VMware for the Mac

This news is about a month old now, but was news to me - VMware has announced that it will be producing a virtualisation product that runs on Mac OS X. Lack of VMware support is the major thing that has stopped me from considering Macs for my own use. So, when the VMware product arrives later this year, I will have to reconsider my options.

VMware aren't the first to provide virtualisation for the Mac, though. Parallels Workstation already has that honour, with software that is shipping now. In you don't have a legacy of virtual machines to support, you might want to try it out. For me personally, it's less work if I can stick to VMware, since virtual machines aren't completely portable between virtualisation packages.

There is a caveat to both these tools, however - they let you run PC operating systems (Windows, Linux, Solaris, etc.) in virtual sessions, but not Mac OS X. That is a big limitation for me, because I prefer to do all my real work in a virtual session which can easily be moved from one machine to another. That means even if I had a Mac, I would still be doing all my real work in a Linux or Windows session on that Mac, which would be curious to say the least.

I hope someone can come to some agreement with Apple about being able to run virtualised copies of OS X. That would make it possible to do real work in OS X, and I would like to have that choice.