Parallels was the first available when Apple switched to Intel processors six years ago and remains one of the fastest and most fully featured programs out there.

The new version of Parallels Desktop for Mac provides running improvements to performance and the interface, along with some compelling new features.

Running Windows on the Mac

The easiest way to run Windows on a Mac is BootCamp. The Boot Camp utility included in OS X automates most stages of the installation process and includes a simple program that installs all the necessay drivers.

The advantage of a virtual machine setup is to enable another OS to run at the same time as the original OS, removing the need for annoying reboots. It also adds the benefit of being able to restore your entire OS to a fully working state in a few simple clicks if anything goes wrong.

Parallels has also invested in graphics, providing enough performance that you can even play some Windows games, virtualised. The new version feels even faster than older versions.

New features

Using Parallels you can now use a MacBook’s integrated webcam from inside Windows! It even supports Microsoft’s DirectX up to version 9.0c/9Ex.

Miscellaneous improvements include support for digital audio up to 192kHz sample frequency, 7.1-channel surround sound, and better integration with new UI features in Lion, such as full-screen mode, LaunchPad and Mission Control.

The full-screen user interface changes are significant. Parallels previously used hot corners to enable a page-curl graphic, revealing the host OS below. While fine in theory, it could clash with other hot corners you had arranged and there was no other easy way to interact with the host, other than to avoid full-screen mode entirely.

The Coherence feature means that It’s still possible to run Windows programs in a Windows-less environment, so that those programs appear mingled with regular OS X apps. Its still in it’s early days yet, as the Aero translucency is lost and the corner of Windows programs’ windows are squared off rather than rounded. That said, these Windows windows do integrate well with Lion’s Mission Control interface.

Performance

Seeing as it’s primary selling point is it’s Windows-on-Mac functionality, this is where Parallels still does best; it excels in speed. It’s so fast that you can no longer tell the difference between running Windows on Parallels or through Boot Camp most of the time.

And for gamers, this virtualisation solution is still the app of choice; in some cases it even exceeds obtained from running Windows natively! This speed comes at the expense of stability though. Of the many programs we run on the Mac platform, Parallels Desktop for Mac is the only one that still sporadically gives us kernel panics.

Other times, when a Windows app seizes up within Windows, we find our whole computer freezes to the point of requiring a forced reboot.

Download, Install and Start the VMware Fusion application by double-clicking its icon in the Applications folder.

Go to > Create a new virtual machine > File > New

The idea is to point the New Virtual Machine Assistant at the Windows 7 ISO you just downloaded.  VMware Fusion does not automatically recognizes, if we insert the Windows installation disc, we have to point it at the ISO.

Click New to start the New Virtual Machine Assistant.

Then, click “Use operating system installation disk image file”:

Just select the ISO in the dialog that pops up:

Tweaking Stage
If Windows Easy Install does not parse the disk image as Windows 7, it will definitely parse the disk image as Windows Vista.  Change that to Windows Server 2008.

Paste the Microsoft serial key into the Windows Product Key form in Windows Easy Install.

Also, uncheck  “Make your home folder accessible to the virtual machine”.

At this point, you should see your final configuration setup, with 1 GB of RAM assigned, and a virtual hard disk that will expand up to 40GB (but will start much smaller).  Click “Finish.”

After you click “Finish,” Windows Easy Install will disappear, but will still be running Windows 7. You’ll see some reboots, and VMware Tools will install automatically.

Voila! That’s it.
Enjoy working on Windows 7.

More details >> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GW0G3igVRE4&feature=player_embedded

And with 2012, this is exactly what were seeing. Consumer electronics has a relative heavy (LG Electronics, Korea) teaming up with the BIG fish in a small pond of speech recognition, Nuance Communications.

Speech recognition may be a novelty to many, being introduced by Apple’s Seri voice recognition on the iPhone. Yes, any rational individual would admit this is the first mass-market product. In no stretch of the imagination does it make it the first product. This author has been looking at business cases for speech recognition for 25 years.

So what does this have to do with virtualization? Answer, pretty much every thing.

The reality is speech recognition is both resource intensive and until this point a highly niche market. Since most consumers are not yet up to using voice for commanding a computer, it makes complete sense to virtualize a heavy resource that not many people will (yet)  utilize.

Virtualization allows with the magic of multi core processors to dedicate the specialized application (in this case Speech Recognition <SR>) to its own core. For the end-user that says SR?, That core is not consuming energy or perhaps more important, RAM. (A person can always plug into the cigarette lighter for more power. RAM is a considerably more precious commodity at this moment in time).

