My favourite virtualization software for Windows and Linux today got released as a public beta for MacOS X (Intel only), and beat both Apple, Microsoft and VMWare on being the first to bring commercial emulation/virualization software to the MacIntel platform. Parallels Workstation lets you run numerous operating systems simultaneously as completely isolated, independently functioning virtual computers on your physical machine.

Just as Boot Camp the MacOS X version is beta software. The user interface still has some errors, and at first it seemed that you could only mount ISO files and not install from CD/DVDs. But after having rebooted the machine this problem had disappeared. I have only had the time to download and install Ubuntu Dapper Flight 6, and that went without any big difficulties. A problem that appeared during installation was that I had to navigate through the installation menus by clicking the arrow keys. Keeping them down didn’t work. I found Ubuntu at least not to be the perfect guest OS for the Mac version as both audio and network (ethernet and wifi) didn’t work. Sad cause Ubuntu ran really well as guest OS on the Windows version. Yes, I know, a completly different hardware … . Hopefully someone can point me in the direction of a better Linux version for this kind of use?

Parallels claims that their solution is “… , the first virtualization software that gives Apple users the ability to simultaneously run Windows, Linux or any other operating system and their applications alongside Mac OS X on an Intel-powered Apple computer.”

Well, that is not true. Parallels fails to boot BeOS / ZETA (just as Boot Camp). More correct is that you can use Parallels Workstation to run the following operating systems as guest operating systems: Various versions of Microsoft Windows and Linux, FreeBSD, OS/2, eComStation and MS-DOS. A quite impressive list.

If you are still not convinced that this is a product that you should buy, then here is a few more arguments:

1. It’s cheap

2. It has a license that gives you access to the versions for the Mac, Windows and the Linux platform.

3. It has full support for the Intel Virtualization Technology®, which is included in most new Core Duo chipset, ensures that virtual machine performance is close to near-native and that each virtual machine is stable and completely isolated from other virtual machines and the host physical machine.

If you haven’t heard of Parallels before. I think you must have been sleeping. They have been quite a lot in the media lately. If you are interesting in more information about this product, please visit the company website or their blog. Yes, indeed also their marketing manager Benjamin Rudolph is regulary blogging. The software solution also has a wikipedia entry.