VMware has introduced with the release of VMware Fusion 5/6 a new method to deploy the application and to set some default settings. This method doesn’t seem to be documented by VMware at this time and was found while searching how to set the serial number for the app before deploying.
- Start by downloading the application from your “My VMware” account, open the disk image and copy VMware Fusion.app to a writable place (like the desktop).
- Access the application content by right-clicking the application and selecting “Show Package Contents”
- Go to “VMware Fusion.app/Contents/Library/” and copy “Deploy VMware Fusion.mpkg” outside the application. This is the tool offered by VMware to deploy Fusion 5/6, a preconfigured metapackage.
- Access the metapackage content by right-clicking the .mpkg file and selecting “Show Package Contents”
- Go to “Deploy VMware Fusion.mpkg/Contents/00Fusion_Deployment_Items” and copy in this place the application “VMware Fusion.app”
- Open the file Deploy.ini with your favorite text editor
- Edit the settings as documented below and deploy the package
VMware now offers the ability to pre-configure some settings by editing the file Deploy.ini that reside in “Deploy VMware Fusion.mpkg/Contents/00Fusion_Deployment_Items”. Before editing the settings, it would be nice to take time to read the whole file.
In outline, with this file you can :
- Add the serial number by editing the “key” entry
- Change the preferences by editing the “[UI Defaults]” section
- Change the default location for the application by editing the “appdir” entry
- Add virtual machines to the deployment by editing the [Virtual Machines] section
The file is very well documented and requires no specific details.
An alternative to this metapackage is available here. In our case, this metapackage is not working with Absolute Manage.