Virtualization Comes To Macs

Deep within the exhibit halls at Macworld, Parallels, VMware and Sun Microsystems hawk the wonders of desktop virtualization.
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With one-click glimpses into competing operating systems like Windows and Ubuntu, the vendors woo Mac users to fire up a new operating system--at least temporarily.

Indeed, virtualization is the next big thing in data centers, where it's heralded for reducing infrastructure costs by making existing hardware work harder. By pulling apart the hardware and software of a computer, the technology allows multiple virtual machines to share the same hardware resources without conflict.

Virtualization is advancing the desktop market, too. A "hosted hypervisor" like Sun's VirtualBox or VMware's (nyse: VMW - news - people ) Fusion allows users to get more out of their PCs by running more than one operating system at a time.

For many Mac users, desktop virtualization is a sigh of relief. Many devices and appliances offer limited or no support for Apple's (nasdaq: AAPL - news - people ) hardware. Windows users who want to switch to Mac are often stuck using their old PC out of necessity.

Katrina Rezvani is a good example. She owns a San Francisco sign and graphics company with her husband, but says she has trouble interfacing the industrial sewing machine or her vinyl silhouette cutter with her PC.

Sitting outside the VMware demo booth, Rezvani confesses to a company employee that she's already tried Parallels without any luck.

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BY Taylor Buley
Source：Forbes