Working with VMware Fusion and Boot Camp partitions

Products

• VMware Desktop Hypervisor

Issue/Introduction

This article identifies options for using VMware Fusion with an already-installed Boot Camp partition.

For more information about Boot Camp, see the Apple Boot Camp Support page.

Environment

• VMware Fusion 1.x
• VMware Fusion Pro 8.x
• VMware Fusion 2.x
• VMware Fusion 10.x
• VMware Fusion 5.x
• VMware Fusion 8.x
• VMware Fusion 7.x
• VMware Fusion 11.x
• VMware Fusion Pro 11.x
• VMware Fusion 4.x
• VMware Fusion Pro 10.x
• VMware Fusion 3.x
• VMware Fusion 6.x

Resolution

VMware Fusion has two ways of working with an already-installed Boot Camp partition:

• Launch it directly. For more information, see Launching your Boot Camp partition in VMware Fusion (1014618).
   
• Import it, which copies an existing Boot Camp partition into an independent virtual machine. This does not affect or remove the Boot Camp partition. For more information, see Importing a Boot Camp partition in VMware Fusion (1015088).

Additional Information

Note: When launching a Boot Camp partition directly, these Fusion features are unavailable:

• Suspend and resume
• Mirrored folders
• Snapshots and AutoProtect
• Virtual disk backup
• Encryption & Restrictions
• Virtual machine's hard disk resize

Those features are unavailable because they would conflict with using Boot Camp natively, or because they require a virtual disk.

• Suspend and resume save the contents of the RAM to disk. This works similarly to the Windows Hibernate feature but the VMware implementation differs so the two are not compatible.
   
• Mirrored folders redirect the Windows directories to the Mac directories. The Mac directories are not available in Boot Camp.
   
• Snapshots capture the contents of the RAM and create a supplementary virtual disk, and AutoProtect is a feature derived from the multiple snapshot feature, which allows you to have more than one snapshot at a time. Snapshots and AutoProtect rely on a virtual parent disk, whereas Boot Camp uses a physical disk. As such, it is impossible to take a snapshot or use AutoProtect with a Boot Camp partition.