I was so excited when I saw that VMWare had a new product for OS X that I promptly went out and ordered a Mac. More on that later as I list all the joys and trials of “switching”.
Once I actually got Fusion installed though, I came to an unfortunate realization — by “Beta” VMWare basically means crippleware. Not intentionally, I hope, but the product is limited in what it can do. It doesn’t have even basic snapshots, let alone the multiple-snapshot wonder that I love about VMWare Workstation. At least, that’s what it looked like at first. Then I stumbled across a post in the beta tester’s fusion forums on vmware.com suggesting that snapshotting code was still in the program, there was just no menu access involved. It turns out if you took an old vmware image that had “ask” as the choice for what to do when shutdown, you could get vmware to ask you what to do when you shut down the host: restore from snapshot, take new snapshot, nothing. And sure enough, it works!
Of course, you can’t always create the image elsewhere and move it over, but after examining the relevant .vmx file, I found it’s really pretty simple to add to any image. Just open up the .vmx file in a text editor and add or change the snapshot.action item:
snapshot.action = "ask"
Voila! Snapshots on VMWare Fusion OS X!
What is up my same named friend?
Just stopping by to see what you are up to!
Jordan
Left by Jordan Wiens on February 26th, 2007
Any idea how Parallels compares?
Left by Greg on March 10th, 2007
No idea — never tried parallels. I use the snapshotting features of vmware a lot, so I’m waiting until fusion has that feature. Of course, it parallels adds it, I’d be willing to give it a whirl.
Left by Jordan on March 10th, 2007