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tldr; Fusion Supports Containers! Download the bits below!
Today is a big day for us on the Desktop Hypervisor team. Our beloved products Fusion and Workstation are getting some pretty significant updates for no extra cost to existing users.
Your VMware Fusion 11 license entitles you to 18 months of complimentary email support from the date of product registration. Telephone support is available by purchasing Per Incident Support (for all Fusion customers) or Basic Support (for Fusion 11 Pro customers only with a minimum quantity of 10) from the VMware Online Store. Build, Test and Demo your next big thing, from desktop to mobile and cloud-scale apps, right from your Mac with VMware Fusion Pro with features designed for advanced users, developers and IT admins. VMware Fusion 11.5 Pro. 750MB free disk space for VMware Fusion and at least 5GB for each virtual machine. VMware Fusion 11.5 PRO requires a 64-bit processor. Microsoft Windows is not included with VMware Fusion. Ready for macOS Mojave and the latest releases of Windows 10.
We have a lot to share about our commitments to Developers, to Community, and to Windows , so let’s dive right in!
VMware has long served developers, as well as end users and IT professionals, with some of the best in class features with our award winning desktop hypervisor products, VMware Fusion and Workstation.
However, when it comes to developing and testing today’s modern applications, things look a little different than the traditional ones which Fusion was originally designed to support.
Today, we’re proud to express our commitment to today’s modern developers by delivering new support for OCI containers using our award-winning hypervisor technology stack. Fusion 11.5 users can now pull, build, run and push containers as part of a modern development and testing workflow, without needing other tools such as docker desktop installed.
Enter vctl
Vmware Fusion 11
To support these new workflows, we created a new CLI tool: vctl, and we’re shipping it today as a part of our Fusion 11.5.5 update.
vctl: “vee-kettle” or “vee-control”? The debate continues…
vctl is designed to locally manage containers and our containerd based runtime. 4ukey manager. We use vctl to pull and run images from remote container repositories like Harbor or Docker Hub, or to build custom container images using standard Dockerfiles.
Some folks may recall that we first introduced vctl as part of Project Nautilus during our Tech Preview a few months back. Since then, we’ve listened to the community, made some changes, added some new capabilities, and are ready to bring it to the world as part of a free update to your existing copy of Fusion 11.5 or Fusion 11.5 Pro. (yes, both!)
For starters, there’s a new syntax. If you’re familiar with docker, you’ll feel right at home. So things like ‘vctl run nginx’ works the same as ‘docker run nginx’.
We think users will also be happy to hear that we’ve also added
build
support, so you can build images from standard Dockerfiles.Let’s take a quick look at how we can get started with vctl!
A familiar workflow
With the vctl cli experience we wanted to focus on some of the most common tasks users perform with containers, and bring that to our unique container engine to bring folks something radically new.
Pulling images is familiar, and defaults to docker hub for simplicity, but you can specify a full path to another repo or registry.
To run an image, it should once again feel familiar:
Same goes for showing the container inventory:
It’s fairly light on resources, and you also have the control to assign more or less resources to the appliance when firing up the container using -c and -m (CPU and Memory) flags. Run
vctl run
with no arguments to see some examples.Fusion is fairly light on resources consumption for the container appliance
When a container is fired up, we also mount the rootfs up to Host, meaning you can use Finder to browse the container contents! You could open up the running code of your app, make changes in real-time, in a way that feels just like editing any other file on your Mac.
When you start vctl, you’ll see the ‘Fusion Container Storage’ mount… each container also gets mounted as they’re started, and unmounted when they stop
Folders and Files from the Linux filesystem in the vanilla nginx container image. You could edit this file directly in Visual Studio Code on the Mac for example.
Let’s check out some of the details:
Using the
describe
command on a running container, we can see more detail, as well as the execvm
commands that we can copy and paste to ‘shell’ into our appliance OS or run some process (/bin/ls
in the example above…). (This of course is in addition to being able to vctl exec
into the container process itself…)Getting Started
Getting started is as easy as updating to Fusion 11.5.5, opening up your favorite Terminal app, and running
vctl system start
.Once the daemon is running, you can try pulling or building and running container images!
We have a good deal of documentation and examples located on our GitHub page, as well as our normal documentation centers.
If you hit a bug with your container or dockerfile, let us know so we can support it by filing an issue!
