Parallels Server Runs Virtualized Mac OS X

[MacRumors]

Parallels announced a beta of their new Server application which is the first virtualization solution to run multiple copies of Mac OS X Server v10.5 Leopard on a single Apple computer.

Parallels Server can be installed using the Parallels lightweight hypervisor, in which virtual machines run in tandem with a primary operating system, or "bare metal’, in which virtual machines run independently and are not dependent on a host operating system to function properly.

The advantages to administrators is the ability to run a combination of different "guest" operating systems in various virtual machines. These "sandboxed" virtual machines can be used to easily test software and configurations, without affecting a full production server.

We've previously explored this topic, realizing that the ability to run virtualized Mac OS X would make it very easy to run Mac OS X on non-Apple hardware.

When questioned about the possibility of using Parallels Server to run Mac OS X Server on a PC, Parallels' Director of Corporate Communications told us that that they have not enabled this functionality in the Windows and Linux versions of their product. The reason behind this limitation is that such behavior would violate Apple's end user license agreement (EULA) for Mac OS X, and Parallels wished to continue their good relationship with Apple.

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[product26]

this would be great if it will run tiger....

a little backwards compatibility without a second partition...

[Novaoblivion]

Interesting I was wonder when something like this would come out.

[product26]

i saw this one coming.


if they can virtualize windows... whats stopping them?

[himansk]

I guess if they have the code of running osx in the windows or linux versions and simply keep it disabled, some hacker will find a way to break it and we will see many PCs running virtualized osx...

[Big-TDI-Guy]

Parallels can maintain their good relationship with Apple.

Just as long as somebody who does NOT work for SWSoft "finds" the code to enable this feature.

Edit: For the record - I'd be all over that like Dr. Venture on amphetamines if I could run Tiger on my Dell Craptop.

[neoserver]

I suspect that they're probably smarter then that and have not compiled in the support for it in the Windows/linux editions.

[indiekiduk]

wonder how you switch between the visor and bare metal OSs.

[twoodcc]

this sounds very interesting to me. i like the idea though. probably not long until they get this working on non-apple hardware though

[ehurtley]

One other nice thing to note is that this supports Intel's 'VT-d' technology, which allows specific bits of hardware to be designated to specific virtual machines, and those virtual machines get full access. So this means you could run Windows in a virtual machine, and it would have full access to a second video card, or second NIC.

That's right, alteredego, this is what you were IMing me about earlier today.

It specifically mentions VT-d in the linked press release.

indiekiduk: There are two ways of running this. One is 'conventionally', where you run the software inside a 'host' OS, and all of your virtual machines run as 'guest' OSes. The second manner is called "bare metal", where there is what I will term a 'picokernel' hypervisor that virtualizes multiple machines before any OS loads, and each virtual machine thinks it is the sole OS. (I don't know what the official term for this is, so I picked 'picokernel', because it sounds appropriate.)

[agensop]

What they said: When questioned about the possibility of using Parallels Server to run Mac OS X Server on a PC, Parallels' Director of Corporate Communications told us that that they have not enabled this functionality in the Windows and Linux versions of their product. The reason behind this limitation is that such behavior would violate Apple's end user license agreement (EULA) for Mac OS X, and Parallels wished to continue their good relationship with Apple.

What they meant: When we bought the Director of Corporate communications alcohol hoping to get them him drunk enough to reveal how the hell we can run os x on our dell boxes he quickly quipped back: What the hell are you talking about??, and have jobs walk into our office with his lawyers, cut our balls off and them feed them too us? No way am i that drunk or we that STUPID.

[vertgo]

Originally Posted by ehurtley

One other nice thing to note is that this supports Intel's 'VT-d' technology, which allows specific bits of hardware to be designated to specific virtual machines, and those virtual machines get full access. So this means you could run Windows in a virtual machine, and it would have full access to a second video card, or second NIC.

That's right, alteredego, this is what you were IMing me about earlier today.

It specifically mentions VT-d in the linked press release.

Wow eHurtley (this is me, altered ego),
actually I was specifically wondering if the new mac pros have the capability of doing the VT-d. Ask and you shall receive. But i guess if parallels (who has previously mentioned that they have been working on vt-d support), says they are coming out with vt-d support a day after hardware has come out, then I would guess as well that the chipset on the new mac pros is indeed support it.

