Software Update: VMware Fusion 12.0

VMware has released version 12.0 of Fusion. Fusion is to macOS what Workstation Pro and Workstation Player are to Windows and Linux. The program makes it possible to create virtual machines on an Intel processor equipped macOS machine. In this way it is possible, for example, to run Windows, Linux or Solaris alongside the existing operating system. New in version 12 is that the program can now be used free of charge in a private situation and we find support for macOS 11, containers, various new guest operating systems, DirectX 11 and OpenGL 4.1, USB 3.1 and vSphere 7.0.

What’s New

• Free Product for Personal Non-Commercial Use
  Fusion Player (previously Fusion Standard) is now free for personal non-commercial use.
• Support macOS 11 Big Sur
  • Run macOS 11 Big Sur as a host operating system.
  • Run macOS 11 Big Sur as a virtual machine.
• DirectX 11 and OpenGL 4.1 Support
  • Support has been added for DirectX 11 (DX11) and OpenGL 4.1 in the guest operating system.
  • Hardware requirements for DirectX 11 and OpenGL 4.1:
    • MacPro 2013 and later
    • iMac 27-inch 2014 and later
    • MacBook Pro 13-inch 2015 and later
    • MacBook Pro 15-inch 2015 with dual graphics and later
    • MacBook Air 2015 and later
    • MacBook 2015 and later
    • iMac 21-inch 2015 and later
    • iMac Pro 2017 and later
    • MacMini 2018 and later
  • Software requirements for DirectX 11 and OpenGL 4.1:
    • Guest OS: Windows 7 or higher, or Linux with vmwgfx†
• External GPU support
  Fusion provides support for external GPU when an external GPU is connected to the host. Choose the Prefer External GPU option from the Fusion UI.
• Sandboxed Graphics
  Virtual machine security is enhanced by removing graphics render from vmx and running it as a separate sandbox process.
• New Guest Operating Systems Support
  • 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
  The virtual machine’s virtual XHCI controller is changed from USB 3.0 to USB 3.1 to support 10 Gbps.
• Larger Scale VM
  • 32 virtual CPUs
  • 128 GB virtual memory
    Note: Running virtual machines with 32 vCPUs requires that your host and guest operating systems both support 32 logical processors.
  • 8 GB virtual graphics memory
• Create VM from APFS Recovery Partition (Now limited to macOS 10.15 host)
• Performance Improvements
  • Improved file transfer speeds (Drag and Drop, Copy and Paste, HGFS)
  • Improved virtual machine shutdown time.
  • Improved container performance.
• vSphere 7.0 Support
  In Fusion 12 you can perform the following:
  • Connect to vSphere 7.0.
  • Upload a local virtual machine to vSphere 7.0.
  • Download a remote virtual machine running on vSphere 7.0 to the local desktop.
• Login to Container Image Registry
  Ability to login to a container image registry with the vctl login command has been added.
• Kubernetes Support
  Fusion 12 now supports CHILD kubernetes clusters.
• Improved Accessibility Support
  Accessibility improvements have been added so Fusion is compliant with WCAG 2.1 criteria.