Mac OSX experts: Parallels Desktop v. VMWare Fusion

You can do that in VMWare Fusion too. Don't know why you'd think that is a unique feature, it's a very reasonable expectation that these virtualization products allow you to control how the virtual network adapter is connected to the real network.

 

I didn't mean to imply that it wasn't available in VMWare... As i've stated previously in the thread, i don't have any experience with that product - i specified Parallels because i didn't want to imply that every virtualization software available had that ability when i had no way of knowing if it was true or not...

 

I don't have any personal experience with these products on OSX, but I have heard from several sides that Vista runs faster on VMWare, and XP does better on Parallels.

The virtualisation technology used by VMWare is currently a hot issue, mainly because it allows to run several virtual servers on one physical machine, and it has very good tools for transferring images across machines. This allows for sever hardware consolidation, and is rapidly becoming the next big thing in IT. Cool stuff. So, VMWare definitely is a big player and will likely become bigger in the future.

Incidentally, I was wondering if any of these companies does the opposite: have a virtual OSX running inside a PC. Since it has been done with Linux, and OSX is also compiled for Intel, it should be a rather straightforward thing to do. But it turns out that both companies say that they won't do this, because the license agreement for Mac OSX explicitely says that it should only be run on a Mac computer. Still that nasty little habit of Apple, having everything closed...

 

Apple recently changed the EULA to allow Mac OS X Server to run virtualized - but only on Apple hardware. That is mainly to allow Leopard Server to run virtualized on Xserve, but I guess you could run it on regular Mac OS X too. Both VMWare and Parallels demonstrated this at MacWorld.