Wednesday December 27, 2006

I've tried Solaris on the public beta of VMWare for Intel Mac

... and I was quite amazed by its compatibility, stability and performance (although the beta release only works in the debug mode, which according to a warning displayed on startup implies a severe performance penalty).

Before Dec 22 there was only one virtualization solution for Mac developed by Parallel Desktops, which supported Solaris as well, but it had quite a few issues (see Capitan Holy Hippie's blog).

According to the press release: The new VMware desktop product for the Mac, codenamed Fusion, allows Intel-based Macs to run x86 operating systems, such as Windows, Linux, NetWare and Solaris, in virtual machines at the same time as Mac OS X. It is built on VMware's rock-solid and advanced desktop virtualization platform that is used by over four million users today.

I was playing with OpenSolaris build 54 and a Mac Book Pro. Already during the installation the mouse pad was working and there was a network connection (unlike during my previous attempts of installing Solaris directly on the hard drive). After installing the VMWare tools (a set of guest operating system /Solaris/ drivers, which make interaction with the host OS even smother) I could also work with sound and full screen resolution, accelerated video (it felt somewhat sluggish before that).

I was truly impressed not to come across a single stability problem in a couple of hours I spent playing with Fusion, torturing it with NetBeans and other heavy stuff, really well done!

I hope the I/O performance improves in the final product, anyways, I find Fusion as it is the best way to run Solaris on a Mac as of today.
Posted by tomslot ( Dec 27 2006, 08:56:29 PM CET ) Permalink Comments [0]