Mac users are not limited to Boot Camp to run Windows on their Macs however, with applications such as VMware Fusion allowing the user to run Windows within OS X; as long as your Mac is powered by an Intel processor and has enough RAM to do so (4GB recommended, though less is possible), you can now seamlessly move between each OS’s flagship programs and enjoy the increase in productivity which this brings.

Read on to see how this process works…

Why Run Windows Within OS X?

There are various reasons you may wish to run a copy of Windows within your Mac – sometimes there’s that last piece of legacy software which you can’t let go of, a printer or other hardware peripheral not supported in OS X, or a job which requires you to run Windows software. Whatever the reason, we’ve got you covered, albeit with one caveat; though great strides have been made with running Windows-based games within a virtual environment, unless you have a powerhouse of a Mac, your machine may struggle with any but the more lightweight or previous generation Windows games.

Getting Started

There are a number of ways to go about running Windows within OS X but the leading three programs are:

• VMware Fusion
• Parallels
• Virtualbox

Each have their own strengths, weaknesses and method of use. My own experience with the trio on various platforms has led me to believe that Parallels is the strongest for gaming, Virtualbox is best for non-gaming use and is less intuitive to get running (though the fact it is free negates this point somewhat), while VMware Fusion is the finest all-rounder and easy to use too – so I shall be using VMware Fusion in this guide.

To get started, first head over to the VMware Fusion website and download a free 30-day trial, then go through the installation process and move on to the next step below.

Installing Windows

Launch VMware Fusion and, assuming you do not already have a BootCamp partition in place on your Mac (if you do, select it from the menu), choose the second option titled “Install Windows or another operating system in a new virtual machine“. Now either insert your Windows disc or navigate to the place on your hard drive where your pre-ripped disc image is located.

This done, be sure to select an “Easy Install” and then a decision must be made whether to create an installation which is “More Seamless” or “More Isolated”, depending on your needs and browsing habits. As you can see in the screenshot above, I chose the former, since I will keep a close eye on what my Windows install is doing and feel comfortable I can avoid any issues. If in doubt, choose “More Isolated”.

Further settings can be customised at will to suit your particular system. For instance, I upped Windows’ RAM allowance to 2GB since I have plenty to spare on my MacBook Pro, though the default preferences be safely left alone if you’re unsure which values to enter. Once this initial setting up of your virtual machine is done, press on the green play button to begin installing Windows, which will install as it normally would in a typical environment.

Note: Though I am using Windows 7 for this walkthrough, most iterations of Windows should work without issue within VMware Fusion

Running Windows Fullscreen

You may prefer to run Windows fullscreen, just as it would be if you were running a normal Windows computer, to do so is as simple as launching VMware and clicking on your virtual machine, then waiting while Windows ‘unfreezes’ – this is an important aspect of running Windows within a virtual machine to note: You need not shutdown and power off your virtual computer each time you access Windows, instead VMware will ‘suspend’ your Windows session in its current state and allow an ‘unfreezing’ of this later.

As shown in the screenshot above, Windows 7 runs perfectly well and Internet Explorer, Outlook and all the other Windows applications run as normal. Since I’m running OS X Lion and make use of the new Spaces layout, a four-finger swipe to the left is all that’s required to move me back into Lion’s environment. This is a handy method of using both operating systems at once, but if you only want one or two Windows applications running within OS X, it seems somewhat cumbersome, so read on to take a look at VMware Fusion’s Unity and Application Menu options.

Making sure you quit any applications you do not need running in OS X will help VMware Fusion run quicker

Unity View

VMware Fusion also has the ability to integrate Microsoft Windows software within Mac OS X in a more seamless manner, even placing applications into OS X’s dock and making those applications behave as one would expect a Mac OS X application to behave, responding to Option-click ‘Quit’ commands. Running Windows in this way is called Unity View – to begin using VMware Fusion in Unity Vew, simply navigate to the view menu located at the top of VMware Fusion’s window and select “Unity”.

As you can see in the screenshot above, I have Windows 7′s Start Menu visible alongside OS X Lion’s Dock and can switch between Mac and Windows software without any noticeable lag.

Application Menu

Another useful tool within WMware Fusion’s feature set is the Application Menu. Sitting in the Mac OS X Menu Bar, the Application Menu serves as a shortcut to Windows’ Start Menu and enables applications to be launched without needing to first manually boot into Windows. Though there is some lag when initially using the Applications Menu, once Windows is fully loaded, it works quickly and unobtrusively. Utilising the Application Menu in this way is my own favoured method of launching Windows applications within Mac OS X.

