“Love your Mac even more with the ability to simultaneously run any PC OS—Windows, Linux, NetWare and others—on Mac OS X. Switch between operating systems by easily tabbing between applications and share data between the two operating systems by dragging and dropping files on the fly—all without needing to reboot. What’s more, you can create virtual machines and run them on other VMware products or run any VMware virtual machine on your Mac,” VMWare’s web page states.
Love your Mac and have your PC too. Run any PC OS on Mac OS X without rebooting.
VMWare says “Do even more with your Mac with the ability to run any of the more than 250 VMware virtual appliances—which provide robust solutions for security, network applications, databases, communications and business applications. Be among the first to try this new product from VMware when it is available later in the year.”
To pre-register for the beta release, complete the form here.
How does this compare to Parallels?
VMWare is a mature product … at least for other operating systems. It’s been around for a while – just not for Mac. While Parallels was the first out of the gate with such a product for the Mac, it’s a Johnny-Come-Lately compared to either VMWare or Xen – and Xen has yet to port to Mac or for Mac.
For more on Xen, a pointer to this pod cast interview just arrived.
XenSource CTO takes on Oracle’s criticisms, discusses virtues of paravirtualization
If you are interested in virtual systems – I haven’t listened to it … yet.
Virtualization is becoming the rage for the Mac platform it seems.
Take a closer look at the VMware screen shot.
Interesting how there’s Parallels software in the dock!
: )
Give me a mac look and feel and I might care.
When will Apple allow VMware and Parallels to allow us to install OS X in a virtual machine? I would love the ability to run a copy of OS X server or test out another copy of OS X inside a VM running on OS X. Its just ridiculous that Apple has so many restrictions.
Ah, competition is good. Sorry VMWare folks, I already bought Parallels.
Jadis One wrote “Virtualization is becoming the rage for the Mac platform it seems.”
Thats only because virtualization has existed for quite a while. It would be much better if you could run OS X inside a VM, even if it was restricted to Apple hardware.
Ahhhh, paradise!!! I can run OS X, with a VM running Xpee, with a VM running Vista Beta, with a VM running Red Hat, with a VM running Solaris, with a VM running OS2, with a VM running…….
I will be able to see to INFINITY!!!!!!!!!!!!
I don’t like Parallel’s high CPU usage, even when paused. I mean the REAL Paused, not the hack they put in the UI to make the pause button suspend. I run it on a MBP, my battery life is already pretty bad. Suspending to disk burns battery while writing out all that… and their actual Pause doesn’t drop CPU usage at all, so it’s pointless to use. If VMWare or VirtualPC or whatever… has lower idle CPU usage than Parallels and let’s me Pause in a way that takes a sensible amount of CPU usage namely ZERO%, then I’m switching.
Well for a Johnny come lately Parallels is a fantastic product and does as advertised.
With VMware, I can run Windows on my G5 Quad. Parallels requires an Intel Mac.
Unless I’m wrong, of course. Actually, it is likely I am. Sigh. Anybody wanna buy a Quad G5, cheap?
John, that was a description, not a condemnation.
Don, I’m not surprised it reduces battery life by at least a little, but I would be thunderstruck to learn it didn’t use a noticeable amount of system resources. Some of my Widgets can peal at a double-digit percentage of one of my CPUs while active, and this sort of software is doing a lot more than they are.
BTW: I listened to that pod cast I linked to a couple posts up. It is, as expected, a bit focused on Xen in its market, but it offers a good discussion of the potential of that type of software. It also spends a minute or so on what MS will have in Vista – and what Leopard is likely to include as well – that will help this sort of software work better and more efficiently. And a hint as to why it isn’t so efficient on Tiger.