Parallels released this past week a virtualization product supporting OS X called Parallels Workstation. I’ve been playing with it and wouldn’t you know it, it works. I was able to install without too much trouble Windows 2000. Since it’s using the virtualization options of the Intel Core Duo CPU the client OS runs at pretty much full speed. As a disclaimer, I haven’t put the thing through any serious benchmarking, but it’s clear that this is virtualization and not emulation going on here. The only thing that doesn’t currently work is audio or a convenient way to exchange files with the host OS.

I still think WINE is the ideal, but this is a product I’ll probably end up getting (it’s only $40) so I can easily have multiple virtual machines available (Win2k, CentOS, Fedora Core, etc.) without the hassle of rebooting.

Of course, for fun, I tried to install the hacked version of the OS X install DVD (the one that supports BIOS) and it started booting but crashed quite quickly. That’s O.K. since it isn’t a supported client OS. It would have been neat to have OS X running in OS X. Could I install Parallels inside the Parallels client? It would be like the Russian nesting dolls but geeker.

Here’s a screenshot for those doubters. ;-)