While you are considering virtualizing (or even installing) Windows Vista, you could kill some time reading Forbes' review Dim Vista.

This intro may make you reconsider the whole ordeal:

"Windows Vista: more than five years in the making, more than 50 million lines of code. The result? A vista slightly more inspiring than the one over the town dump. The new slogan is: "The 'Wow' Starts Now," and Microsoft touts new features, many filched shamelessly from Apple's Macintosh. But as with every previous version, there's no wow here, not even in ironic quotes. Vista is at best mildly annoying and at worst makes you want to rush to Redmond, Wash. and rip somebody's liver out."

Ooh, that's gotta hurt. Especially coming from Forbes.

Still, we're waiting for Direct 3D support in the virtualization software, so we can run Vista in all its glory on our Mac and Linux boxes.

You know how everybody is saying that one of the limitations in VMware Player is that it's unable to make snapshots of your virtual machines?

Well, VMware Player can make snapshots!
As a matter of fact, you may very well be using this functionality on a regular basis.

Okay, here it is:
When you close VMware Player, you can choose between shutting down or suspending your virtual machine.

Shutting down the virtual machine is a no-brainer, but what really happens when your machine is suspended?

You guessed it, the player creates a snapshot of your virtual machine!

There you have it!
VMware Player really can make snapshots.

What we need now, is somebody who can take advantage of this fact. I would love to see some cross-platform software that can manage VMware Player snapshots.

Both Microsoft and Apple are quite restrictive on running their operating systems in virtual machines.

While Apple won't let you virtualize OS X at all, Microsoft won't let you virtualize the comsumer versions of Vista.

Well, they will let you do it, but you have to buy an extra license for the virtual machine. Why there's such a fuss about this, I'm not quite sure. That's just the way it is with Windows XP today.

Microsoft has this to say on the subject:

"For production machines and everyday usage, virtualization is a fairly new technology, and one that we think is not yet mature enough from a security perspective for broad consumer adoption. Today, customers using virtualization technology with Windows are primarily business customers addressing application compatibility needs or technology enthusiasts.

"For that reason, Windows Vista Home Basic and Windows Vista Home Premium cannot be installed in any virtual machine technology, but Windows Vista Business and Windows Vista Ultimate can. This is regardless of the virtualization stack, applying equally to use with Microsoft's virtualization technology, Virtual PC, and third-party virtualization technology.

"Each virtual installation of Windows requires a new license just as it did for Windows XP except for Windows Vista Enterprise Edition which includes four installations in a virtual machine as part of a single license."

So, if you aren't buying Vista Ultimate, you have to buy extra licenses for your virtual machines. Businesses are granted the same rights as Ultimate gives you, with Vista Business and Vista Enterprise.

It's worth noting if you intend to run Windows in a virtualized environment.
And we're still waiting for Apple...

More news from Ars Technica.
Parallels is not going to add OS X virtualization before Apple gives the green light.

From the article:
"We won't enable this kind of functionality until Apple gives their blessing for a few reasons," Rudolph told Ars. "First, we're concerned about our users—we are never going to encourage illegal activity that could open our users up to compromised machines or any sort of legal action. This is the same reason why we always insist on using a fully-licensed, genuine copy of Windows in a virtual machine—it's safer, more stable, fully supported, and completely legal."

So what does this say about OS X virtualization in Parallels then?
It could mean that it's never going to happen, given Apple's strict licensing that only will allow running OS X on Apple hardware.

It's what we've all been waiting for.
One could argue that virtualization mainly has been for servers and testing. But it's clear we're seeing a shift in usage.

People want to run more than one operating system at once. 3D gaming and desktops are becoming standard, and the makers of virtualization products are working hard to do 3D acceleration.

It should not com as a surprise that Ars Technica is reporting that VMware 3D graphics acceleration is just around the corner.

It's still (mostly) a rumour, but VMware seem to have acknowledged it (sort of).

We know from before that Parallels is going for 3D acceleration too.

Finally some hope for running Chicken Shoot on my Mac. (Or running Windows Vista on my Mac, if you want to get boring...)

I'll be the first to admit that the EasyVMX! site needed a make-over.
And I'm now proud to admit that the make-over has taken place!

The most important news (at least it is to me) is that the whole layout is now CSS based.
Why is this important? For one, it will be soooooo much easier to make changes. The look and feel should also be more consistent between browsers and platforms.

The design is not radically different, you may not even have noticed it.

Here are the major changes:

Parallels is still at it, giving us Parallels Desktop for Mac Release Candidate 2.

This time around, they are introducing a lot of interesting and useful new features.

First of all, there's the support for USB 2.0.
The history of USB in Parallels haven't been the greatest of all. Now it seems they've got it right. Many users will be more than happy with the fact that you can use the built-in iSight at full speed in Parallels.

It doesn't stop there.
They've now got full support for CD/DVD and burning, another huge feature that will make the upgrade worth it.

Coherence has been upgraded and made better. You can now use the Mac dock as the start menu.

The Boot Camp support has been greatly improved.
This means that you can have one common Windows install for both Parallels and Boot Camp.

They have added a keyboard remapping configuration, and a drag-and-drop function for files between Windows in Parallels and your Mac.

While VMware has it's Converter, Parallels now has it's new Transporter to convert physical machines to virtual ones.

What I really like about Parallels is it's performance.
Though it has a tendency to drop a little bit in the beta stage, it is absolutely fantastic in the final product. Evidence of this is that the graphics performance is up to 50% faster in this release!

Together with all the other fantastic features of Parallels, this will be pure greatness. As always, paying customers get the final version for free.

Hidden in the downloads section of the EasyVMX! website, there is a handy little tool.

The tool is called EasyMAC (download link).

It's a tool for those who like to get further into the creation of VMware config files, and need to generate valid VMware MAC (hardware) adresses.

The tool will let you generate both random and static MAC addresses, in lower or upper case for your convenience.

EasyMAC is released under the BSD license, which means you can use it for, well, anything you like actually.

Linux kernel 2.6.20 was released yesterday.

Of course, from my point of view, the big news is the inclusion of KVM. KVM is using Intel and AMD's processor virtualization hardware, and implementing paravirtualization. (As opposed to Xen, which is pure paravirtualization.)

Here's the change log, for those of you who want to see the other changes in the Linux kernel.

There you have it, another contender on the virtualization scene.

Both for my own testing, and professionally, I've really been interested in how to do disaster recovery. Recovering backups from existing physical servers onto VMware is a really great way to deal with a disaster.

Running a project for my last employer, I had to write a multi purpose "physical backup to virtual restore" routine myself. Which really goes to show how versatile VMware really can be.

I'm not really sure if VMware Converter can be used for this purpose. However, it's a great tool to convert your physical servers in to virtual ones.

You see, the main problem with migrating from physical to virtual (as well as moving an existing OS install from one hardware platform to another) is the difference in hardware. More often than not, you will find that your install won't even boot on the new platform. This is why you need some kind of conversion routine.

Converter lets you do the conversion from physical to virtual without any problems. It even has a "Hot Cloning" feature, which does the conversion without any downtime.

There's a free Starter version, and then there's the Enterprise version. As far as I can tell, the difference is that Starter won't let you do multiple simultaneous conversions.