The popular company VMware announced on Monday the release of VMware Fusion 1.1, which represents an update to its virtual machine software for the Intel-based Macs. VMware Fusion costs $79.99, but the registered users can update their virtualization software for free.

VMware Fusion 1.1 brings the Intel-based Mac users the possibility to run other X86-based operating systems such as Linux or Microsoft’s Windows at the same time as they are running Apple’s Mac OS X. Fusion will operate the other operating systems as virtual machines running simultaneously with the host OS.

What’s also important is that the update VMware announced today adds official support for Apple’s recently launched Mac OS X v10.5 operating system, also known as Leopard. Furthermore Fusion 1.1 also improves the 3D graphics support and unity, which allows the users to minimize the Windows applications to the Mac OS X Dock, to switch between the Mac and Windows apps using Exposi and more, was also improved in Fusion 1.1

The software’s performance has been also improved and it features also support for Vista Boot Camp partitions as virtual machines. VMware Importer, which is a new beta application that allows the Fusion users to important virtual machines created with Parallels Desktop, was also introduced.

The update can be downloaded from here.