Which leads us to our next commitment: Community.
Vmware Fusion Pro 11.5
Releasing great software is fun, but what’s also exciting is the community around it.
VMware has a long standing and well-established community, but it tends to be centered around the “VI Admin” through VMware Technology Network, our community forum, and we welcome users to share their experiences with us there.
However, when it comes to the more development related discussions, the VMTN community forum might not always have the right experts readily available.
So we’ve expanded in a few new ways:
- New Slack channel
- Livestreams coming!
In collaboration with the VMware {code} team, we’ve created a new Slack channel:
#fusion-workstation
, within the VMware {code} Slack community! Cocoabox 1 1 – store unlimited cocoaobjective c snippets.Joining VMware {code} is free, and once you’ve joined you’ll get an email with a link to the main Slack channel.
The VMware Code community is full of folks that go beyond the typical duties of the VI Admin, and our Fusion and Workstation product and engineering teams will be directly participating to help answer tough questions. Editor: We’ll probably share some memes too.
We will also be doing live and recorded events with both the VMware {code} team, community, and on our own in an effort to help folks get the most out of Fusion and Workstation. Follow our Fusion and Workstation Twitter accounts to get the latest details!
As mentioned earlier in this post, we also have our Github repository where we have example docs, how-to content as well as detailed descriptions of the vctl subcommands. We encourage users to let us know if they hit any snags with vctl by filing an issue so we can work to make sure every OCI container runs without a hitch!
And finally,
The days of “you must disable Hyper-V to use Workstation” are over!
After years of collaborative development and engineering between VMware and Microsoft, we’re proud to be delivering a compatibility story where Workstation 15.5.5 and newer can run on Windows 10 Hosts with Hyper-V mode enabled.
Hyper-V mode is required for security features like Device Guard and Credential Guard, as well as developer features like WSL, and previously rendered Workstation completely inoperable.
For more detail, check out our Workstation Blog
So that was a lot… Our commitment to Developers with a new container runtime for Mac and supporting WSL on Windows, to Community with many new ways to engage and a content calendar put together to help folks get the most from Fusion and Workstation, and to Windows with our multi-year collaborative effort to support Windows 10 Hyper-V mode with Workstation.
It’s with great pleasure that we announce the immediate availability of VMware Fusion 11.5!
Still on Fusion 10 or 8.5? Upgrade here with 20% off!!
This release comes as a free upgrade to existing Fusion 11 users, with Fusion 8.5 and v10 customers being still eligible for discount upgrade pricing. This release also extends support for v11 customers until December 2020.
Added to that we’re also running a 20% off sale right now! We wanted to make sure that folks who are still using older releases can get support for macOS Catalina without having to pay full price for the upgrade.
So what’s new?
First up, Dark Mode.
When Dark Mode is enabled onl our Mac, Fusion transforms into a darker and more nighttime-friendly version of itself.
Vmware Fusion Pro 11 5 100 Ft
Fusion not only detects when Dark Mode is enabled and adjusts the user interface accordingly, but it also can synchronize the mode with Windows and macOS Guests who support the feature. This is a per-vm preference, and can be enabled in the VM Settings > Advanced window.
Next up: Sidecar
macOS Catalina introduces an incredible new feature called Sidecar that lets your Mac use your iPad as an external display.
With Fusion’s support of this feature, users can deploy a VM and drive it completely from your iPad, including support for the Apple Pencil and Bluetooth Keyboard. Works Wired or Wirelessly.
Also featuring: Jumbo Frames
Professionals oftentimes use Fusion and Workstation to deploy virtual lab environments, but when using some more advanced networking tools and techniques unfortunately some things didn’t work. One reason is because a larger MTU size was required for their virtual networks, but previously this wasn’t something users could configure.
Now with this support, savvy IT Pros and VI Admins can run a full vSphere, with NSX, virtual lab environment on Workstation with overlay support. (Given sufficient hardware resources, of course!)
There are a number of other reasons to use Jumbo Frames, including network performance advantages in enterprises and universities with supporting network infrastructure.
And More!
We’ve squashed bugs, improved performance and closed security holes, while adding support for the latest OS’s from Microsoft, Linux, BSD and Apple.
Still on Fusion 10 or 8.5? Upgrade here with 20% off!
We hope you enjoy, and please share your feedback in our community forums!