So how come Fusion supports Vista x64 while there is no network support using a bootcamp Vista x64 partition.
As you'd suspect: drivers, drivers, drivers.
Normal VMware gets Windows to run on the VMware virtual machine, with
virtual network card, virtual graphics, virtual this and that. VMware supplies
drivers for all the virtual devices they designed. Underlying those drivers
are the magic on how to map virtual hardware to actual hardware, and
that varies according to what VMware product you are running (Fusion,
Player, Workstation, etc), but they all have the same virtual machine
in common.
In Boot Camp Apple provides drivers for the actual Mac hardware, not
virtual hardware. The advantage Apple has is that there isn't a lot of
variation in Apple hardware, and they certainly know their own machine.
When Fusion runs a Boot Camp partition as a VM, somehow it manages
to get the Boot Camp drivers and VMWare drivers to co-exist in a single
installation, almost as if you took your hard disk and moved it from
machine to machine. They can do this with Boot Camp because it's
a pretty consistent target, basically an alternative virtual machine.
Start throwing 3rd party drivers in there, though, and all bets are off.
I suspect the network is affected because of the funny way Fusion
shares the network between the host and guest OS's, via their vmnet
processes. Just be glad it's the only thing not working.
When Apple provides 64-bit Boot Camp drivers, then VMware will have
their fixed target and can do 64-bit Boot Camp VMs. Or they may be
clever and figure out a way to do it without Apple. They're obviously
very clever people, those VMware folks.