Conclusion

Hopefully the above walkthrough will show you how surprisingly easy it is to have the best of both worlds and boot into Mac OS X’s stable and virus-free platform, while enjoying the ubiquitous software which can be found on Microsoft’s own OS. Though this is by no means an exhaustive guide to running Windows in OS X, it should serve as inspiration for your own experiments and a launching-off point to begin. The great thing about running operating systems in a virtual machine method as employed by VMware Fusion is that it does not require potentially destructive partitioning of your hard drive, so long as you’re careful, it’s a very safe and easy way to run Windows on your Mac

For example: If you are using Windows xp, you can install popular virtualization software like Windows virtual PC, Vmware workstation to create a virtual machine within your current operating system. Now in that virtual machine, you can install any operating system e.g Windows xp, vista. You can run these operating systems in a new explorer window within Windows xp.

The problem with virtual machines is that you have to install an operating system from scratch. This includes loading the operating system from cd or dvd, installing all the drivers and system software etc. This can be very time consuming and is not a quick job.

How to Convert your Existing Operating System into a Virtual Machine

Microsoft has a free application named Disk2vhd, which can create a virtual machine of your existing operating system. The utility is a portable application and does not require any installation. You can run the virtual machine on any computer you want.

Following are the steps involved to create the virtual machine of your existing Windows operating system:

1. Download the Zip file (751 Kb) and extract it. After that, just run the Disktovhd. exe.

2. The application will show you the available drives in your computer.

3. Select the drive which you want to migrate as a virtual machine. In this case, i would want to create a virtual machine for my Vista installation, hence i have selected the D drive.

4. Specify the path where you want to save the virtual hard drive (vhd) file. The file would be of large size and almost equal to the size of the operating system drive.

5. Hit the Create button. It would take some time to create the vhd file (mine took 25 minutes).

The software will clone a virtual hard disk of the drive selected and save it in specified location. After the vhd file has been created, you can use any virtualization software to mount the virtual hard disk and run the operating system as a virtual machine.

For example: I mounted the virtual hard disk on Microsoft Virtual PC and ran Windows Vista as a virtual machine under Windows xp. The software can convert the chosen hard drive into a vhd file, even if it is under use.

How can the Virtual machine be useful

Using a virtual machine has many advantages, especially when you are tech savy. Consider you are working in Windows xp and need to test a small Windows application compatible with Windows vista only. In that case you have to boot your system and start Windows vista again. A virtual hard disk of vista will come in handy here as you can start testing the vista compatible application by starting a virtual machine in xp.

Another situation where virtual machine can be a real time saver is when you are using multiple computers. Suppose you want to work in your friends computer with all your installed software and applications. In that case, just create a virtual hard drive of your operating system and carry the vhd file in a usb stick. When you are using the friend’s computer, just mount the virtual hard disk and use all your installed software.

Disktovhd can be used to create virtual hard drives of Windows xp, Windows vista, Windows server 2003. If you are using Ubuntu, check out how to create an Ubuntu virtual machine.

1) Download VMware Server 2.0. You will have to register for a free account in order to download and get the license key. At the download page, select the tar image for Linux system. It is 539MB and will take about half an hour with a broadband connection

2) Using the Archive Manager, extract the tar file to your home folder. You should now see a vmware-server-distrib folder.

3) Before we start the installation, we need to install the necessary dependencies. In your terminal:

sudo apt-get install linux-headers-`uname -r` build-essential xinetd

Once that is done,

cd vmware-server-distrib
sudo ./vmware-install.pl

You will be prompted to answer some questions. Unless you know what you are doing, pressing ‘Enter’ to select the default answer is often the best bet.

During the installation, you will encounter this error message “Unable to make a vsock module that can be loaded in the running kernel…“.

There is some conflict with the new kernel and the vsock module which make it unable to compile. Luckily, this does not affect the operation of the VMware. You can safely ignore this and proceed with the installation. Just note that you won’t be able to access the Vsock module in the VMware server.

Next, it will arrive at this prompt:

The current administrative user for VMware Server is ”. Would you like to
specify a different administrator? [no]

If you select the default answer [no], you will have to log into your vmware console as root. That is not a big issue here, but if you want to log in as your own user ID (the ID you log into your Ubuntu machine), you have to type YES and press Enter. It will then ask you to type in your user ID.

Proceed on with the installation until the end.

4) Now, if you choose to log in as root, you need to set a password for root

sudo passwd root

Enter your password twice.

5) The keyboard configuration option for VMware is not turned on by default. Here is the trick to get it to configure your keyboard.

gedit ~/.vmware/config

Paste the following line to the text file.

xkeymap.nokeycodeMap = TRUE

Save and exit.

5) Open your Firefox browser (I have tried in Opera and it doesn’t work well), on the URL bar, type in http://localhost:8222

6) Log in with your username and password. If you have chosen the default option, the login name will be root and the password is the one that you have set previously.

That’s it. You can now create your own virtual machine.

