VMware updates Fusion

According to a post on the VMware company blog, the maintenance update also fixes an issue when running Fusion on the MacBook Air with its external SuperDrive attached (or not, depending on the circumstance).

VMware Fusion 1.1.2 addresses two MacBook Air-related problems. Previously, MacBook Air users would encounter a crash if a virtual CD/DVD drive was connected to the virtual machine but a CD/DVD drive was not connected to the MacBook Air. This update fixes this issue. Also, this latest VMware Fusion update adds the ability to burn CD/DVDs with the MacBook Air’s USB Superdrive.

The previous version of Fusion excluded the virtual machine files from Time Machine backups because of an Apple bug that caused a crash when backing up running virtual machines. This was fixed in Mac OS X 10.5.2.

An interesting note warned users that they may want to get a really, really big backup drive and expect Time Machine backups of virtual machines to take a while.

As part of the back up process, Time Machine makes duplicate copies of all non-excluded files, as those files change. As such, Time Machine will make a new copy of any virtual machine that has run since the last time Time Machine ran. Because virtual machines have a tendency to be large files (just like iMovie projects, or Aperture Libraries), and might take up large amounts of space with duplicate copies on your Time Machine hard drive, you may want to consider manually excluding certain virtual machines from backup in Time Machine’s preference pane.

One bug that's quashed is one where the virtual machine didn't always return the use of USB devices back to Mac OS X when the virtual session was shut down. Since most of us have one or more devices hooked to USB, that could be an inconvenience.

Another annoying bug to users of the new Apple Aluminum Keyboard, was where Fusion might crash if certain keys were pressed. This has been fixed, VMware said.