The Mac Chronicles
Virtualization
Boot Camp is nice in that it allows native access to the hardware; DirectX games will therefore run on it. In fact, at present it’s really the only way to run anything requiring access to the 3D video hardware.
However, it’s somewhat inconvenient in that the system has to be rebooted into it. Most applications don’t use 3D hardware at all, and it’s painful to have to reboot the system in order to use Visual Studio.
Fortunately, there are virtualization products available to address this need. The two most obvious commercial offerings available at present are Parallels and VMware Fusion. Parallels has been available for some time, while VMware Fusion is still in beta, albeit a publicly available beta.
Key to both offerings is the ability to coexist with Boot Camp; we’d otherwise need to install Windows again on the virtual disk image drives that these products use. That would present a licensing problem; furthermore, once through the Way of the Many Reboots was quite enough, thank you.
VMware Fusion offers Boot Camp support as of beta 3. Unfortunately, there are still a few bugs being worked out, among them the inability of Fusion to correctly identify a Boot Camp drive in some instances on Mac Pro systems. This issue did occur on my system, thus knocking Fusion out of the running for me. Fusion does otherwise appear to be quite a compelling product; it’ll be interesting to see what the final version looks like.
Parallels handled the Boot Camp partition without complaint. XP appears in a window on the OS X desktop, with full keyboard and mouse support; move the mouse into the XP window, and it’s the Windows mouse, move it out and it’s the OS X mouse. Slick. Fullscreen view is available; there’s also a ‘Coherence’ mode where the Windows desktop vanishes and the application windows appear in OS X itself. For my part, I prefer the XP in a window mode, but I’ve got a large display.
Downside to the Boot Camp coexistence mode is that the VM can’t be suspended; instead, it has to be shut down in the normal manner. We take the good with the bad, and it’s not such a big deal, really. The vendors of both products have promised 3D hardware virtualization in future releases, which would enable us to get rid of Boot Camp altogether. That’ll be a neat trick if they can pull it off.
Parallels provided a 15-day unlimited test drive, which was more than enough time to make a decision. Cost to license was $79.99 USD; the online purchasing experience was quick and easy, with the activation key delivered immediately.
Well worth the expense, in my opinion.