1) File size

How long do you need to download a 20MB file with a broadband connection? A snap of finger! Yes, that is how small VirtualBox is: slighly over 20MB where you can download it in a snap. VMware server? About 102MB, well…not too long either, mayber after you have finished your tea session.

2) Installation

Ubuntu users can simply install VirtualBox from the repository. Simply open the Synaptic Package Manager, check the VirtualBox and click Apply to install. For other Linux disro, there is also debian and rpm package available for download. For VMware server, only if you like to compile and build the source code from command line.

3) Speed Boost

The real advantage of VirtualBox over VMware server lies in its performance. VirtualBox apparently runs faster than VMware server. A timed experiment of an installation of Windows XP as the guest OS took 20 mins in VirtualBox and 35 mins on VMware server. A similar test on the booting time of the guest OS also shows favor to VirtualBox with a timing of 45secs compared to 1min 39 secs on VMware server.

4) Remote File Sharing

When I was using VMware server, I have to install and configure Samba on my Ubuntu host so as to access the files in my guest OS. In VirtualBox, the remote file sharing feature is built right in the package. Setting up remote file sharing is easy and you only need to do it once: point the file path to the directory that you want to share.

5) Integration with Host OS

In VirtualBox, there is this mode call ‘seamless mode‘ where you can integrate the guest OS with the host OS. With this mode on, you can access the applications from the guest OS right from the host’s desktop. There is no need for you to traverse between the guest and the host. VMware server does not have this feature, although you can find the ‘unity‘ mode that does the same thing in VMware Workstation.

My Feel…

I have not tested VirtualBox on a server setting, thus I can’t comment on its performance for corporate use. However, for personal use, I would strongly recommend VirtualBox over VMware server because of its faster speed and user-friendliness.

Luckily, there are several solutions to this.

1) Transfer files using a USB drive.

Open up your VMware Server Console. Make sure that your VM is powered off (not in suspend mode). Click “Edit Virtual Machine Setting”. Under the Hardware tab, click Add -> USB Controller. This will install the USB driver and allow you to connect up to two USB devices to your VM.

Insert in your USB disk and power on your VM. Once the VM has finished loading. On the menu bar, Click VM -> Removable device -> USB Device -> your USB drive name.

Done. You have now access to your USB disk from your VM. A point to note is that you can’t access your USB disk from the host desktop and the VM at the same time. If you are adding USB disk in your VM, the host will automatically dismount your USB disk. Thus, if you want to transfer files between host and VM, you will need to transfer files from host to USB disk, then dismount USB disk from host and add removable device in VM.

2) Setting up networking via Samba

All virtual machines use shared networking to gain network access from the host. Thus, if configured properly, you can create a shared network to share files between the host and the VM. Here is a detailed instruction to configure file sharing via samba.

3) Buying license software
If you rely heavily on your VM for work, then you want want to consider buying a licensed VMware. This paid software enables you to access your virtual machine from the host desktop and you can even drag and drop your files from your VM to anywhere in the host without any further configuration. Parallels (another paid VM solution) also offers this service.

Vmware Server is a free to download virtual machine tool that allows you to install the various type of operating systems under a virtual environment.

Before you attempt to install Windows Vista, please make sure that your computer has at least 1GB of RAM (preferably 2GB), 16GB of hard disk space and a genuine Vista CD.

Here are the steps to install Windows Vista in Ubuntu using Vmware Server.

Download the VMware Server software from VMware download site. Remember to register to get your license key. You will need it for installation.

Launch Archive Manager and extract the downloaded file to /tmp directory

Next, we need to prepare our system for VMware installation.

In your terminal,

sudo apt-get install linux-headers-`uname -r` build-essential
sudo apt-get install xinetd

Now the installation,

cd /tmp/vmware-server-distrib (or whatever directory you have extracted to)
sudo ./vmware-install.pl

The installer will then guide you through the installation. Press “Enter” for all the questions. The last step require you to enter the license key.

Once installed, launch the VMware from Application -> System Tools -> Vmware Server Console

Click “Create a new virtual machines”

Choose “Typical” in the Virtual Machine Configuration

Under the Guest Operating system, choose “Microsoft Windows”. At below, scroll down to “Windows Vista (experiemental)”

Enter the name of your virtual machine and choose the location where you want to save it.

Under Network Condition, choose use “Network Address Translation (NAT)”.

Under the Disk Size, allocate 16GB to the disk size and make sure the split disk into 2GB files is checked. If you just want to try out Vista, uncheck the allocate disk space now.

Ok. Now insert in your Vista installer CD.

On the VMware console, click “Power on this virtual machine”.

The virtual machine will now boot up with your installer CD and guide you through the Vista installation process.

Once the installation of Vista is completed, press “Ctrl + Alt” to get out of the VMware console.

On the VM menu, select “Install Vmware tool”. Now you’ve got enhanced graphics and mouse cursor that can move in and out of the virtual machine.

That’s it. Done!