Wow - thanks to Trevor Gerdes, I'm now sailing along on the new 27" QuadCore iMac (with only 4Gb RAM at the moment) - running Vista64 Ultimate and Linux (Ubuntu derivative "Linux Mint") absolutely seamlessly, and at the same time under
VMware Fusion 3 for OSX (Intel). Virtualisation isn't new, and it's been mentioned here on IIS a number of times. It's just that I've never seen it so well done before this. As you mouse over each window, mouse control is attributed to it. You don't have to remember mouse-in and mouse-out control sequences any more.
I've set VMware Fusion 3 such that each guest OS has direct access to my iMac's document/picture/movie/etc folders - which means that MacOSX, Vista64 and LinuxMint all share the same common disk resource, and all without any complicated setup whatsoever. I used to use Sun Microsystems VirtualBox (vBox), but no longer. All machines have complete access to all peripherals and networks and it's all simple plug n' play - way too easy. If you leave each virtual machine in a window, you can simply re-scale the window (drag bottom right corner) and the guest OS display scales with you! Resolution scales with you as you drag, which means that it's crystal clear in the window no matter how large or small the window is - all without having to adjust resolution inside the OS itself. It helps that the iMac display resolution is 2560x1440.
I need this setup so that I can easily test my company's web-based publishing workflow software in all environments, and Fusion 3 lets me do this all on the one machine, and all at the same time. I gotta love this virtualisation caper - especially now it's so darn easy. It helps to have such a grunty machine, but hey - it's cheaper than running three separate ones isn't it? LOL!
Here's a screenshot of my Mac OSX desktop, with both Linux and Vista64 running at the same time on it - without any noticeable slowness from any of them, including the host OSX. I usually have each virtual machine running on its own desktop at full-screen (Mac "Spaces") and just flick between them when needed with a control-right or control-left keyboard command.
Click to open>>
I guess the upshot for this means that I will upgrade the Vista64 VM to Windows7 soon, and be able to run all my astro software on my iMac.
Noice
