A few month ago when VMware announced the new Fusion Professional Licensing I’ve published an article which described the Fusion & Fusion Professional differences. This article was just an overview of the VMware announcement but now I’ve needed information about the Restricted VM’s for a customer so I had to look into it in detail. Unfortunately the VMware Fusion Professional website gives only a short description of the new feature in Fusion 5.0. The help system in Fusion also gave me just some hints, so I had to test it by myself.

First I wanted to know what security options are available with the Restricted Virtual Machines. This was easy:

• Encryption & Restriction of a virtual machine
• Prohibit Move & Copy
• USB Restriction
• Password protected

Compared with VMware’s discontinued ACE product these are only essentials but the functionality may enough for a secured local VM environment.

First of all I have to say sorry as my Fusion installation is in German language but I’ll try to translate as good as possible for you. If you call the settings of the VM you can see “Encryption” and “Restrictions”. The restrictions won’t work until encrypting the full virtual machine. The option for the restriction is greyed out first but after the encryption has been completed you’re able to configure the restrictions. For the encryption you need to configure a password.

To enable and disable the restrictions you’re asked to use a password. This is great as the user could otherwise change your configuration.

On the same page at the bottom you can see two other security options. The first one gives you the option to configure password protection when copying or moving the VM to another physical device. There will be a need to change the encryption password due to any user actions.

The second option is USB control. Here you can enable or disable USB redirection. There is no possibility to do a granular USB control.

After enabling the restrictions the user isn’t able to change most of the VM’s configuration. If you compare the next screenhots you can see what I mean.

The next screenshot was taken after disabling restrictions again.

To protect your VM you could i.e. disable the network adapters of the VM so it can’t connect to the local network or Internet.

You can even delete the network adapter and it will disappear in the configuration.

To secure the the VM you should also disable the Folder Sharing so the user can’t exchange files between the VM and the physical desktop.

In the last step you can deploy your virtual machine on Linux, MacOS or Windows as VMware Fusion Professional includes a commercial VMware Player license .

As a Mac user you might be interested in the latest VMware Fusion & Fusion Professional update to version 5.0.3. This was releases two days ago and is a freely available maintenance release which includes a few bug fixes. Here’s the information from the release notes.

• Added support for Boot Camp partitions on 3TB disk drives.
• Improved the cursor performance for select applications, especially when in Unity mode.
• McAfee AntiVirus Plus updated with Windows 8 support.
• Resolved an issue that could result in blurry graphics under certain circumstances.
• Resolved an issue that resulted in horizontal scrolling being reversed in Unity mode.
• Resolved an issue with displaying Office 2013 applications on some recent Macs.
• Improvements to vSockets.

 To upgrade to the latest version please use the integrated Fusion updater.

Link: http://www.vmware.com/support/fusion5/doc/fusion-503-release-notes.html

VMware has just announced that they entered a definitive agreement to acquire Wanova, a software vendor who has a great solution called Mirage. Mirage is a innovative image replication solution with layering technology which allows centralized management of desktop images. While VMware View uses a remote protocol (PCoIP) to connect from an end device to the centralized hosted desktop, Mirage offers a desktop which is hosted on the end device i.e. a VMware Fusion. VMware’s EUC CTO Scott Davis has published an article on the EUC blog which describes the technology in detail. http://cto.vmware.com/vmware-welcomes-wanova-to-the-euc-family/

There is also a press release: http://www.vmware.com/company/news/releases/vmw-wanova-05-22-12.html

Welcome to the VMware EUC family Wanova!

The VMware Fusion team has released a new version with over 20 bug fixes. The update is available through the auto-update feature.

Here are a few fixes from the release notes:

• Resolved an issue that caused the following message when you resumed a suspended virtual machine: The Virtual Machine is unable to reserve memory.
• The McAfee Virus Scan software is updated.
• Resolved an intermittent problem that caused printing to fail on Mac OS X Lion.
• Resolved an issue that occurred when copying and pasting information from newer Linux distributions.
• Improved compatibility with certain versions of Mac OS X.
• Improved the behavior of the minibar when placed at the top of the display.
• Fixed mapping of comma on numeric keyboard mapping of a French keyboard.
• Resolved an intermittent problem when removing a CD device from a virtual machine.

Link: https://www.vmware.com/support/fusion4/doc/releasenotes_fusion_412.html

VMware yesterday released a new version of VMware Fusion, their virtualization solution for the Apple operating system. You can download the version at the download website. Fusion 3.1 has a huge number of new features which can found in the “What’s new section”. Additionally to the new features their are improvements for graphics, boot camp and pc migrations. Also Fusion 3.1 supports 10 more operating systems.

VMware released the new version 3.0.1 of Fusion this morning. The download is available at the VMware website. Version 3.0.1 is a maintanance release and freely available for all Fusion customers. Check out the release notes and the what’s new document.

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