Virtualising Leopard

[bchappell]

I believe that Apple is relaxing the licensing on OS X to allow it to be run in VMs (as long as it's physically on an Apple box). Is VMWare planning to support OS X as a guest OS and is the a timeframe for this?

[admin]

Apple only changed the license of the Server edition. This is a cool opportunity, but VMware policy is to not comment on any unannounced products, features, timeframes, etc.

http://db.tidbits.com/article/9277

[Guddler]

Cool indeed.

Sadly, the wording is pretty restrictive:

>This License allows you to install and use one copy of the Mac OS X Server software (the "Mac OS X Server Software") on a single Apple-labeled computer. You may also install and use other copies of Mac OS X Server Software on the same Apple-labeled computer, provided that you acquire an individual and valid license from Apple for each of these other copies of Mac OS X Server Software.

Unfortunately, in my interpretation anyway, that reads:

Leopard Client Host -> Leopard Anything Guest = NO

Leopard Server Host -> Leopard Client Guest = NO

Leopard Server Host -> Leopard Server Guest = YES

So very useful for the companies out there but of limited use to more normal desktop users, long since touted as the target audience of Fusion.

Martin.

[admin]

I'm not a lawyer, but that's my interpretation as well. An optimistic reaction would be that Apple is cautiously allowing this, and wants to see how it goes.

[Guddler · Accepted solution]

Let's hope so - it was hard work maintaining a separate partition for all those Leopard developer seeds. It would have been nice to have been able to virtualise it instead. Of course the timing of all that was completely wrong since Fusion was in it's very early stages then too (not even out at all to start off with iirc) but next time round it would be nice

[bchappell]

The Leopard Seeds were a pain, I fortunately have a system that'll boot off an external USB drive so that made life a little easier but a collection of VMs compared to a few external HDDs would have been so much easier.

On Windows I maintain several VMs for seperate tasks, it means each instance is only loading what's absolutely necessary to keep them fast and more responsive... it'd be nice to be able to do the same on Mac OS X. I also don't understand the multiple license approach. On a piece of server hardware I can either run several copies of the OS or, if I'm forced to buy many copies to do so, I'll simply run all the services on one instance... be disappointed in the performance and then set up a multi-Linux system On a piece of desktop hardware, come on.... I can only actually 'use' one instance at a time now matter how many I have running. Apple, Microsoft, get a grip. Sell me a license to run the OS on a piece of hardware... as many instances as I want. It'll get more of your software out there!

Anyway... rant over... thanks for the responses all!

[rcardona2k]

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