nelutz  | 2007-06-22
Enterprise-grade vritualization
VMware is widely known as a company that provides enterprise-grade virtualization products. They've been doing this for years and they're good at it. Because of Apple's transition to Intel processors, they have decided to enter the Mac market with their virtualization products. They have been releasing (free) beta versions, continually adding features and polishing the application. Now at Beta 4, it provides a great environment to run virtual machines - I use it regularly for Windows (testing of web sites, and the occasional little game :) and sometimes Linux (when I need to test something before deploying it on a real server). It's also great as a sandbox - for example, instead of installing a Apache, MySQL, PHP and whatnot on my mac, I can install them in a small, out-of-the-way virtual machine, and fire it up only when doing web work. Another nice benefit is that I can use the same virtual machine images with VMware on other platforms (Linux and Windows). There is a slight performance penalty in running a virtual machine, and there are still some (small) stability issues, but it's still a beta, so it's understandable.