Virtualization on Mac OSX

I use virtualization extensively at work to run multiple virtual computers on one physical machine. We also use it to disconnect the operating system and application environment from the physical hardware for disaster recovery and hardware agnosticism. Our platforms of choice are VMware Server and VMware ESX server. The first is great because it’s free, and the second is great because it’s amazingly fast and reliable.

Almost all our virtualized workloads run fine in VMware Server in production, which is great because there are no license costs. The only workload that works like crap on VMware server that we use, is SQL Server. It dies like a dog because of I/O latency or something, and the only thing we could do to get it working in a virtualized environment is to run it in ESX server. SQL Server is so flaky that it returns random query results (when it works) or one of several unrelated errors (when it fails) when run in VMware Server or VMware Workstation.

Since I’ve become a switcher I’ve been looking to run virtual machines on my Mac at home. The likely choice for me is VMware Fusion, which is still in beta, even though Parallels is more mature on the Mac platform. The advantage of VMware is that my work virtual machines will run at home. In Beta 3, it seems that 64-bit VMs are not supported, even though my Mac is a Core2-Duo. The website says you can run 64-bit VMs, but a Solaris VM I built at work won’t run in 64-bit mode in Beta3. I haven’t updated to Beta4 yet, but apparently it has a new feature called Unity, which allows you to sort-of disappear a Windows virtual machine desktop so that the application windows running inside the virtual machine just appear as windows on your Mac desktop. that’s kind-of cool, I guess. I’ll update to Beta4 and see if my Solaris 64-bit VM works.