Parallels Workstation beta (virtualization software for Mac Intel)

[Senbei]

:woot: Been waiting for something like this since I don't really need to dual boot.

Parallels released a beta of their Parallels Workstation product for Intel Powered Macintosh today.

Parallels Workstation virtualizes a full set of the standard PC hardware including:

* CPU Pentium II or AMD Duron;
* Generic motherboard compatible with Intel i815 chipset;
* RAM up to 1500 Mb;
* VGA and SVGA with VESA 3.0 support;
* 1.44 Mb floppy drive (mapped to a physical drive or to an image file);
* Up to four IDE devices, that may be either virtual hard drives (from 20 Mb up to 128 Gb each, mapped to image file), or CD/DVD-ROM drives (mapped to physical drive or to image file), or both hard drives and CD/DVD-ROM drives;
* Up to four serial (COM) ports (mapped to real port, to pipe or to output file);
* Up to three bi-directional parallel (LPT) ports (mapped to real port, to printer or to output file);
* Ethernet virtual network card compatible with RTL8029; Generic Parallels Virtual network card;
* AC97 compatible sound card;
* 104-key Windows enhanced keyboard;
* PS/2 wheel mouse.

More information (and marketing spewage) plus download link on their site.

http://www.parallels.com/en/products/workstation/mac/

Following is a video capture by a user of XP running in the software.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AC_DuAUTHWI

Also, it seems that on Mac mini's, VT (which Parallels takes advantage of) is disabled in the firmware (http://forum.parallels.com/showthread.php?p=237#post237) for both Core Solo and Core Duo (so they run in software virtualization mode versus Intel VT-x mode). Rest of the Intel Mac's don't have this issue.

P.S. - thanks Frisch for the welcome in the other thread

[antipop]

Welcome to the crazyness.

I've heard that the soft from parallels was still in beta and that a lot of kernel panic occurs. Anyway I'm interested by that soft and i'm following the dev closely :)