VMware Fusion is virtualization software for Macintosh that allows you to run Windows Vista, Windows XP, Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, NetWare and 60 other operating systems inside a Mac box. VMware Fusion works on Macs with Intel processors and is able to run several operating systems on one machine at the same time.
VMware Fusion is capable of running 32 and 64-bit operating systems including Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit Edition or you can leverage Virtual SMP to boost application performance. VMware Fusion comes with full support of 32 and 64-bit and multi-core processors to run resource-hungry applications and even 3D games based on DirectX 8.1.
You can launch multiple systems of different versions and bit architecture at the same time, taking advantage of multi-processor environment if you have more than one processor installed. Some of the applications use emulation while some of them are dynamically recompiled as you run them.
VMware Fusion allows you to attach external USB 2.0 devices and even run Windows-based games. VMware Fusion is also capable of running virtualized Macintosh OS X Server inside the regular Macintosh OS X.
While hosting virtualized operating systems, VMware Fusion is able to map Macintosh'es local drives to use them inside virtualized machines. All documents and files you may have on your Mac's local disk, can be made accessible from the virtualized systems via special folder.
VMware Fusion Launch Palette allows you to get rid of the standard Windows Desktop and you can use Spotlight tool to start your Windows-based applications as easy as they were native Macintosh software. And of course you can use the standard Macintosh mouse and keyboard shortcuts in your Windows applications.
The Boot Camp feature included in VMware Fusion allows you to create partitions that host Windows operating system eliminating the need of multiple installations of the same OS.
Current Operating System Snapshots feature allows VMware Fusion to save your current OS state to a file to recover it later on. This works similar to hibernation known from Windows, where you can resume your work with a closed application in just seconds without rebooting the system.
VMware Fusion has extensive hardware support for networking devices, external USB 2.0 devices as well as built-in physical devices such as hard disk drives, DVD / CD drives and many more. VMware Fusion lacks support for FireWire.
If you decide to move your virtual system installations to another machine, you simply copy the virtualization files there and you are done.
VMware Fusion is fully compatible with other VMware software such as VMware Server, VMware Workstation and VMware Infrastructure 3 which means you can use virtual machines' files created by those applications.