Upcoming announcement regarding VMware and Mac OS X Intel? January 6, 2006
Posted by James Webster in : apple, software, virtualization , trackbackUPDATE 1: I have summarized some of the latest information and rumours about Windows and OS X x86 virtualization over here.
UPDATE 2: Looks like Parallels might beat VMware to virtualizating XP under OS X.
Over at the excellent virtualization.info Alessandro Perilli writes about his wish list for the next versions of VMware’s workstation and server products. One of his bullet points is “MacOS x86 guest support”. I made the following comment:
Re: MacOS x86 guest support, as much as I (and many other people) would like to see this, I consider it highly unlikely. After all, consider that Apple is still a hardware company, in addition to being an OS and software vendor. Virtualization technology attempts to turn hardware into a commodity (from a business perspective anyway). For VMware to support OS X x86 on Workstation would also require them to implement support for the Trusted Platform Module that Apple/Intel are implementing to prevent OS X x86 from running on any other x86 hardware platform other than Apple’s. Unless Apple is willing to co-operate with VMware on implementing a TPM in software, VMware would have to reverse engineer it, and expose themselves to litigation under the DMCA (I think, IANAL).
Now a version of VMware Workstation and Player that supports OS X x86 as a HOST operating system I think we might possibly see! Given the UNIX underpinnings of OS X, the porting effort from the UNIX versions of OS X might not be so hard?
Alessandro then mentions that we should look to January 9th for an interesting and unexpected announcement regarding VMware and OS X virtualization!
I have been extremely excited about VMware for a long time and intended to write more about the topic shortly (if you haven’t downloaded the free VMware Player, go now!). This rumour is a reason to be doubly excited.
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[…] My previous post about VMware and OS X seems to be getting a bit of traffic, so I thought I might also contribute a ‘State of the Union’ summary of the rumours/possibilities that have been floating about. Or at least the ones that I’ve come across… […]