VMware has worked toward improved performance throughout the application, reducing memory usage where possible and adding small refinements. Dragging windows in Unity mode will be notably faster than before, and CPU usage is lower than it was previously. Users will be able to copy and paste not just text but graphics as well between Windows and OS X. Fusion 3 will support multiple cores in virtual machines, as opposed to the multiple CPUs supported in Fusion 2. Virtual machines will also launch more quickly than they did in Fusion 2.

via VMware announces VMware Fusion 3 details | Software | Macworld.

I have been using VMWare Fusion fairly regularly for the last 18 months or so, but I’ve never loved it.  I consistently run into seemingly random bottlenecks and slowdowns in system performance despite having tried a number of tricks to improve VM performance and reallocate memory.  My fingers are crossed that this update will address these issues.

BTW, I just peeked at the product website and it looks like they didn’t do anything with the application icon.  Would it have been too much to ask to give it a refresh?   I am still trying to figure out what it represents.

This screen popped up in VMWare Fusion today in the middle of Outlook synchronizing with my Exchange server (yep… still using Outlook over Entourage or Mail.app until we upgrade to Exchange 2007 / 2010).

It’s been awhile since I’ve seen something like this — I forgot how horribly great Windows error screens can be.  When I read this my first thought was I had seconds before I was going to see smoke come out of my laptop.

I’m not sure what caused it but powering down the Windows virtual machine and powering it back up did the trick.

Not to beat a dead horse on the whole virtualization and Outlook on a Mac topic, but I was pleasantly surprised to stumble across an article on Businessweek.com from yesterday that talks about the same issues I wrote about in my switch to using Outlook on the Mac.

In the article, Windows on a Mac: Virtually Perfect, Stephen H. Wildstrom discusses the general benefits of using VMWare and / or Parallels on the Mac and the potential of virtual machines for the future.  He specifically uses Entourage and Outlook as a primary example of how virtualization has benefited enterprise Mac users:

“I think the application that is the biggest deal for business Mac users is Microsoft Outlook. The Mac alternative, Microsoft Entourage, is a less-than-satisfactory substitute for Outlook’s mail, contact, and calendar functions. Entourage lacks Outlook’s small business contact manager. Critical collaboration features of the Microsoft Exchange corporate mail system are also missing.”

I hope you enjoy it.  Check it out!

Now that I am using VMWare Fusion on a regular basis I am learning the application a lot better, and this includes how to deal with typical issues that arise with day-to-day usage.  Yesterday, I powered up my laptop after it had unexpectedly lost power and saw that my virtual machine was “locked”.  In this state my Windows VM would not start, but I was able to figure out how to resolve the error.

Here is what VMWare Fusion looked like when I opened it up after the power outage (note the “File locked” message and lock button on the VM listing):

When I clicked on the lock button (which had replaced VMWare Fusion’s normal “play” button), I got an error message indicating “The virtual machine appears to be in use”:

Seeing as how I was not using the VM (…at least to the best of my knowledge), I clicked on “Take Ownership”, and got an error message that said “Taking ownership of this virtual machine failed”:

I have been using Microsoft Entourage 2008 as the email client on my Mac for almost a year now and while it is not perfect, it provides the best Microsoft Exchange support out-of-the-box of any native Mac email application.  Mail.app, iCal, and Address Book do not work well enough just yet to use in an enterprise Exchange environment (although I am anxiously awaiting OS X 10.6 which promises native Exchange support in all three applications!).  That said, about two weeks ago I had to abandon ship on Entourage.  I suffered a major Entourage meltdown, and it frustrated me enough that I made a hard switch over to nothing other than Microsoft Outlook.

Huh?  Say that again?  Outlook on a Mac?  What could I possibly be thinking?  How could I be such a traitor to the cult of the Mac?  Give me a minute to explain… I am as big of an Apple fan boy as you can get, but put simply Entourage was not delivering a reliable solution for me, and in a work environment that is a non-starter.

The Entourage Identity / Database

If you are an Entourage user, at some point you have probably opened Entourage and seen what I would say is the application’s equivalent of the Windows Blue Screen of Death — a message informing you that something is wrong with your local Identity (also commonly referred to as the database).  In essence, your Entourage Identity stores your emails, contacts, and other application data locally on your Mac to improve performance.  In theory, there is nothing wrong with that.  Lots of applications do the same type of thing.

