Fusion Studio on Parallels/WMWare Fusion/Boot Camp?

Hi guys,
Looking to run Fusion Studio 8 on a 2013 8 core Mac Pro (trash can).
My main focus will be Generation. That's largely the reason I now have Fusion Studio. And Generation isn't (yet) ported to OSX. We'll likely shift to Windows stations for the VFX team in the near future, but not right now.

I'm aware that the best performance will be via Boot Camp. But I'm wondering if anyone's had any joy with Parallels or VMWare Fusion (appropriately named)?
Obviously having Generation running in my dock would be preferable, but I'm not sure how much I'm likely to sacrifice in terms of performance?

Any thoughts/advice/experience would be hugely appreciated

Thanks in advance.

Hi Charles

We've been struggling with this for a while now. Thus far no luck getting Fusion to run on any virtual environment. I started by trying to run it on Amazon Cloud. - No luck viewtopic.php?f=22&t=51987

Then I tried creating a VM computer running Windows 10 using VMWare Fusion for Mac. - No luck
Then we tried creating a VM on Windows running VMWare Pro. - No luck.

If anyone can give any insight into this it would be greatly appreciated.

Has anyone had any luck with this?

For my cross-platform Fusion scripting, macro development, and Fusion composite testing tasks I am successfully running Fusion Studio 7 and 8.2 in Parallels Desktop 12 for Mac Business Edition (v12.1.1). This is done using a Parallels virtual machine loaded with either Windows 10, or Windows Server 2012 R2/2016.

The same copy of Parallels can also run Fusion 8.2 for Linux with CentOS 7.

The main usability issue is if you are working with ultra high resolution media in Fusion's 3D system the virtualized machine's OpenGL texture video memory can be limited which causes an artifact to occur eventually where the right border of the image "de-rezzes" a bit if you go over 4K in resolution on a long sequence.

These are the settings I'm using for the Parallels virtual machine's graphics:

parallels graphics settings.png (104.84 KiB) Viewed 2145 times

This is my current Parallels CPU and Memory setting:

parallels cpu and memory settings.png (94.25 KiB) Viewed 2145 times

* * *

There is another option I'd like to mention if you don't want to have to install Windows + Bootcamp on your Mac's primary internal hard disk which will typically run into space issues if you are dual booting multiple operating systems on an SSD.

You can use an external bootable hard disk and explore the specialized "Windows to Go" installation approach that allows Windows to boot correctly on your Mac system using an external USB hard drive.

There is a free version of "WinToUSB" utility from EasyUEFI that makes it a lot easier to set up the initial installation settings that are required to get the Windows OS to be set up correctly and bootable from an external USB drive.

When I created my intial Windows to Go drive setup I format the USB external drive in advance as a GPT volume in the Windows Disk Snap-in. The first partition needs to be 100 MB as FAT32. This is where the EFI boot files are stored. Then the rest of the drive is partitioned as NTFS.

When you plug the external USB disk that is loaded with Windows (via Windows to Go) you can boot off the drive by holding down the Option key on your Mac at boot time and you are then able to select the drive icon labeled "EFI" and start up the copy of Windows that will run Fusion + Generation natively.

With this approach it helps if your Fusion compositing media is stored on an external NAS so you can get to the same files using SAMBA file sharing on macOS and Windows.

Hi Charles

We've been struggling with this for a while now. Thus far no luck getting Fusion to run on any virtual environment. I started by trying to run it on Amazon Cloud. - No luck viewtopic.php?f=22&t=51987

Last year I experimented briefly with Fusion running on an Amazon AWS EC2 G2 GPU instance type. Its been a while so my memory is a bit hazy but there were several extra steps that were required to get things set up and going.

One important step was that you had to manually install the NVIDIA proprietary GRID graphics drivers on the Windows Server instance to get access to the required hardware acceleration.

Also there was some difference in what OpenGL/OpenCL level of support you had available in the Fusion program if you were connected to the GPU G2 instance via Windows Remote Desktop vs installing a VNC server and connecting that way. I forget the exact differences but it was significant at the time.