Sweetness.

This has been my dream, having a machine that has 8 cores, can run both mac and windows at the same time, and have either operating system access the hardware directly, resulting in the virtual OS running as fast (minus negligible overhead) even in 3D heavy work.

Imagine a machine that has 2 video cards, 4 monitors, and 8 cores. If you need, you can do all 4 screens controlled by leopard, or two by leopard, two by windows, NATIVELY, and 4 cores for each one, at the same time.

Now imagine when ZFS support is complete (a look at the developer page shows they are working on boot support for it), so that you can keep slapping more drives into a pool, and each drive makes the transfer rate faster and increasing data stability.

So you throw 4 disks into a mac pro, watch as it has super fast
disk i/o with great redundancy, time machine working with ZFS's constant time snapshotting, windows running virtualized, but with direct i/o so that your peripherals that don't have mac drivers can still be controlled by windows, and of course, Leopard. If windows screws up, you go back using the snapshot that's on leopards partition, and the virtual machine is back up and running.

You can test for multiple platforms, edit HD video in real time, the perfect workstation for anyone who does everything from software development to video editing.

As you can tell, I am really excited.

[kaisdaddy]

...before someone else figures out how to do this. In particular, someone who doesn't care about their relationship to Apple.

More likely than not, it will be somebody who lives in a jurisdiction that doesn't care about prosecuting folks who play fast and loose with copyright law and EULA's.

Once it's out in the wild, Apple will have a huge incentive to sell their OS to folks wanting to use their own hardware. Whether or not they will depends on how stubborn certain people who have say-so over this type of thing are.

[ReanimationLP]

Originally Posted by Big-TDI-Guy

Parallels can maintain their good relationship with Apple.

Just as long as somebody who does NOT work for SWSoft "finds" the code to enable this feature.

Edit: For the record - I'd be all over that like Dr. Venture on amphetamines if I could run Tiger on my Dell Craptop.

Err, you already can. Its called OSX86.

This has been done for 2 years. Now its gotten to the point to where if you have a Core micro architecture system, your Hackintosh can use the native OSX non-hacked kernel and the normal updates.

[award]

Parallels is definitely not the first virtualization solution to run Mac OS X.
The first one was KVM with several patches provided ca. 2 weeks ago on this page:

http://alex.csgraf.de/self/?qemu/

[Fast Shadow]

Fusion on my Mac has sworn me off other hardware brands forever. Being able to run a virtualized OSX would be huge. Curious to see if/how VMWare will respond to Parallels Server. Hopefully I'll be approved for the Parallels beta.

[iMikeT]

I'm glad that these guys respect Apple's EULA.

[janstett]

Originally Posted by MacRumors

When questioned about the possibility of using Parallels Server to run Mac OS X Server on a PC, Parallels' Director of Corporate Communications told us that that they have not enabled this functionality in the Windows and Linux versions of their product. The reason behind this limitation is that such behavior would violate Apple's end user license agreement (EULA) for Mac OS X, and Parallels wished to continue their good relationship with Apple.

Technology gets held back because of legalese.

I understand Parallels being a good partner, but I hate finding out something that CAN be done that would be quite cool ISN'T. Grrrrrr....

[jhande]

Yah, that's really great and all, but this is Parallels. How about throwing a little SmartSelect in there as well on the server side. And enable it by default.

Given Parallels past history of creating default mash-ups (or mix-ins, if you prefer) which then have to be manually untangled, pardon me for not being all that excited.

I think I'll save my applause for something more bomb-proof, say VMWare.

I bought Parallels Desktop, but that one 'feature', and the subsequent clean-up work involved, really killed any chance of me buying anything from them in the future.

[Merkuryy]

Originally Posted by kaisdaddy

Once it's out in the wild, Apple will have a huge incentive to sell their OS to folks wanting to use their own hardware. Whether or not they will depends on how stubborn certain people who have say-so over this type of thing are.

That's true! with the success of Linux , i think there is time to have personal HD+ personal OS. May be not now, but it's the future. Apple must have solutions to deal with this, to hold the legacy of Mac OS isn't a good way for future project

[Fukui]

hmmmm, where is vmware........