For the SR savvy person, virtualization, turning on and off a single (dedicated?) CPU core gives them quite snappy performance without going through energy as though it was coming from a hydroelectric plant in the trunk of the car.

While fully acknowledging the SR advances made on the Apple iPhone with Seri, let’s call a spade a spade. It requires the heavy lifting of SR to be done on Apple’s servers. And that means wireless connectivity. No connection, no SR.

While looking into a crystal ball is at best, always cloudy – the 2012 battlelines appear to being quite clear.

Nuance Communications in a joint venture with LG Electronics is going to be directly competing with Windows 8 and its internally developed Speech program, which has used the same code since Vista, Windows.

Is it possible that Apple’s Seri will open the doors to these two competitors, that are seemingly hell-bent on not requiring wireless communications and saving resources by using virtualization?

If the person was an OS X type, the words Parallels would have come out of my mouth in a heartbeat. Conversely for PC users with equal speed I would have said VMware Workstation.

While experience was my guide, it seems with new releases things have changed. With a New Year,  I finally got the chance to sample VMware’s Fusion 4 and it appears VMware got some people that understand how virtualization even on a laptop should work.   In terms of raw performance the two competitors appeared to be doing well enough to call it a tie but some VMware’s feature with new Lion interface enhancements are impressive with full screen mode so easy to use.

The pros tend to take VMware’s Fusion over Parallels V 7 because the integration of the Windows icons into Lions toolbar makes a cleaner User Interface for those that need both operating systems on their hands at the same time. It just reduces desktop clutter.

Further, Vmware as king of virtualization products is well known by developers and system administrators. The upshot of this is this group of people has a collection of images already built in VMware. And since almost any virtual machine image created in VMware can be used by another VMware product, it makes sense this group would stay in the VMware world.

It has been said here before and it is worth repeating, if you’re looking for a strong product to run Windows on a Mac if for no other reason than a clean easy interface,  then you’ll appreciate the polish of VMware with its product Fusion V4.

And in this article I’m going to take the risk. If you running OS X (Leopard, Snow Leopard, or Lion), and you have 80 bucks ($50 for an upgrade version), go ahead and get it.

If you are new to virtualization, and you want to see what all the excitement is about, you can try Parallels Version 7 free for 14 days.

One thing you can say about Parallels is each version gets faster, while getting more features.

Of course running any virtualized environment does require some horsepower. If you’re looking at virtualization because you need to run Windows (more precisely, an application that requires Microsoft Windows) 4 GB of RAM is strongly suggested by both the company and testers.

And even that would depend on what you need to run in Windows. Consider speech recognition. One of the industry leaders is Nuance. For OS X, they have Dragon Dictate. Frankly, you cannot pay me to use it. On the Windows side, the firm has Dragon Naturally Speaking. The dark side to DNS even in a Native Windows Environment, the computer really does need 4 GB of RAM.

See what I mean about generalizations? I just cannot recommend running Parallels 7 on a MiniMac to run DNS.

However, I am just itching to try Parallels 7 on Windows 8. Parallels accepts a. ISO just as easy as you please, for the guest operating system.

It seems just right for a Parallels 7 installation. While everyone and their brother agrees 4 GB of RAM on the Mac is a minimum for Windows 7, there is some complaint about the $200 license.

However Windows 8 will not be available until sometime around the end of 2012. Its first beta releases in late February. And there are three points to this. 1) it’s free during the beta period. 2) under the hood, it still NT. And finally, 3) . It’s NT that has gone to Weight Watchers.

While Microsoft’s goal is to take one of their major crown jewels (NT the OS) so they can play catch-up in the tablet market, it seems like it will fit just fine on a computer with finite resources that has to serve the host Operating System (OS X), the guest Operating System (‘fatman’)  Windows AND the monkey in the middle (Parallels).

If all this sounds great, however, you have a budget of zero, consider looking at Oracles VirtualBox with Windows 8. In this configuration for 2012, the capital outlay is zero.

This is what makes one of several differences with VirtualBox. You can keep your credit card in your wallet. Virtual box is licensed under GNU General Public License (GPL) version 2. If you’re not familiar with the GNU it is a lot of legal speak that says you’re not going to get busted for using this and not paying for it.

While free is a great price, no price in fact comes with a price. While a GNU product might be quite stable (think Linux) in terms of not crashing, in English, stable can also mean doesn’t change much.

