I just bought a new laptop, and because I am studying Music Technology part time at university now, I decided to get a Macbook Pro so that I could use Apple’s Logic program for music projects as well as run all my development apps like Visual Studio/SharePoint/SQL Server etc.
Setting up the dual boot with Mac OSX and Vista 64bit was no problem at all. (Andrew Connell has a great blog post about this http://www.andrewconnell.com/blog/archive/2008/07/10/Triple-Boot-Goodness-on-the-MacBook-Pro.aspx)
I have quite a few Virtual PC and Virtual Server images that I use for training as well as software development, but I was wondering if it would be possible to have the same VM’s run from either the Mac OS or Vista?
Well, you can exclude VPC right off the bat. They did have a Mac version, but it is now discontinued and I’m not sure if the same .vmc could be opened in Mac and Windows anyway.
VMWare has Fusion for Mac, but it costs a few bucks.
So a collegue of mine recommended I try Sun’s FREE VirtualBox, which runs on damn near anything.
So I did, and I have to say, I am amazed at this product. Not only was it easy to install and configure on both Mac and PC, but it runs my existing VPC images as is (well after uninstalling the MS Virtual Machine Additions and installing the VirtualBox Guest Additions)
And the bonus is – the exact same image can be started up in either the Mac of Windows OS – perfect for my situation.
Plus I was getting weird scrolling lag issues in VPC that completely disappeared in VirtualBox. Everything is stable and rock solid.
VirtualBox also has a really nice feature called “Seamless Mode“, where your guest OS applications are not run on a separate window, they are run in their own independent windows on the host OS desktop. You have to see it to appreciate it.
Anyway, I’m totally impressed and it has been a long time since I’ve been able to say that about a piece of software, especially a free one.