Haven’t seen a TidBITS notice of the Fusion 13.6 update, but when there is, it should point out some changes:
Unity mode was something that was pretty cool, when it worked. It make Windows applications appear on the Mac as just another window, as peers of other Mac apps. The actual Windows desktop was hidden.
I stopped using it because it had too many problems.
Of these, I’d say Bluetooth sharing is probably the biggest loss, IMO. It was never perfect, but it was useful.
Also, as I mentioned on another thread, they’ve dropped older guest tools from the installer.
Honestly people still wanting a supported and (highly) paid product should probably just shuffle on over to Parallels; the rest of us will put up with Fusion in case virtual GPU is necessary, and UTM if it is not (or we are primarily in Linux). That’s how I’d roll, anyway.
From what I heard on a VMUG podcast, that’s a good part of the reason they dropped it. The comment was made that it required some not-quite-condoned-by-Microsoft behind-the-scenes chicanery that was going to be difficult to keep up going forward (and, I supposed to port to Windows ARM).
VMware sees their desktop hypervisor products as development platform extensions of their enterprise products such as vSphere, not as a consumer “run Windows seamlessly on your Mac” product. Perhaps that also figures into why they didn’t feel the need to continue Unity mode (after all, what good is Unity mode for ESXi? or cloud services).
VMware’s Bluetooth sharing was severely limited by the types of device profiles it could support, which as you say wasn’t perfect. There’s quite a few posts over on the VMware forums about BT devices that people wanted to connect to a VM but found that they didn’t work because that devices’s profile wasn’t supported.
Thanks! It must have slipped past @agen, but I’ll ping him.
Of those profiles that did work fairly reliably was RFCOMM, used on Apple platforms for Braille device support. However even when the device connected, often the switch between host and guest access to those ports would tickle bugs in the device firmware, requiring it to be restarted, and so it was never quite as seamless as going via USB pass-through where the reset happened as part of the handoff. Honestly it’s a shame, but not a showstopper.
And you’re right that ultimately Fusion is increasingly a developer’s tool, for people with any familiarity with the rest of VMware’s portfolio. Unfortunately even the free ESXI is no longer available, so it’s the end of the road for the hobbyists; best get used to using and learning qemu-backed alternatives on that score.
I am running a DNS server for my internal network and an extern web server on Red Hat 9 in WMware. The external web server has only 3 users, supporting one of my hobbies. Red hat 9 is used since I have worked with it professionally in the past. Both with no desktop and no sharing of disk with mac. The mac is a Late 2014 3 GHz Dual-Core Intel Core i7. If I move to qemu will I lose anything performance vise? Will I have to upgrade the mac to a more recent OS with OCLP?
If you’re happy with your existing setup then of course there is no harm in sticking with that. qemu itself will almost certainly always be able to run on your older Mac, if you install a compiled port for your version from one of the package managers, however then you’d need to run qemu directly which is not for the faint of heart. Happily the excellent UTM will run on Monterey hosts just fine as of right now, which is what your 2014 Mini can run. And of course there’s always the option of just directly running a Linux OS (including Proxmox) on that machine too in future, if you want. Both offer improved performance for the case that you’ve allocated more RAM to the VM than is actually needed because qemu does memory ballooning and there’s rugged support for the virtio devices it emulates on Linux directly (a bit of Googling suggests that you may have to do some work to get the RHEL9 kernel/initrd to include the necessary virtioblock device, but you could always use a legacy controller in the meanwhile). So no, you don’t have to upgrade macOS past the supported release and it looks like you stand to gain from making the move to qemu for this scenario. Good luck and have fun!