[goMac]

VMWare's Fusion begins private beta - The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)

Some key stuff:

"Access physical devices from the virtual machine. You can access physical devices such as CD ROM drives, video cameras, iPods, printers and high-speed disks from the virtual machine."

"Leverage Virtual SMP capabilities to gain additional performance improvement. You can assign more than a single CPU (on supported hardware with Intel Core Duo CPU) to gain additional performance for CPU-intensive workloads."

"Fusion supports high-speed USB 2.0 for a huge range of devices. Even devices that do not have drivers for Mac OS X will work in a virtual machine."

Looks like we have a winner. Physical device support will be nice. It should allow VMWare to use a Boot Camp partition for virtualization.

[Tsilou B.]

Physical device support will be nice. It should allow VMWare to use a Boot Camp partition for virtualization.

Even if VMWare supports this, it won't be usable with Windows XP or Vista. Unlike Mac OS X, these operating systems cannot boot on "different computers" from the same installation. As long as VMWare doesn't emulate the exact same graphics card, network card etc. which are really installed in the Mac (and are therefore used by Bootcamp), it won't work.
Additionally, Windows would have to be reactivated everytime you switch between Bootcamp and VMWare and Microsoft probably will refuse to activate the copy after three reactivations.

However, it should be possible to access the files on the Bootcamp partition from a second copy of Windows installed in Fusion.

[driven]

Originally Posted by Tsilou B. 

Even if VMWare supports this, it won't be usable with Windows XP or Vista. Unlike Mac OS X, these operating systems cannot boot on "different computers" from the same installation. As long as VMWare doesn't emulate the exact same graphics card, network card etc. which are really installed in the Mac (and are therefore used by Bootcamp), it won't work.
Additionally, Windows would have to be reactivated everytime you switch between Bootcamp and VMWare and Microsoft probably will refuse to activate the copy after three reactivations.

However, it should be possible to access the files on the Bootcamp partition from a second copy of Windows installed in Fusion.

It seems to be working for me.

[64stang06]

Originally Posted by driven 

It seems to be working for me.

Works fine here also; MacBook and an iMac with dedicated graphics.

[Cold Warrior]

Zombie thread. A lot has changed in 14 months.