The VMWare Fusion 12 is now available. VMWare has designed Fusion 12 to provide support for the successor of macOS Catalina, macOS Big Sur. From Big Sur onwards Fusion will not use kernel extensions but use Apple’s APIs for its functioning. Fusion 12 is available for macOS Catalina and will continue to use kernel extensions.
Fusion 12 will provide both Host and Guest support to the upcoming mac OS Big Sur. Let’s take a look at the features of VMWare Fusion 12.
Table of Contents
Security enhancement
Fusion offers Sandbox Renderer which improves security. SBR achieves this by running the virtual graphics engine in a separate thread with reduced privilege. Doing so helps to maintain security without losing out on performance.
Help for developers
VMWare includes support for container-based applications built with Kubernetes in Fusion 12. This additional support to developers is the result of introducing the “vctl” feature to the container engine.
DirectX 11 and OpenGL 4.1 support
The availability of DirectX 11 and OpenGL 4.1 support allows the latest Fusion version to maximize the performance of games and 3D applications. The presence of 8GB of virtual RAM enables improving the performance.
Compatibility with vSphere 7
Fusion 12 supports connections to vSphere 7 through ESXi and vCenter. This ensures better remote VM operation and allows effective management of remote workloads between Desktops and Data Centers.
Miscellaneous
VMWare has integrated APFS support, simplifying the installation of macOS guests in FUSION 12. The APFS enables installing the OS from the Recovery Partition. There is also support for eGPU devices. The external GPU enclosure takes charge of graphics rendering and image processing from the host GPU improving the overall performance.
Licensing modifications
VMWare has modified the pricing for Fusion 12 to bring it in alignment with Workstation 16. The base version called Fusion Player is available free for personal use. The commercial license costs $149, and if you want to upgrade from an older Fusion version it costs $79.
Fusion 12 Pro which is an advanced version aimed for developers and IT professionals is priced at $199 and costs $99 as an upgrade.
