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.

Note: The preceding link was correct as of December 9, 2014. If you find the link is broken, provide feedback and a VMware employee will update the link.

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.

VMware Fusion と Boot Camp パーティションとの連携
使用 VMware Fusion 和 Boot Camp 分区