Generally speaking, that is not an attribute I would assign any GNU software that is under active development. I think it’s safe to say software being actively developed changes about as often as some people change underwear.

It’s fair to say that VirtualBox is missing some of the whistles and bells of its competitors, Parallels Desktop V7 and VMware Fusion V4. However, other than price, it does have some compelling features. Of all the offerings in virtualization, virtual box seems to win hands-down in the sheer number of host and guest Operating Systems it will support.

It even supports DOS as a guest OS (in some cases this may require virtualizing hardware as DOS was designed to read and write ‘to the metal’). If you’re in that boat, you may want to look at FreeDOS. They just released version 1.1 on 2 January 2012.

Certainly some readers are questioning why addressing DOS as a guest operating system is worth a breath. The answer is there is a great number of highly specialized projects and devices that need this commandline operating system.

For example, an amateur astronomer was quite disappointed that Parallels did not have sufficient RS-232 support (serial port) to run his astronomy gizmos. And that only very recently he was able to get software that ran native on OS X and utilized USB. There are others from PBX programming to other industrial apps that need DOS.

While the jump from version 3 to version 4 in VirtualBox sought no speed improvements, the installation process is considerably simpler. You may or may not need the extra USB functionality package.

Early reports from a variety of different testers are reporting few to no glitches.

The manual for VirtualBox is available online and does a pretty good job. It’s not the quality of the Parallels V4 manual, however quite serviceable.

If you want to use VirtualBox in a commercial environment, you need to pony up $50 for a license.

As simply as possible. I’m going to show you your options so that you may do the virtualization equivalent of picking the right pair of shoes. At the end of the day, the shoes that fit you best are the right choice.

Let’s start off with the dark horse in thee race: Oracle’s VirtualBox (free under the GNU, $50 for commercial license). Of the three choices, it probably has the least number of features. Whether that means anything to you or not is a question only you can answer. Is there anyone who has used every feature of Microsoft Office?

If you are new to virtualization, hands-down, this would be my first choice. Certainly, it’s free to try. And compared to the other guys you don’t experience ‘lock-in’.

While you are running the wizard and and see Create New Virtual Disk, you have a total of four choices. The first is to create a VDI (Virtual Disk Image). This is the default format for VirtualBox -  an XML format.

Your second option is a VMDK, a format popularized by VMware. Very important, if you wish to use the VMplayer at a later date.

Your third choice isVHD, used by Microsoft. Did I mention that Microsoft’s Hyper–V comes free with every installation of Windows 8?

Your fourth and perhaps least favorable option is would be Image Files of Parallels Version 2 (HDD).

One of the reasons for the popularity of virtualization goes beyond maximizing hardware resources, while minimizing electrical use and cooling costs is the time spending building an OS base that looks just so, for testing. VirtualBox does full clone and linked clone.

Chances are you will find it is not quite as speedy in the horse race between its two major competitors. Nor does it have as many whistles and bells. Clearly, it wins on flexibility and price.

Target Audience: novices to virtualization, professionals that need as many backdoors as possible.

VMware Fusion V4 Advantages

Originally the winner when the host operating system was Windows. No longer the case. A virtual tie in performance with Parallels V 7.

VMware Fusion V4 strengths come from the fact that VMware was first. IT professionals are comparable and proficient with the strengths and weaknesses of VMware and the VMDK  format. A superior choice for those that need an integration between OS X and Windows, that is as seamless as is currently possible. Competition keeps its pricing at the utility level.

Target Audience: experienced virtualization/IT professionals that are just trying to ‘make it go’ for their customers (end-users within an organization).

Parallels Desktop V7 Advantages

Parallels Desktop V7 had its original incarnation coming from OS X, and originally the speed demon on the Mac. In 2012, in terms of performance and whistles and bells a virtual dead heat with Fusion V4.

It comes down to the experience. Most novices will find Parallels more pleasing to the eyeballs. Both VMware Fusion and Parallels managers may wish they had started with Oracle’s VirtualBox. Because they were not locked down to a particular vendor’s container.

Target Audience: OS X users (Mac) that don’t have experience with virtualization and are scared of trying something not mainstream (VirtualBox).

Other Desktop Virtualization Solutions

It is beyond the scope of this article to discuss niche projects. One that is (currently) under the radar and definitely not niche is Hyper-V1. It was a version 1 product in its day it would have been the butt of a WC Fields joke.

Like it or hate it, the 2-ton gorilla known as Microsoft has been quietly working on virtualization for some time.