[ajbrehm]

Originally Posted by kaisdaddy

.
More likely than not, it will be somebody who lives in a jurisdiction that doesn't care about prosecuting folks who play fast and loose with copyright law and EULA's.

I understand that in Europe a EULA is in itself a violation of copyright law. For example, when you buy an item that contains copyrighted information you are bound by copyright law, but you are NOT bound by some weird agreement that the vendor includes and claims you "agreed" to by opening the package. Claiming that the consumer agreed to a contract he hadn't seen at time of purchase and never signed or agreed to is in itself not legal.

I do not know why in the US companies can apparently force a contract on people without their consent, but in Europe they cannot.

I never care about EULAs, I only care about the law. The law doesn't allow me to distribute copies of copyrighted material without a licence to do. If the EULA gives me more rights than that, I will agree with it. If the EULA gives me less rights than those I have by law, why would I agree with it? I already have the product and am bound by the law. And whether I found the package on the street or bought it in a shop, my ownership is legal.

I find it strange that American law enforcement doesn't care about prosecuting companies who play fast and loose with copyright law by forcing contracts on people that a) their customers didn't see or sign before they got the product and b) take away from rights that customers have according to copyright law.

[jellomizer]

Originally Posted by kaisdaddy

...before someone else figures out how to do this. In particular, someone who doesn't care about their relationship to Apple.

More likely than not, it will be somebody who lives in a jurisdiction that doesn't care about prosecuting folks who play fast and loose with copyright law and EULA's.

Once it's out in the wild, Apple will have a huge incentive to sell their OS to folks wanting to use their own hardware. Whether or not they will depends on how stubborn certain people who have say-so over this type of thing are.

I think in this case for an other company to do so. Would be bad for them. Companies large enough to get away with it and not be intimated by Apple are also partners with Apple on some level and doesn't want to get on their bad side (Microsoft, Adobee, etc...), they tend to think like Apple does in terms of protecting their code and assuring it is ran the way they want it. So they are not going to violate Apple rights in fear of be hypocritical and perhaps open the door for others as well.

Smaller Companies even if they don't mind loosing apple as a customer/partner or ever getting them as such. Are smaller then Apple and can be bullied by Apple to stop support, just making life difficult for the company.

The Open Source Community hasn't done to much work in the terms of virtualization there are some that work with some success in general but there is a lack of control to get people to make windows drivers, OS X drivers for the Virtual Machine, because there is no glory in making windows drivers for and Open Source project and could be some licensing issue too. Also VM Coding isn't really so much fun it is about translating calls or passing them through. It takes a skilled programmer with a good knowledge of hardware to write the code (hard to find) and the fact it isn't really much fun makes it even harder to find for Open Source. Commercial Development makes it possible because it may not be fun but it will pay the bills and them sum.

[AppleMojo]

Originally Posted by twoodcc

this sounds very interesting to me. i like the idea though. probably not long until they get this working on non-apple hardware though

I would have to imagine that Apple has provided Parallels with the incentive and methods to prevent virtualization of OSX on non-Apple hardware just the same as OSX.

Although I could be wrong, and when it's released check /windows/system32/parallels.ini for "enable.osx.virtualize = off"

;-)

[AppleMojo]

Originally Posted by Merkuryy

That's true! with the success of Linux , i think there is time to have personal HD+ personal OS. May be not now, but it's the future. Apple must have solutions to deal with this, to hold the legacy of Mac OS isn't a good way for future project

Most people seem to lose focus on the fact that Apple is not an OS company. OSX is just the platform which runs on Apple hardware.

At $129.00 a copy every 18 months, Apple isn't getting rich. Apple's revenue stream is high end consumer devices & hardware which run with beautiful interfaces.

OSX is by far superior in every way, but keep in mind this is primarily due to the quality of hardware controlled by Apple. Imagine every Joe Kwan importing cheap hardware into America (I'm American, so I am globally self-centered) expecting OSX to support it.

Besides, the same argument can be used for the iPhone and iPod. You are not ever going to see Apple release a copy of the iPod's interface for use on 3rd party hardware.