VMWare Fusion and Parallels Desktop 4.0 are the two major players in the virtualization of Windows on the Mac. Virtualization in this context means running an operating system on top of another operating system. In this case it’s for the purpose of running Windows on a Mac without having to leave the Mac operating system.

To be fair, this wasn’t much of a competition. For me this was a hands-down win for VMWare Fusion. The main reason being that Parallels let me down early on in the process.

I have had a PowerMac G5 for a number of years now, so I haven’t been able to do VMWare or Parallels. Both require Intel Macs. So now that I have a Mac Pro, I finally get a chance to put my PC in the closet and virtualize it on my Mac.

The great thing I found is that both VMWare Fusion and Parallels Desktop give you tools to migrate your physical PC to this virtual world. This saves large amounts of time because you don’t have to install the operating system and then all the programs all over again. Also your settings and everything are right there.

Because I remembered the Parallels name first (it’s definitely catchier) I downloaded it at once. I found that I also had to install a Windows version on the PC. It boasted that it was going to be able to migrate my PC right across the network to its new virtual home on my Mac Pro.

Well, to get straight to the heart of the matter, it didn’t work. After Installing the latest version on both, when I went to get the PC information, I was met with an error message that said the versions of the Parallels software on my Mac and the Parallels software on my PC were not the same and I would have to make sure I had the same versions on each. I went back and rechecked, downloaded them again and found the same message. When I looked on the Parallels site, I saw that the PC version (which was very difficult to find) was very new. Perhaps no one bothered to test the migration? I don’t know. It seems like it would be very important. After messing around with this for hours, I finally gave up and decided to search for the other one.

I looked around and found VMWare Fusion. Their website looks much more corporate, and I think probably the Mac Version is something they added after doing a lot of Windows Virtualization. By the way, it is very useful these days to virtualize servers on top of other servers for various reasons. One reason is that you can run two or more servers using one physical server. It’s pretty incredible when you get into it. But this is a topic for another article.

So I installed VMWare Fusion. I had to use a hard drive and install VMWare on my PC and have the VMWare make a virtual machine on the hard drive first. This is just a folder with files in it. You can see all the details of what I did by looking at this video I found about how to do it Migrate Your Windows PC to your Mac with VMware  Fusion. Incidentally, I had a little trouble with the part where he has you open the package contents of the virtual machine and put the source files in the package. I prefer to leave them in their original folder once I create the machine. This is because when I add another virtual drive or change the configuration it seems to look for this old folder. I suppose a tour through the manual would help. For now I keep it simple.

I liked this VMWare so much I decided to download the Windows 7 Beta and test it out . It seems to work great. Right now, as I type this I’m using a Windows 7 with Windows Live Writer. I intend to use this as a machine where I test out living in the cloud exclusively. More to come on that topic.