OSX "Spaces" + VMware Fusion = "Unparalleled" personal computing power
I am soon to be a full time research associate instead of a part time one doing it in my spare time. Currently I've been spending the last few months teaching myself to program, install, support and generally get to know Oracle 10g and 11g on both an Ubuntu Server environment, as well as on a SunOS Unix server. Instead of lugging around five machines I only lug around two. One is my work issued "Stinkpad" (okay, IBM Thinkpads are solid machines) but nothing, and I mean nothing I've ever encountered delivers what I have going on my Macbook Pro. Let's run through what I'm doing, and how I'm doing it.
VMware isn't a multibillion dollar company for nothing, these guys understand virtualization like Lebron James does a basket ball. At the core, we are running a micro and macro kernel in OSX's Darwin Kernel (Version 9). (Download Darwin Source Code Here) Mac OSX is powered by a Mach & BSD Kernel which enables some cool stuff which I'm about to talk about here.
I have the ability to have up to 4 operating systems (including OSX and more if I wanted) and when I want to switch between operating systems, I just press "CTR + LEFT OR RIGHT." and Wazam!! I'm in another OS. Currently I'm running OSX 10.5, Windows Vista Ultimate, Sun Solaris 10 with Oracle 10g, Ubuntu Desktop (or Server with 10g, depends on whether I'm using Ubuntu as my IDE environment or testing a program on my virtual network of up to 5 PCs. I am also downloading gOS to give it a try, it's a Ubuntu flavored distro with tight integration with Google.
Here is the kicker. I don't even have to have a network connection to test real world applications, I can have multiple concurrent LAOP/UAOP/LAMP stacks running. I don't usually do all of these at once, but I plan on upgrading to 4 gigs or ram, at which point all of this would run very very fast. Having 4 operating environments at once does work fine for me, you can adjust the VMWARE Fusion settings, and your mileage may vary.
As you can see, I have Sun Solaris 10, Ubuntu Desktop, Microsoft Vista, and OSX all running concurrently thanks to the magic of a OSX Spaces, a kernel that's advanced, dual processors, and the magic of VMware's Fusion product.
