Virtualization

When i ordered my Macbook, I asked salesman to add 2 more Gigabytes of memory and even bought boxed version of Parallels. All that to explore the world of virtual machines running XP inside Mac OS X. I had some memories about first version of Parallels, which ran for about a month on my home Mini last year, until trial period was over. It worked without any glitch, and all new feature announcements promised the unforgettable experience.

In practice, Parallels 3 out of the box did not like itself being installed on Leopard. The very first run threw me an error message saying that application has unexpectedly quit. After restart it worked, and I excitedly tried to run XP off BootCamp partition inside the virtual machine. It worked beautifully and I thought all problems are gone. But the next time I started Parallels Desktop, the same error message appeared.

And it kept coming and coming all the time. No update for version 3 is available from Parallels website... In forums, noone seems to have the same problem... I found a pattern of having virtual machine in runnable state the very first double-click on virtual machine's shortcut that appeared on the desktop after creation, but mostly started to boot straight into windows partition. Then the next problem came.

The problem is called Windows activation. When you boot once from Windows partition when starting your Mac, and next time running it in Parallels, Windows gets sick and complains that hardware was changed significantly since last run and therefore Windows should be activated once again. The same thing when you boot next time from Windows partition. Pretty annoying.

And then I decided to give VmWare a chance and downloaded it with serial number for 30 days trial period. The very first run of XP off BootCamp failed miserably - system hanged and I can't remember how I managed to finall kill VmWare processes. I was really upset having two non-working virtualization software titles. But I gave VmWare another chance and installed XP inside the virtual machine. It totally changed the game field.

Not only it installed quickly and without problems, it also automatially installed VmWare tools (software that is installed in guest operating system that enables painless release of control to host system when mouse is rolled out of guest OS window) - Parallels still tried to install its counterpart to VmWare Tools with every run of virtual machine.

I did not notice any significant difference in performace of virtual machines in Parallels Desktop or VmWare Fusion, and Parallels' own Coherence and Fusion's Unity work pretty much the same way - but Full Screen mode in Fusion is way better - it automatically adjusts to screen resolution of host system. To be honest, I liked Unity more as well - it shows the right icon for the application in Dock. In single window mode, I found Fusion's controls to enable/disable virtual devices to be ore convenient, too.

Now I can impress my co-workers with Full Screen Windows running in one of Spaces in my Leopard, and change to Mac OS X spaces with just single Control+Arrow keystroke. Slick transition makes people wow. In such moments you are really happy you have a Mac :)