Well

[macrifice]

That's what I thought from the very beginning of the 3.1.3 discussion about supporting Lion. First saying Lion is supported by 3.1.3 (excepting some serious issues, which obviously will not be fixed). Then pushing a new version which obviously has even more serious issues. I'm not sure what this strategy is for other than making Fusion users angry. I understand that VMWare needs to sell software and that they have competitors. The other way VMWare should understand that there are people who need to have reliable environment to do their daily work. And that those people are not a good target to do experiments.

Well, I finally decided neither to upgrade to Lion nor to using Fusion other than 3.1.3 version. This works stable on SL for quite a time now and there is nothing at all I would get being worth to take the risk of not being able to work properly. I will check the situation in 6-12 months again. Maybe then the most serious issues are solved. The only effect remaining from all this is much less trusting into VMWare's competence.

Regards,

Macrifice

[WoodyZ]

Yes some Users are having issues however...

No one if forcing one to upgrade to either Mac OS X Lion or VMware Fusion 4!

VMware offers a Fully Functional Free 30 Day Trial so if one whats to test drive it to make sure it works for them it can be done at no direct monetary cost.

Also one can/should backup the Virtual Machines before upgrading or at the minimum take a Snapshot so one has an easy avenue to revet to a known good working state if needing to revert back to a previous version of VMware Fusion.

So the way I see it, if done properly, the worst it has to be is a little loss of time test driving a new release and that just shouldn't be a big deal! :smileywink:

[tracywang]

Hi Guru Woodyz,

I just curious that how many BIG issues (against Fusion 3) did you met as user reported in the community for Fusion 4, you know you are guru who can avoid many unreal bug like wrong configuration issue happens. Which area do you think is regression against Fusion 3. :smileyhappy:

[WoodyZ]

tracywang wrote:

Hi Guru Woodyz,

I just curious that how many BIG issues (against Fusion 3) did you met as user reported in the community for Fusion 4, you know you are guru who can avoid many unreal bug like wrong configuration issue happens. Which area do you think is regression against Fusion 3. :smileyhappy:

Sorry, but I do not understand what you're saying or asking, nor do I have the time or inclination to compare issues between various versions of VMware Fusion.

[tracywang]

Good answer!! Thanks.

[macrifice]

Obvisouly you missed some points.

Firstly, some people might need to upgrade to Lion. If 3.1.3 does not work for them then they need to use 4.0 and if this doesn't work either, hm...they can't?

Secondly, it's not just a matter of trying the eval version but installing Lion, installing Fusion, backing up my VMs I want to check and if if does not work downgrading my entire mac back to SL and 3.1.3 not mentioning the risks of broken backups and so on.

Thirdly, I have around 20 productive VMs running Win XP, Win7, Win Server 2008 each something between 50 and 150GB large. So to see if it works well I had to check all of them (at least the different OS versions), i.e making backups of them and in worst case restoring them.

Fourthly, I might not see immediately if there are problems. So if it turns out after some weeks there are serious problems and I need to roll back I lose changes I did on my VMs in between and have to repeat them after rolling back.

So the worst is not a "little loss of time" but a couple days or even more.

I was just thinking what our customers would say if I told them "the worst it has to be is a little loss of time test driving a new release and that just shouldn't be a big deal!" or if Apple or MS released patches and told me "the worst it has to be is a little loss of time test driving a new release and that just shouldn't be a big deal!". :smileyshocked:

All of our customers demand 100% backward compatibilty (and safe migration paths for new versions) and they pay really a lot of money for that. We have a couple hundred employess working with VMs, mostly on ESX but also on notebooks and desktops. So also we pay a lot of money and the last thing we want to hear is it's maybe a little loss of time or just give it a try. That's everything, but not professional.

[werpu]

macrifice schrieb:

Well, I finally decided neither to upgrade to Lion nor to using Fusion other than 3.1.3 version.

Personally I can second that decision but for other reasons and mostly for Lion.

I personally think VMWare Fusion 4s problems are way less than Lions. VMwares problems mostly are in the area of the 3d drivers which probably will be resolved by one or two bugfix releases. Lions problems are way bigger. Sorry for getting off topic, but my personal opinion is that Lion is Apples Vista, full of good ideas but oviously never really tested for working and rushed to the market with too few implementors (obviously Apple has shifted its core OS developers to iOS while OSX basically is starved from developers)

Literally any new feature no matter if coming from iOS or not is only  thought out, to fit into a desktop os, or not even that and a fair bunch of them has still a lot of bugs. The biggest problems are simply in Lion the weird color scheming, the simply broken and sometimes dangerious autosave versioning workflow and the half finished launchpad and the auto locking of files, add to that a new bunch of bugs, like more flakey wifi, more flakey SMB support breaking AFP support for old devices etc.. and you have a mess on your hands in a corporate environment.

Compared to this mess the a little bit beta feel of VMWare 4 is harmless, this will be resolved in 1-2 bugfix releases, while I dont have the hope that Apple will fix the fundamental workflow problems of Lion within Lions timeframe.(The bugs maybe, but the auto versioning and autosaving is broken in a way that it needs a major redesign which is out of scope for a single release)