However in my experience, Entourage’s Identity is fairly susceptible to getting corrupted.  In my first month of using Entourage 2008, it got corrupted twice, and I had to use Entourage’s Database Utility to rebuild the database — a process which for my mailbox at least takes a couple hours.  Not fun and not very enterprise friendly.

Additionally, the Identity is a bear to back up.  Time Machine is hands down one of the greatest features in OS X 10.5, however Microsoft’s Office for Mac team recommends you do not configure Time Machine to back up your Entourage Identity.  Why?  The actual Identity / database is one big file that appears to Time Machine (or other third-party backup solutions) as a new file anytime it is written to or updated.  When Time Machine goes to back up every hour, it therefore makes a full backup of the file as opposed to an incremental one.  To put it into an example:  if your database was around 5GB in size, then in a day you could eat up 120GB (5GB * 24 hourly backups) on your Time Machine hard drive if you have an active email account.  There are some workarounds on how to manage backups, but they require varying degrees of hacking and none in my opinion are scalable enough or appropriate for enterprise use.

The Great Entourage Meltdown of ‘08

So, with that said let’s get back to my story.  As I mentioned, my Entourage Identity had corrupted a couple of times early on, but after one service pack and a couple of Office for the Mac patches later, the
developers over at the Mac Business Unit in Microsoft seemed to have
improved the stability of the database.  I had a nice stretch without an incident.  However, two weeks ago I sat down at my desk at the beginning of the day, got ready to start working, clicked on Entourage, and got the dreaded database error.

Given the backup issues above, I assumed that if something ever seriously went wrong with my Entourage setup, I would first attempt to rebuild the existing Identity, but worst case could just create a new one by syncing with the data on the Exchange server.  Therefore, I launched the Database Utility to verify and rebuild my database.  Two to three hours later, the Database Utility informed me that my database was fixed.  I launched Entourage, and guess what?  All my contacts and email were gone.  That’s right completely gone.

Still I was not going to panic — I went to plan B and was going to create a new Identity file and re-sync / download all the info from Exchange.  Before moving forward with this, I logged onto Outlook Web Access (OWA) which gave me a real-time view of my Exchange account and could not believe what I saw — my entire email, calendar, and contacts were empty outside of a handful of emails that had come in within the last 5 minutes.

I checked with my IT manager and he saw the same from the Exchange side — a mailbox that was barely 20MB in size.  What we quickly realized was after I rebuilt the Entourage database, and for whatever reason the rebuild did not do what it was supposed to, the local (now empty) Entourage database synced to Exchange and deleted everything on the Exchange server.

Abandoning Ship…

To cut to the chase, we were able to restore my emails, contacts, and calendar info from a backup, however when you combine Exchange support that is not 100% equivalent to Outlook with the potential to have issues like the above, it is tough for me to “love” Entourage.  I recognize there are other preemptive measures I could take in the future to prevent this same sequence of events from occurring, but at the end of the day, you need reliable and scalable applications and systems to run your business and Entourage let me down.

So, I made the move to Outlook.  I am using VMWare Fusion which has been on my Mac since day one, but I never really had a reason to use on a daily basis until now.  I run Outlook 2003 in a Windows XP virtual machine in Unity mode.  So far, I have to say it is working a heck of a lot better than I had originally anticipated.  VMWare has a number of features which allow you to share folders across both operating systems, launch Mac apps from Windows and make the integration between the two operating systems work well together.

(Editorial note: It is pretty amazing if you stop to think about this solution for a second.  Several years ago doing something like this would have been unthinkable, yet getting this set up literally took minutes.  It is a huge credit to Apple’s Mac team for designing a world-class platform.)

Am I in Mac / Exchange email nirvana yet?  No.  I want to have a native Mac application deliver Exchange integration that really kicks you-know-what.  However by moving to Outlook, I now know that: 1) my work day does not have the potential of being randomly interrupted with email problems as a result of my local email application; 2) I have 100% compatibility with the Exchange server and the Windows users in my company; and 3) I am still able to use my Mac in an enterprise environment.  Right now Outlook is the only client that can deliver on the three… sorry Entourage and Mail.app

Let’s all hope that Snow Leopard brings the Exchange integration that Apple has promised and we Mac users need.  I am anxious and ready to make the switch back when that happens!