Four-Eight-Four [dot org]

I’ve looked forward to getting an Intel Mac for some time now, if for no other reason than because I could run a Windows virtual machine significantly faster since there wouldn’t be any need to do “translation” between Intel and PPC instruction sets. Even on my pretty healthy 1.5 GHz Powerbook G4 with 2 GB RAM, XP was glacially slow … and that was after I disabled nearly every non-essential Windows service and ran it at 800×600.

Then VMware introduced their Fusion product, which uses (basically) the same virtual machine format used by VMware Player, Workstation and Server. I’ve got all three products in use at work. I build VPS machines in Workstation, use them in Player, and have a number of Server VPS machines running on host machines at the datacenter. Running Fusion would mean that I could move the VPS machines to my Mac and test them, which would just be cool. Several times in the past, I’ve duplicated a running VPS from the datacenter and tested upgrades … and it’s saved my bacon.

In the last couple of weeks, while I’ve been without my Powerbook after its logic board failure, I created a CentOS5 VPS to use to test things on while I was using the Vista laptop. Yeah, I know I can install XAMPP, but I just don’t trust it for my development work. Of course when I got the Macbook yesterday, I went ahead and installed Fusion on it and copied over the VPS, and had it up and running with a minimal amount of hassle.

And today … just a few minutes ago, I discovered that they have an application that will convert Virtual PC 7 machines to the VMware format. I ran it on my IE7 XP virtual machine, and it worked like a charm. I’ve already ordered a copy of Vista to run as a virtual machine too (just because it’s different enough from XP that I want to be able to test on it without having to use another machine), but I probably won’t get it and be able to set it up until mid-week. Having the XP machine means I can test stuff in IE 7 right now. Yay for VMware!