Parallels Desktop had almost a year of exclusive ownership of the Intel Mac software virtualization space. VMware is bringing an end to Parallels’ clear field advantage, and current and prospective Intel Mac users get to reap the rewards of competition.Just before Christmas, VMware released the free public beta of Fusion, the company’s first virtualization solution for Intel Macs. VMware has demonstrated Fusion, although not yet with that name, at previous venues including the 2006 Worldwide Developer Conference. I’ve gotten two supervised walk-throughs of alpha releases of the software and, with allowances for the shortcomings inherent in the alpha release of anything, I wasn’t impressed with either the demos or the potential described to me by VMware’s staff. My viewpoint was skewed by the performance and stability of the better-established Parallels Desktop, which is VMware Fusion’s head-on competitor. The one thing I found compelling about VMware’s Mac virtualization software was OpenGL pass-through. I saw in this the potential for much-improved 3D graphics performance in apps where OpenGL is leveraged directly.On paper, Fusion enters the Mac market with two substantial advantages over Parallels Desktop. Fusion is able to run 64-bit guest OSes, a feature that, if done right, could remove one of the two major roadblocks to replacing Boot Camp’s dual-booting approach to Windows/Linux with far easier virtualization (the other roadblock is video performance). Fusion is also able to run multi-processor virtual machines, meaning that a Fusion guest OS instance will see a multi-processor PC at install time. VMware Fusion also laid down two new features that Parallels quickly matched in a beta release of its own. Both products provide direct access to USB 2.0 devices, an especially cool feature given that OS X has such a tiny selection of drivers for add-on USB 2.0 devices. Now you’ll be able to plug in some high-speed external peripherals. “Some” isn’t a quantity I can define yet; I’m working on that as I type. Parallels gets points for stating that it lacks isochronous USB device support, meaning that streaming devices like web cams, video capture and microphones will have to wait. What virtual USB 2.0 support does give us is access to devices that are covered by drivers for Windows, Linux, BSD, or whatever your guest OS happens to be. This doesn’t create a magical bridge through which OS X will be able to talk to an unsupported USB device through another OS’s driver, or those created for Windows (et al) by third parties. But if the performance is anywhere near native as Parallels claims it is, USB 2.0 support in a Parallels or VMware virtual guest OS is a major win.VMware and Parallels betas also bring out drag-and-drop support, allowing users to move files between OS X and guest OSes by dragging them from one GUI to the other. This eliminates the need to set up a Windows virtual share just to relocate a few files from, say, NTFS to HFS+. I don’t yet know how extensive it is, specifically, whether I’ll be able to drag a file from Windows Explorer and drop it in an arbitrary Mac app as an automatically-typed pasteboard object.Parallels didn’t just cut and paste the feature list from VMware Fusion to beef up its beta. See the next post. Software Development