OS X Server as a Guest

[admin]

For those of you not at Macworld, we're showing off an unmodified OS X Server as a guest.

http://blogs.vmware.com/vmtn/2008/01/virtual-leopa-1.html

http://digg.com/apple/Mac_OS_X_Leopard_Server_in_a_Virtual_Machine_Screenshots

[MKleinpaste]

Licensing has nothing to do with it. If that's VMWare's "official response", it's just an excuse.

Neither parallels nor VMWare are the EULA police. That's like saying the car manufacturer is responsible for some idiot doing a hit & run. Or Microsoft is responsible for every ping flood because you can add a switch that pings indefinately at the command line. It just won't float. Having the ability to run the OS X client doesn't violate the EULA either. Only the action of doing so violates it.

[MicahBaker]

Agreed. Since VMWare already demonstrated an unmodified OS X 10.5 Server running in Fusion I know they could integrate that into Vi3 but they are choosing not to. The EULA is very straightforward and only requires the end user to comply, not the virtualization manufacturer. Otherwise, why isn't Apple suing VMWare for "allowing" hacked OS X copies to be installed on their virtualization software?

[r-f]

Speculation: Apple probably allows Leopard Server to run as a guest under any OS because VMware ESX and competitors don't run on a traditional OS -- instead, VMWare runs on the "bare metal" with some code loosely related to the Linux kernel.

My reading of the OS X EULA matches Bob Zimmerman's, btw.

[korpy]

Hi,

>Neither parallels nor VMWare are the EULA police.

Agreed, unfortunately they put time, money and effort into prohibiting people running mac os x client as a guest. This ends up in people trying to get around this, with the risk of people hacking either fusion or os x. If some bad guys made copies of either one available, success is guaranteed, and not for vmware or apple...

just my 2c

regards -frank-

[DiamondBill]

The Parallels Server for Mac runs on Mac OSX Server and allows you to virtualize Mac OSX Server, just like Fusion 2 Beta 2. However it has been out since mid-June.

A salesperson at Parallels just told me that they have a bare-metal version in beta right now! Hello VMware! Get ESX to support a virtual Mac hardware profile and be done with it. Replace the virtual machine's BIOS with PCI so we can install OSX Server on our official Apple hardware like the EULA says we can.

The licensing thing doesn't hold water. Microsoft has had a restriction that software cannot be moved from physical machine to physical machine more often than every 90 days. Apparently I was violating the license every time VMotion moved my VM from one physical machine to another, though. Since the software always remained on the same VM, they were never the wiser. I never knew this was a violation until Microsoft recently lifted that restriction. My point is that VMware was enabling me to violate my Microsoft EULA for years now and never had a problem with it; why would they be so concerned about policing the Apple EULA?