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- iPhone native SDK opens Apple's own dev tools to public
- iPhone gets Exchange support, aims for BlackBerry
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August 03, 2006 | Comments: (0)
VMWare for Mac to debut August 7
VMWare will be launching a product on the opening day of Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference. The specific product is a secret, but the folks at VMWare were mightily torqued by my Parallels Desktop review's unchallenged reference to Parallels' claim of a hypervisor approach. That's a debate for another day; probably tomorrow in a phone call with VMWare. But VMWare's efforts to make sure I come to WWDC with a firm understanding of what a hypervisor is and is not takes some of the mystery out of the Monday announcement.
Parallels probably got wind of this before I did. They hurried to update me on enhancements planned for its Mac products "before the end of the year," including support for USB 2.0 and the ACPI BIOS that Vista requires. VMWare is undoubtedly going to show Vista running as a guest under Tiger. That could be really interesting if VMWare's engineers worked out the graphics driver bottleneck that slows down guests' GUIs. Parallels might just be making sure they have something fresh out there to avoid getting buried by a VMWare PR onslaught. Or it might know some specifics of VMWare's coming product, in which case we've been tipped on two more features VMWare may include in its first trip to the Mac.
I predicted a WWDC desktop virtualization shootout among VMWare, Microsoft and Parallels, but that doesn't strike me as revenue-rich battleground, It may be a wise place to start, but VMWare is focusing more heavily now on services than on shrink-wrapped software. I see enormous potential in a VMWare server product for the upcoming Xserve. The combination of Xserve, OS X Server, VMWare, Xserve RAID and a little physical-to-virtual magic would put some silvery Apple logos in racks dominated by HP, Dell and IBM badges.
VMWare has already completed work on a virtualization solution that leverages Intel's VT extensions, the very stuff that lives in every Intel-based Mac from Mac mini on up. Unless VMWare just phones it in, its Mac product will land having at least what Parallels does. And if VMWare is on the ball, it'll get to 64-bit before Parallels does, as well.
We'll see VMWare showing off hypervisor, Vista, VT, probably 64-bit and maybe a server product at WWDC. I'm hoping for the home run, the whole enchilada.
So, has anyone heard from Microsoft?
Posted by Tom Yager on August 3, 2006 04:27 PM
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Eighty percent of success is showing up. — Woody Allen
Parallels was the only game in town for several months, which is why I got their software for my MBP. It is perfectly acceptable for what I would use it for, test websites to make sure they are bug-compatible with Internet Exploder. I don't see why I would pay again to get the VMWare product, even though all my engineers at work use VMWare on Linux for much the same thing.
Posted by: Fazal Majid at August 3, 2006 05:11 PMIf this works, things are looking very exciting indeed!
Posted by: GregFromOz at August 4, 2006 08:12 AMApple may actually get into the enterprise market if VMWare rolls out ACE 2.0 for OS X. I think that is the most important product we need to see on OS X besides Workstation of course :) When ever I have asked vmware about ACE 2.0 they love to tell me about the operating systems they will support, but when I ask about OS X, they just say "I'm not sure. I will have to get back to you on that." Of course they never do.
This is far out.. but..
The real question is this going to be is this a Leopard only product? It may, because there are a lot of rumors about OS X getting a new kernel. Sounds crazy but I think VMWare has been running vmware on Leopard in their labs for months, but its simply the Linux version with an Aqua front end. Switching to a Linux kernel in OS X aligns with with the "closing" of the darwin on intel, the announced end of opendarwin, and now a vmware announcement at wwdc that had to wait until now. Just a thought... we will see monday.
I doubt that Microsoft will have a new VirtualPC for Mac. They are giving the one on the PC away at the moment. All they need to do is openly sell and support their OS's to the Mac community. If you are Microsoft, why care anymore if Apple isn't buying your OS? Sell the more expensive, more profitable boxed versions to their customers, and sell those same customers versions of Office both native-Mac and for XP/Vista. Let someone else make the chump change with the virtualization software.
But then again, Microsoft loves control...
Posted by: Glenn Millam at August 7, 2006 01:04 AM
