Mac Monday: Virtualization Gone Wild
Mar 2nd, 2009 by Ealeal
Picture this: you’re skipping merrily down the street, making the dreamlike trek from the Apple store nearest to your home, clutching your new Mac. You are in a state of utter bliss. You envision the painless setup process and the ease of transferring your data and synching your army of devices to the new member of the family. All is quiet on the geeky front. That is, until you realize, to your horror, that due to to circumstances and the archaic standards of the world around you, you’re still doomed to Microsoft-dependency, even if only to a limited extent.
Only a few years back, some of the common question bothering potential Mac users contemplating whether or not to make the switch were issues like the ability to view Microsoft Word documents (which have become a standard), access Excel spreadsheets or to connect to the mail server at work, since no matter where you’ll work, unless it’s in Cupertino, most chances are you’ll be using Windows, along with the Microsoft Office suite. Even upon a triumphant adoption of Boot Camp, you may find yourself on the fray.
Luckily, you can deal with all of these obstacles on your path to bridging between the worlds of Mac and PC – enter platform virtual machines. The virtual machine, or VM for short, is basically a software implementation of a machine or computer, which can execute commands and programs like any real computer, and can serve as an outlet for your remaining PC needs right within your Mac. The virtual machine basically tricks the operating system into acting as though it’s running using its own hardware, when it is actually leeching unused CPU cycles and RAM. Aside from serving as an important tool and test environment for developers, virtualization can be used to build a tiny little Microsoft outpost directly within any Mac. Nifty, huh?
There are a multitude of virtualization products to choose from – VMWare Fusion, Sun xVM VirtualBox and Parallels Desktop for Mac, just to name a few. However, finding and choosing the right virtual machine product for your needs may take a little bit of time and experimentation. While the two major players in the Mac virtualization market are currently VMWare and Parallels, my personal favorite after a long process of trial and error is VirtualBox, free for the taking from Sun MicroSystems.
VMWare Fusion is a virtual machine platform developed by VMWare for Macs sporting Intel processors. VMWare Fusion allows you to run “guest” operating systems on your Mac OS X, such as Microsoft Windows, Linux and NetWare. In other words, a user-friendly security blanket for those making the Mac migration or in need of Windows applications. In this video tutorial from WhoKnewTech, find out how to install VMWare Fusion on your Mac.
Parallels Desktop for Mac was developed by Parallels, Inc., the pioneer on the virtualization-for-Mac frontier, having released the first virtualization software for the consumer market back in 2006. While initially I was a happy camper having coughed up the humble sum to acquire Parallels, this was not a how-to with a happy ending – while things were working seamlessly at first, “heavier” use proved to be a problem. Actions such as opening up Microsoft Excel spreadsheets while having an Outlook window resulted in sluggish moves, I had trouble retrieving files from my Mac libraries in less than a minute or two, and my DVD-drive and USB ports were constantly being hijacked without warning. My CPU usage was inching at 100%. The final battle was fought when upon updating to a newer release, my Parallels virtual machine morphed into a mute.
Obviously, this downgrade turned viewing videos into a somewhat creepy experience, so I began searching for alternatives. VirtualBox was the one to ultimately become my VM BFF – open source, freely available for use, well-designed and seamless for the most part. Plus, being a cheapskate, nothing says love to me like free and open-source software. *Swoon*
The backup capabilities executed via the Snapshot feature are excellent, and the resulting snapshots don’t even occupy much disk space. If you’re in a hurry or low on battery and can’t afford to worry about what’s currently open on your VirtualBox desktop, you can just save the current machine state and close up shop – ironically enough, the results were more predictable and stable than on some actual Windows machines I’ve worked on, without much crashing of any kind.
While I still feel a little embarrassed to run a “fake Windows machine”, as we affectionately call it here, out in the open on a dainty little Mac (as if anyone passing by is actually going to point and exclaim, “HEY! Is that Outlook I see way in there?!”), installing a VM product on your Mac is a relatively quick and painless process, and with so many great virtualization options out there, it’d be a shame not to have that extra Windows XP environment to play around with. In other words: to open up those PowerPoint presentations your parents forward you, easily download, view and edit files associated with Microsoft Office, browse websites that for some reason do not yet support Safari, and navigate the workplace computer environment with ease.
Got questions, comments, or suggestions for a VM alternative not mentioned here? We want to hear about it!
Might be worth mentioning that for most of the planet who do not need to type and read Right-to-Left and with horribly odd characters, Microsoft Office for Mac is brilliant, as well as Apple’s own iWork.
The rest of the planet also probably lives in countries where large consumer or government sites are not designed solely with support for IE6 on a Windows XP machine in mind, so even the browser issue goes away.
In short, for most people, it’s worth looking for the Mac-native solution rather than run a virtual machine.
It’s not only Microsoft; Many professional software suites nowadays have Mac-native versions. There’s SPSS for Mac, Matlab for Mac, obviously Photoshop and Final Cut, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. VM is only recommended when you’ve run out of alternatives.
Shay -
If it isn’t apparent from spending a large portion of the day hearing me gripe about using Windows from the next room over, let me tell ya – I have run out of alternatives.
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