Got an intel mac? Get thee over to vmware’s site and grab a copy of the public beta of their ‘fusion’ product, which is basically the PC vmware engine ported over to macosx. I’ve been running Parallels and am completely happy with it, but I’m also really happy to see competition in this space on the mac, and given my last several years use of vmware on the pc, I’m also happy to see it running on the mac, which allows me to seamlessly move my environments from platform to platform as needed. If you’re not familiar with it, vmware, parallels and other virtual machines software allow you to run alternative operating systems inside your host operating system with very high levels of compatibility and at almost native speed. If you’ve had experience with products like virtual PC in the past which left a sour taste in your mouth, rest assured: this is not that. vmware and parallels are both great products and tremendously useful.

All that remains is for Apple to loosen up so you can run OSX as a guest OS in these virtual machines, something which is really needed and would again be tremendously useful. If Apple wants to compete in server rooms, they basically have to do this because vmware has taken over the world’s server rooms over the last couple of years.

Anyway, kudos to vmware on this, and here’s to healthy competition.