Life in the blogosphere has its ups and downs. Some weeks there's little to write about. Others, you're inundated with too many juicy story ideas to count. Last week was all about virtualization. After savaging Microsoft's Hyper-V Achilles' Heel, I was pleased to discover a new beta release of VMware Workstation 6.5. Also dropping in to pay a visit: Virtual PC 2007 Service Pack 1. Truly a bumper crop of leads to Life in the blogosphere has its ups and downs. Some weeks there’s little to write about. Others, you’re inundated with too many juicy story ideas to count.Last week was all about virtualization. After savaging Microsoft’s Hyper-V Achilles’ Heel, I was pleased to discover a new beta release of VMware Workstation 6.5. Also dropping in to pay a visit: Virtual PC 2007 Service Pack 1. Truly a bumper crop of leads to follow-up!First, I just got done putting the latest VMware 6.5 pre-release (Beta 2?) through its paces. The earlier beta was already pretty solid (see my preview for the Test Center), so I wasn’t expecting all that much in the way of improvement. One thing I did want to test again: 3D video hardware acceleration. In the earlier beta I was able to fiddle with a few DirectX tests — including the Direct3D 7, 8 and 9 cube thingy in dxdiag — however, the experience was quite buggy. The VM would often freeze or crash, and I never made it through the entire test suite without some sort of bug or issue.Clearly, VMware was listening. The new build (91185) is rock solid, allowing me to complete the full range of Direct3D tests as well as play some legacy games (Quake II, Starfleet Command III) under Windows XP Professional (SP3). Otherwise, the basic feature set remains the same. There’s still the slick new Easy Install option, which worked great with both XP and Vista. However, I’m not yet sold on the whole Unity business. The amount of shearing and other visual weirdness I encounter when enabling Unity makes the feature all but unusable for me – that, and the fact that VMware crashes whenever I try to enable it while CubeDesktop is running.Oh well, at least VMware is making progress on its 3D acceleration feature. Virtual PC SP1, on the other hand, is really an update in name only. Aside from an expanded set of supported host OS (Windows Vista SP1, XP SP3) and guest OS (Windows Server 2008 Standard Edition, Vista SP1, XP SP3), the only real change is to the Virtual Machine Additions, which are now at version level 13.820 (up from 13.803 with the original Virtual PC 2007 release). Otherwise, the product remains effectively unchanged, which also means that it sill doesn’t support 64-bit guest OS and only pays lip service to Linux and other non-Windows platforms. The other major contender in this space — VirtualBox — seems to be benefiting from its recent acquisition by Sun. Version 1.6 was released at the end of April and brings the full force of Sun’s engineering prowess to this previously obscure VM solution. One feature, in particular, that seems to have received some polish is Seamless Windows. Much like Unity under VMware, Seamless Windows lets you run applications from a VM directly on the host desktop. The only difference is that Sun’s implementation actually works well. There’s none of the window shearing that makes Unity so difficult to stomach and performance seems at or near that of a locally executing application. And most importantly, it doesn’t crash when enabled with CubeDesktop running.Overall, VirtualBox 1.6 is a solid release and one that shows how serious Sun is about producing a competitive, Open Source alternative to VMware Workstation. Check it out. Software DevelopmentSmall and Medium Business