VMWare made some noise earlier this summer when the rushed out a pre-announcement (vapourware…) of a VMWare Workstation-esque product for Mac OS X at WWDC 2006.
They have a sign up page where you could pre-register to get access to the beta. Recently, some people apparently did get access to the product, code named Fusion (but not me, unfortunately, although I do not have an macintel at the moment anyways).
I’m glad to see that there is actual code out there now. For a while it sure looked vapour-ware like to me. I imagine two of the reasons for pre-announcing were to acknowledge that Parallels is already there but some people may already be VMWare users itching to use their software on Mac’s; and secondly that OS X is a growing market for savvy developers, qa folk, and system administrators.
The usual bunch who are out on the bleeding edge of technology and need tools to enable development/test/deploy for multiple platforms without necessarily needing to haul around 4 different notebooks, multi-boot them, or have multiple machines under their office desk.
VMWare, however, is taking it’s sweet time. Yes they need to make sure the product is fit for use before releasing it, but pre-announcing just to steal some of Parallels’ thunder is bad karma in my mind.
I almost did the coffee | nose thing today when I read an article on how to convert VMWare appliances (aka VMWare Workstation) images to work with Parallels.
It’s not very complicated at all. For the simple case it practically amounts to a straight up dd. Not quite that easy but just about. Very easy for someone comfortable with the command line.
Admittedly some of the appliance images may have gotchas related to scsi vs ide, drivers vs emulated hardware and so forth. Still nothing most competent UNIX admins with VMWare GSX/Server/ESX/Workstation experience couldn’t overcome.
Hurry up VMWare. Your lunch is about to be eaten (even more so) in the Mac OS X market. Put up or shut up.
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