VMware Fusion 12 What’s new?

VMware Fusion 12

What is VMware Fusion?

VMware Fusion Designed for new application developers, IT professionals, and anyone wanting to run virtual machines, containers, or Kubernetes on specially designed Mac computers, this product comes in the form of a product group called Desktop Hypervisor. And Fusion Pro and Fusion Player each release allows users to run Windows and other operating systems directly from macOS, without restarting. Fusion is suitable for all users as it is simple for regular, non-tech-savvy users and has powerful features for IT professionals, companies, and developers.

VMware Fusion 12 enables virtual machines from Mac, Windows, Linux, and x86-based operating systems. Almost all programs that run on these operating systems will work with VMware Fusion. Such as Microsoft Office programs or advanced and more complex programs such as drawing programs that require DirectX 11 and other dedicated applications and Kubernetes containers can also be run.

What’s new in VMware Fusion 12

Free product for personal, non-commercial use

• Fusion Player (formerly Fusion Standard) is now free for personal, non-commercial use.

MacOS 11 Big Sur support

• MacOS 11 Big Sur runs as a host operating system.
• MacOS 11 Big Sur runs as a virtual machine.

DirectX 11 and OpenGL 4.1 support

• Support for DirectX 11 (DX11) and OpenGL 4.1 added in guest OS.

Hardware requirements for DirectX 11 and OpenGL 4.1:

• MacPro 2013 and later versions
• 27-inch iMac 2014 and later
• MacBook Pro 13-inch 2015 and later
• 2015 15-inch MacBook Pro with dual graphics and later
• MacBook Air 2015 and later
• MacBook 2015 and later
• 21-inch iMac 2015 and later
• iMac Pro 2017 and later
• MacMini 2018 and later

Software requirements for DirectX 11 and OpenGL 4.1:

• Guest operating system: Windows 7 or higher, or Linux with vmwgfx.

External GPU support

• Fusion provides external GPU support when an external GPU is connected to the host. Choose the Fusion UI’s Prefer External GPU option.

Sandboxed graphics

• Virtual machine security is improved by removing graphics processing from vmx and running it as a separate protection mode process.

Support for new guest operating systems

• RHEL 8.2
• Debian 10.5
• Fedora 32
• CentOS 8.2
• SLE 15 SP2
• FreeBSD 11.4
• ESXi 7.0

USB 3.1 controller support

• Changed the default XHCI virtual machine controller from USB 3.0 to USB 3.1 to support 10Gbps.

Larger VM scale

• 32 virtual CPUs
• 128 GB of virtual memory
• 8 GB virtual graphics memory

Note: Running virtual machines with 32 virtual CPUs requires both the host and guest OS to support 32 logical processors.

Create VM from APFS Recovery Partition (now limited to macOS 10.15 host)

• Performance improvements
• Improved file transfer speeds
• Improved virtual machine shutdown time.
• Improving container performance.

VSphere 7.0 support

On Fusion 12, you can do the following:

• Connect to vSphere 7.0.
• Upload a local virtual machine to vSphere 7.0.
• Download a remote virtual machine running vSphere 7.0 to your local desktop

Log in to the registration image container

• Added the ability to log into the container image record with the vctl login command.

Kubernetes support

• Fusion 12 now supports KIND Kubernetes.

Accessibility improvements added so Fusion complies with WCAG 2.1 standards.