the outside.  (Note that nat.conf is in /Library/Application Support/VMware Fusion on Mac OS hosts).

Here's a few early Mac news sites' links with thoughts on Fusion:

• TUAW chips in: Interesting thoughts.
• Ars Technica readers share their comments.
• Macworld gets in on the Fusion action.
• Words from the venerable MacNN.
• MacRumors readers sound off on Fusion.