On Friday, hot on the heels of Parallels' 2.5 update of Desktop for Mac, VMWare released a second beta of its Fusion virtualization program for the Macintosh.

The new beta incorporates the following changes:
-Experimental 3-D graphics support - Play a selection of DirectX 8.1 games in Windows XP Service Pack 2 virtual machines.
-Snapshot feature - Roll back your virtual machine to a known good state when something goes wrong in your virtual machine—for example, when your virtual machine picks up a virus, or when a software upgrade causes problems.
-Improved networking - Automatically bridge to the computer’s primary network interface.
-Full support for Airport wireless networking, including virtual machines behind a NAT firewall and bridged to the local Airport network.
-Support for up to ten virtual network interfaces.
-Improved Microsoft Vista support - Support for Microsoft Vista Business, Enterprise, and Ultimate editions.
-Complete VMware Tools support for Microsoft Vista including copy/paste, dragging and dropping files, shared folders, and screen resizing.
-Improved hardware editor - Add additional virtual hard drives to a virtual machine for needed capacity.
-View the physical computer's battery status in the virtual machine.
-Improved full screen mode - Support for plugging and unplugging displays while virtual machines are in full screen mode.
-Improved usability: an on-screen tip shows how to enter and exit full screen mode easily.
-Experimental support for Mac OS X Leopard - You can now install and run VMware -Fusion on Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard). Support is experimental because Mac OS X 10.5 is not yet released. Fusion will support the release version of OS X 10.5 in the final VMware Fusion release.
-Improved keyboard and mouse support - Third-party graphics tablets, keyboards, and mice no longer interfere with keyboard and mouse input.
-Support for plugging and unplugging input devices while virtual machines are running
-Improved CD/DVD support.
-Better support for mounting and unmounting discs in virtual machines.
-Quicken Scheduler corrupts keyboard and mouse input in virtual machines - Offer workaround to disable Quicken Scheduler when it is detected.

A final release date and price has yet to be set for Fusion, which requires an Intel-based Mac and Mac OS X 10.4 or later to run.