Certainly some of my Redmond buddies would like to say not quietly. My responses is, be happy version 1 of Hyper-V didn’t get more attention. The product sucked. That was then. Now is 2012.
Becoming a standard feature in Windows 8 is a topic that will be not lost on a number of manufacturers. Particularly in the tablet market. Add to that ARM CPU support, and the next 12 to 24 months are going to be very interesting indeed.

To help you neutralize the Mac vs. PC prejudice, consider two things. One, it’s all just computers. And secondly, the marketplace needs competition. Without competition there would be no need for any vendor to improve its products. Further, legally corporations are bound to maximize their profits for their shareholders. Without competition our digital life would be much more expensive.

There was more good news. In the computing ecosphere competition has driven price and performance to heights where the real winner is us as users and consumers, regardless of what platform we are using.

The best choice in virtualization on Mac vs. PC is very much like buying a pair of shoes. The best choice first comes down to selecting the right shoe size. From there, considering purpose. A properly sized dress shoe will be useless for going out fishing. Only after those two considerations have been addressed can one intelligently look at price and brand.

There is one final consideration, and that is quality vs. price. Traditional thinking says by a quality product that will last. On the surface, this makes a lot of sense. And yet it is not always the correct answer. A case in point would be power tools. Let’s look at this market segment for an important learning point.

It used to be that power tools were expensive and lasted seemingly forever and a day. A tool manufacturer known as Black & Decker did some market research. They discovered the average homeowner would buy a variety of power tools for projects around the house. Yet the utilization of the power tool in question typically only got about 25 hours of use.

This gave them the insight to manufacture power tools with motors that were much lighter in weight and designed for considerably less operational life. Of course, this afforded them much lower manufacturing costs. In addition to this, the end-user was able to purchase a power tool at a lower price with considerably less weight.

Going back to the dress shoe analogy, a person that only occasionally goes out to a formal event will find it more cost-effective to purchase a good-looking dress shoe that will not last more than a dozen evenings. These examples relate well to the consideration of virtualization in OS X vs. Windows (or for that matter Linux/UNIX).

Which is the best can be answered rather easily. When one gives a serious and unbiased consideration the following factors.

What is my endgame in virtualization?

If you are new to the concept of virtualization. There is no getting around the fact you are going to have to make an investment of your time to learn it. Regardless of your OS choice you do not have to spend money. If you are in this camp. Two good choices are VMware player and/or VirtualBox. While both are free, there is a distinct separation between the two offerings.

VMware player is free and proprietary. While VirtualBox is free and open source. The former comes from EMC, while the latter is offered by Oracle. Both are big-name players with aggressive support and updates.

While both support Windows, Microsoft has its own Hyper V offering that is free as well. This has found itself embedded in the upcoming Windows 8. Being as it comes with this virtualization offering as part of the installation, it is the easiest choice to get started with since it is already there.

A quick sidebar on Windows 8. While the smart money is saying it will not be available as a final product until the end of 2012 or early 2013 what Redmond is doing is becoming pretty clear. In simple terms, Microsoft is going through all the subsystems and putting them on a diet.

They have reached their goal of running on as little as a 1 GHz processor with 1 GB of RAM. And doing this while keeping all the functionality of a Windows 7 desktop OS. Programs that run on Windows 7, with few exceptions as of now operate perfectly.

Given this, playing with virtualization means you need a relatively small amount of resources even if you are virtualizing on a host OS that is not from Redmond.

Let’s begin by taking on the dark side first. Given that all resources are finite, you may find a guest operating system operating rather sluggishly. The most common reason for this is when you are virtualizing completely different operating systems. For example, running OS X (Snow Leopard, or Lion) to host virtualization software so that you can experiment with a relatively alien operating system such as Windows 7.

Because the two have little in common the lower-level functionality (actions that happen in the kernel of the operating system) cannot be passed on from the host operating system to the guest operating system utilizing the virtualization software as a high-speed two-way pipe. In other words, it becomes a whole system virtualization. Since required tasks cannot be shared they must be re-created.

Depending on the virtualization software you are using, it may not support the virtual operating system passing through system calls even when they are similar or the same Operating System (OS). Saying which will do what is beyond a simple article because there are so many variables and due to the hot competition, the vendors are adding features on an extremely rapid basis.

Companies that are running OS X for servers might want to consider Parallels Server for Mac 4.0. The offering is hypervisor-based, making it performance effective to mix OS X for some operations and Windows server for product specific applications such as Exchange.

