VMware Fusion 3 support for Mac OS X Lion (10.7)

Purpose

This article explains VMware's position on its support for running Fusion 3 on Mac OS X Lion, and the compatibility guidelines.

Resolution

VMware Fusion 4.x supports OS X 10.7 (Lion) as both a host and a guest operating system. For more information, see theVMware Fusion home page.

 

VMware Fusion 3.1.4 was designed for OS X 10.5 (Leopard) and OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard). It is compatible with Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion), with some limitations. VMware Fusion 3.x is incompatible with Mac OS X 10.8 (Mountain Lion). VMware Fusion 2.x is incompatible with Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion).

If you are running an older version of VMware Fusion, upgrade to VMware Fusion 3.1.4 before upgrading to Lion.

For the best experience, reinstall Fusion after upgrading to Lion.

When running Fusion on Lion, these limitations are known to exist:

• VMware Fusion 3.1.3 virtual machines do not start in Mac OS X 10.7.4 or later. For more information, see  Fusion 3.1.3 virtual machines fail to start after upgrading to Mac OS X 10.7.4 (2020651).
  
   
• The Migration Assistant, included with VMware Fusion, is not compatible with Mac OS X Lion. This is due to a change in file sharing components.
  
  VMware recommends that a Snow Leopard-based Mac or vCenter Stand-Alone Converter be used to migrate an existing PC. The resulting virtual machine can then be used in Fusion running on Lion.  For more information on Converter, see this article: Converting a physical machine for Fusion, Workstation, or Player using Converter Standalone (2005129).
  
• Boot Camp partitions may not be accessible through Fusion after upgrading to Lion.
  
  To work around this issue, delete the Boot Camp virtual machine from the library and recreate it. For more information, see A Boot Camp virtual machine fails to power on with a disk error (1003483).
  
• Minor visual issues have been reported when using Mission Control with Unity mode.
  
• Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion) Client and Server cannot be run as guests.
  
• USB issues have been reported.  These are due to incorrect filesystem permissions on the Mac.  For more information, see USB devices fail after upgrading to Mac OS X Lion (10.7) (2004687).
  
• The minimum RAM requirement for Lion itself is 2GB of RAM. This is an increase from Snow Leopard, and it may cause performance issues on Macs that only have 2GB of RAM or that allocate the majority of their free RAM to virtual machines. VMware recommends upgrading to at least 4GB of RAM. For more information about RAM allocation, see Investigating virtual machine resources in VMware Fusion (1022213). 

VMware can provide best-efforts support if you choose to upgrade to Lion, but cannot guarantee a resolution for all issues.

Reference

http://kb.vmware.com