K’s Weblog

Several months ago I picked up a new machine, a MacBook, from which the bast majority of these blog posts have flowed. I absolutely love my MacBook and I can see myself becoming a regular Mac user with future computer purchases. That said, for about the past 15 years, I’ve been a devout Windows user. I do still on occasion develop Windows-based applications and it really is much easier to do that on a Windows machine. So, what’s a geek to do? It sure wouldn’t look very technology savvy of me to carry around a second laptop when I have this sleek MacBook so… Virtualization to the rescue! Apple offers a Beta of its BootCamp product to work with OS X 10.4. It would allow me to install and boot Windows directly from my Mac. Not a bad option, but I had some issues:

1. All the rebooting to switch OS’s would be annoying at best.
2. The partitioning magic that ships with BootCamp wouldn’t work. To use it, I would have had to wipe and reload OS X and Windows.
3. Couldn’t use BootCamp to boot from my brand spankin’ new external drive.

So the other options I was left with are Parallels and a new offering from VMWare called Fusion. Parallels has been around for a while and does a decent job of supporting Windows, and a few other OS’s as well (Linux, Solaris), but lacks 64-bit Windows support. Fusion also has similar support capabilities, but does come with some bugs as the product is still in a Beta cycle. What finally sold me on Fusion were three separate things:

1. VMWare’s support for virtually any operating system I could throw at it (including 64-bit versions of Windows)
2. VMWare’s website contains tons of pre-built “Virtual Appliances” which are self-contained operating system/application bundles which can be up and running within about a minute of the download completing.
3. Portability. VMWare has an application called VMWare Player which is available for both Windows and Linux which will allow me to port my virtual machine instances to other computers. Geek factor? Yes.

Screenshot of me installing Visual Studio 2005 on Vista in Fusion on my MacBook with the blog post in the background. For those of you interested, here’s the configuration I’ve got for this VMWare client:

• Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate Edition
• Microsoft Office 2007 Enterprise Edition
• Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Professional Edition
• 1GB dedicated system memory
• 1 Virtual CPU (may switch to 2 for some operations (ie large compiles)

In getting everything setup there are already three unexpected features of VMWare Fusion that have impressed me. These are features that were either undocumented, or listed as missing in the last few reviews that I’ve read. The first thing that I noticed by accident is that the Command key opens the Start menu! For me, this is a major selling feature, I use keyboard shortcuts for literally everything. This feature is also missing from Microsoft’s own RDP client for OS X. The second is a bit more intriguing: when you resize the VMWare window, the resolution of the Windows Vista client is adjusted to match. No scrollbars. No distortion. Genius! Finally there is automatic drag-and-drop support for transferring files between my OS X installation and my Windows Vista installation. In fact, the two screenshots above were dropped into vista, stitched together, and then dropped back into OS X. Though it’s only been installed for a short time, I think that this VMWare environment will solve my mobile computing issues, allowing me to port a Windows installation with my Mac and live in both worlds.

Related Posts