Entries tagged with “virtualization” from O'Reilly Digital Media Blog

VirtualBox 2.1.0 adds Intel VT-x hardware virtualization support as well as the ability to run 64-bit Guest OSes on a 32-bit host OS. I installed Xubuntu (based on Ubuntu 8.1.0) and brought in the previously built Windows 2000 Guest OS for testing. The results look good so far.

Sun VirtualBox 2.0 was released on Sept. 4, 2008. I tried this free Open Source cross-platform virtualization hypervisor on an iMac running OS X Leopard. Microsoft Windows virtualization looks somewhat improved. But, running Fedora 9 Linux resulted in problems that I did not see with VirtualBox 1.6.2 a few months ago.

VMware Fusion 2 Release Candidate 1 addresses the major problems I ran into when I tried the Beta 2 release a month ago. There are a few glitches I ran into. But, it looks like Fusion 2.0 is on track for a production release soon.

VMware Fusion 2 Beta 2 looks good when used with Microsoft Windows Vista or Windows Server 2008. I ran into problems when testing it with Fedora 8 though. It is a Beta release, however. So, I'm not passing judgement on it until I see the Release Candidate and production release.

VirtualBox 1.6.2 is an Open Source virtualization hypervisor that runs on Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux. I tested it by installing Windows 2000 and Fedora 9 on my iMac. It doesn't have all the features of VMware Fusion or Parallels Desktop. But, the price is right and it does a pretty decent job. Read on for more impressions from my testing...

Unlike Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008 (Standard Edition in this case) installed fine from an ISO file using VMware Fusion. I used Fusion's Windows Server 2008 Experimental preset installation configuration. It seems to be running smoothly with 512MB RAM allocated to the Guest OS. The one thing that surprised me is how huge a basic Windows Server 2008 Standard...

There's been a lot of changes since Intel Macs and Parallels Desktop let Macs virtualize Linux and Windows back in 2006. And, Microsoft Windows Vista introduced its own set of challenges for virtualization. Here's a quick summary of some key changes over the past 2 years that affect virtualization decisions.

Go forth and virtualize Windows Home Basic or Home Premium on your Mac using Parallels or Fusion. It is ok now. Phew...