VMware Fusion let's you run multiple operating systems, including Windows, Linux, and Solaris, on your Macintosh at the same time as Mac OS X – without rebooting. See more details.
Review :
People have been finding other ways of running operating systems on their Mac for the past twenty years. Hardware options started in 1985 with Dayna MacCharlie, a box of expansion and software kit for the original Mac (and later the Mac Plus), which added an Intel 8088 at the Mac's core Motorola 68000. In 1987, AST Research created the Mac86 and Mac286 plug-in cards expandable Macintosh II. In mid-1990, Apple has sold too PC Compatibility Card for certain Performa, Centris, Quadra and Power Mac models.
As Mac processors became faster, software emulation has become the common method of integration: Insignia developed SoftWindows, which combined with a sophisticated mapping processor emulation programming interfaces Windows to Mac Toolbox; SoftWindows 95 and 98 followed Softwindows . In 1997, freed Connectix Virtual PC, its innovative software to emulate a PC-based Pentium inside a Mac window, which allows it to run almost any PC-based operating system. Unfortunately, the burden of translation between architectures is rather slow and hungry equipment for demanding applications.
Another decade later, Virtual PC has been acquired by Microsoft and now transformed into a Windows product, the Mac version abandoned. But recent Apple switch to Intel hardware has made a new world of high performance virtualization possible, if applications can run at full speed. This software virtualization, rather than slowly translating CPU instructions, just a shell that creates a guest operating system idiots thinking that it is working in its own on the same computer, a native Intel hardware.
Parallels Desktop is the first among several such systems virtualization currently available for the Mac, and we used Parallels since its inception. (Parallels recently issued a "version 3.0" upgrade - in fact, its second major version.) Other options include virtualization Innotek semi-open-source VirtualBox, and three based on the open-source QEMU project: OpenOSX WinTel , and iEmulator Q.
The latest entry is VMware Fusion. VMware, which started as a research project at Stanford University, was the creation of a virtualization software on the PC platform for nearly ten years. Fusion is a new Mac Cocoa application based on the same core as the engine of VMware virtualization server software. The merger was presented for the first time at a private meeting at WWDC Apple developer conference in the summer of 2006, and has been in public beta since late December 2006. Today, VMware released the final version.
We spent the last few days working with Fusion 1.0 on the original 2.0 GHz iMac Core Duo and a 2.66-GHz Mac Pro (with 2 GB of RAM). If he has a few quirks and missing features, we believe that the merger will be stiff competition for Parallels Desktop.