A quick side note for firms that are using Windows-based servers. The Mac heads know something you don’t, and that is how to save money. Microsoft charges on a per user basis a licensing fee for its servers. OS X is a one-time fee for its server edition and is limited only by the hardware is installed on. There is no per user license fees. The end result frees up a great deal of the budget for IT.

Setting aside large companies, let’s say you work for a smaller firm called: Me-Myself &I Co. – technically this is known as desktop or client virtualization.

Just as with the enterprise group, the amount of resources used will depend on whether you are using hypervisor technology. Again, there are too many variables for simple binary choice of do this or that.

With all that said, there are still a number of advantages in most applications. Let’s look at some examples.

Suppose you are running OS X and you want or need to run Windows. Should one of the bad guys be running an attack on your computer he very well may be looking to exploit a Windows vulnerability. Having OS X as the base operating system, the attack stopped cold. This leaves only “clean calls” reaching Windows.

Another advantage of current virtualization software is its flexibility of allocating resources. It takes a page from teachers found in cloud computing. That is to say, it is possible to dynamically allocate CPU usage and RAM requirements on-the-fly.

The end result is whatever investment was made in hardware can be more fully utilized. This results in less upfront cost. On an ongoing basis, this also means less power consumption, therefore a lower electric bill. Further, this means less heat is generated, which reduces cooling requirements. And this in itself reduces both the upfront and ongoing costs of dealing with the waste heat.

For those of us who are stuck by mandate to use Windows don’t have to have Mac envy. There is the lesser known VirtualBox from Oracle. This option has a few tricks up its sleeve that you cannot find elsewhere. First off, it is an Open Source product, which means free – as in no cost. It also runs on Linux, Windows, Mac and Solaris for the base (native) platforms.
It is pretty flexible with the Guest Operating Systems as well. For those needing Microsoft support, it goes back to DOS (and the Graphic Shell for DOS – Windows 3.x or its archaic alternatives). It also supports most Linux offerings. While Oracle doesn’t come right out and say so, it also allows Windows users to run OSX.
It’s pretty easy to see why Oracle does not mention this. Apple takes a very dim view of running OSX on hardware other than Macintosh.
It is beyond the scope of this entry to say Parallels is a better choice than VMware Fusion or that VirtualBox rocks.  The reason for this is no single group has a lock on brillant software engineers. Furthermore, your particular needs may be widely different than someone else’s.
While VMware and Parallels are locked in a wrestling match, choosing which is best changes about as often as who is on top in a wrestling match.  It is relatively safe to say for the moment both offer superior performance to VirtualBox.  However open source products beyond having the advantage of being no cost, tend to roll out with new features and performance enhancements at a faster rate than commercial software.

Real Life Application

While there are more variables to consider then there are types of shoes and styles let’s look at one possibility for Macintosh users.  Speech recognition.  Yes, there is a commercial application to install on OSX.  The name of the product is not being mentioned here because you could not pay me to use it.  And yet, the Windows offering from the same firm is undisputed as king of the hill.
Let’s say you wish to dabble in speech recognition.  Further, you don’t want to spend any money.  Assuming you have a reasonably powerful Macintosh, there is a solution.  First, install Virtual Box.  Next install a pre release copy of Windows 8.  Go to the control panel of Windows and select Ease of Access. Among the next choices will be Speech Recognition.  Run through the setup, which is a combination of training you how to use it as well as your training the speech engine what you sound like.
Don’t expect magic at first since any speech engine handling whatever a user might say has to narrow down from an incredible amount of variables. It is by correcting mistakes using your voice that is learns. It takes effort.
If you are afraid of Win 8 and you have a copy of Win 7 the good news is it is the same engine. The downside is Windows 7 is considerably fatter (needs more resources) than Win 8. As of the time of this entry, Win 8 with one not too busy browser window open, WordPad and Speech running uses just under 1 GB of RAM. Win 8 can also be assisted by giving it access to a few GB from a USB memory stick using ReadyBoost.
Again, using it is not the same experience as Dragon Naturally Speaking. And it doesn’t need the considerably more horsepower and RAM. This is a serious consideration when you have to have some resources for running OSX, then VirturalBox, AND Windows 8 with Speech running.  Certainly if you are using a Mini Mac.
In closing, while this entry is barely a hole in the ice, it should be big enough for you to safely dive into alternate worlds. This way with some limitations, you can safely learn the advantages ‘the other guys’ have, regardless of which side you are on. An additional advantage is more protection from the bad guys however that is a story worthy of its own entry.