Install Windows 7 on a Mac

Raise your hand if you remember when a Mac was a Mac and a Windows machine was a Windows machine, and never the twain shall meet. I sure do.

Our own Christina Warren has written an exhaustive set of instructions for installing Windows 7 on a Mac over at our sister site, Download Squad. Windows 7 is in beta, so don't try and use it for any mission-critical tasks. Meant to be an incremental update to Vista (Snow Vista?), the current iteration of Windows 7 includes changes like a redesigned taskbar, enhanced touch performance and improvements when run atop multi-core processors.

While Intel Macs can run Windows 7 via Boot Camp, Christina points out that virtualization is probably the best bet for most users. She described how to set up an installation with VMWare Fusion 2.0, Parallels 4.0 and VirtualBox 2.1.2 (and the VMware team has posted a guide of their own for Win7 on Fusion).

If you're a Mac user who keeps Windows around for compatibility testing or that one proprietary Windows app you can't do without, and you're just itching to try Windows 7, this is the tutorial for you. If you're wondering what the fuss is about over on the Microsoft side, Engadget's deep dive on Windows 7 is a good place to start.

Parallels Desktop 4 updated

Popular virtualization software Parallels has been updated to build 3810. The software offers many upgrades and fixes, including Windows DirectX 9.0 with Shaders Model 2 support, as well as "experimental" support for Snow Leopard and Windows 7 beta.

The "experimental" caution, as you might surmise, means not all features will work. For example, in Snow Leopard, there is no USB support, and Parallels notes there is no shared networking support.

Parallels has been running a competitive race against VMware Fusion as each software solution tries to out-feature and outperform the other.

The Parallels update can be downloaded at this link, or you can select "check for updates" from the Parallels application help menu.

A complete list of the enhancements in this build can be found here. Some users are reporting faster performance and some improvements with use of peripherals.

Parallels Server for Mac available now

In October, when Apple introduced a change in policy allowing Leopard Server to run in a virtual environment on Apple hardware, Mac IT geeks everywhere looked forward to the day that they could run Windows Server, Linux and OS X Server all off their pretty Xserves. That day is today, because Parallels Server for Mac is now out of beta!

According to Parallels, this is the "...first server virtualization software to run on Intel-based Xserves...and to power VMs running on the Mac OS X platform." Similar the the Parallels Desktop product, Parallels Server lets you run virtual instances of different operating systems on top of OS X Leopard Server, including Leopard Server. The next beta of VMWare's Fusion, which like Parallels Desktop is a consumer product, will support Leopard virtualization as well, but Parallels Server is a little different and aimed at a different market.

The difference is that the hypervisor used in Parallels Server is hardware optimized and takes advantage of Intel's VT-x acceleration (which new XServe and Mac Pros have) to provide a more robust experience with better allocation of resources and memory. This makes the experience much more akin to running a completely separate machine, as opposed to running one OS on top of another.

Yesterday, we reported on Media Temple's new (xv) project, which is the first official service that will be run on Xserves running Parallels Server for Mac. The (xv) will be running multiple VMs of Leopard Server, but Parallels Server can also support Linux (Debian, SUSE, Red Hat and Ubuntu), Windows (Server 2008, Vista, XP and Server 2003 and Windows 2000) and FreeBSD 6 and 7 as guest OSes. So if you run your website off of CentOS (which is based off of Red Hat Enterprise) but your company network runs off of Leopard Server, you can do both off of one Xserve.

Make no mistake, this is an enterprise product, and as such, it is pricey. Parallels Server for Mac is $1248.75 for the software and one-year of support and maintenance and that's before you add in the cost of any software licenses you might need, but that's still a lot less expensive than another Xserve.

For enterprise users who are interested in virtualization, definitely check out the free trial.

VirtualBox [ MacOS ]

Running other operating systems on a Mac is nothing new, and with the advent of Intel-based Macs we've seen a flood of virtual machine software: Parallels Desktop for Mac, VMWare Fusion, and Codeweavers CrossOver Mac. These products enable you to run Mac OS X and another operating system simultaneously.

For many of my consulting clients who are switching from PCs and who already have a licensed copy of Microsoft Windows, I've been using Sun's Open Source xVM VirtualBox product. Why? xVM VirtualBox works very well and it's free.

If you're new to virtual machines and want to know how to do this, follow along as I set up a Windows Vista virtual machine on an "old" 2GHz Intel Core Duo 20" iMac.

This post is continued after the break.

To begin setting up a virtual machine on your Mac, you need to download xVM VirtualBox. Head over to virtualbox.org, read all about this Open Source project, and then download your copy of xVM VirtualBox for Mac OS X from the download page (see below):

Once you've downloaded the app, install it on your Mac, then get ready to build your virtual machine. Launch VirtualBox (see below), then click the New button in the upper left portion of the application window to launch the New Virtual Machine Wizard.

Click Next, and then give your Virtual Machine a name (below). For obvious reasons, I'm calling mine "Vista." Select the OS Type from the pull-down -- you have a choice of 34 operating systems you can create virtual machines for, including such favorites as DOS, OS/2 Warp, Netware, and Sun's own Open Solaris. Click Next again.

As you can see below, now you need to select how much of your precious RAM you want to give up for the virtual machine. Most modern OS's run better with more RAM, so I'm going to give Vista a full 1 GB to play with. Once you have set the slider to your RAM amount or typed in the amount of RAM in MB, click Next.

It's time to select a hard disk image to be used as the virtual machine boot disk. If you're creating a new virtual machine from scratch like I am, just click the New button. Poof! A new wizard appears:

This is the Create New Virtual Disk wizard. Click Next.

Like many of the other virtual machine tools for Mac OS X, VirtualBox can build either dynamically expanding images that grow along with your virtual machine, or static images that keep their original size. Here I'm going to choose to have a dynamically expanding image. Clicking Next, I'm asked for the name and initial size of the disk image.

I keep the name Vista for my image name, and I'm selecting a 20 GB initial image size. I've also chosen to store this on my 1 TB external hard disk. After validating my settings, I click the Finish button to create the virtual disk image.

Now I'm back to the Create New Virtual Machine wizard with my new virtual disk image selected. Once again, I need to validate my settings, and then I click Finish to start loading my new virtual machine.

As you can see in the screenshot above, the virtual machine is powered off and the CD/DVD-ROM drive is disabled. I'll pop into the settings on my virtual machine and change the initial boot order to CD/DVD-ROM (so it loads Vista from the installation DVD), then Hard Disk. I'll also mount my Mac's SuperDrive so the virtual machine becomes aware of it. With that done, it's time to power up the virtual machine the first time. To do this, I click the Start button.

Whooops! One more screen to look at (see screenshot above). VirtualBox wants me to know that I'm going to be giving over control of my Mac keyboard to the virtual machine while it's running, and that I'll have to press the left Command key to get control back. I acknowledge this message, and then Vista begins to load.

It actually shows me a boring black screen initially, but then a configuration screen appears. I select the language, time and currency formats, and keyboard or input method, and then click the Next button. When the next screen appears, I click the Install Now button.

As you can see in the screenshot above, you must have a properly licensed version of most operating systems in order to install them. Here, Vista is asking me for the 25-character Product Key that will activate the OS. I type it in, then click the Next button.

I accept the license terms for Vista, then click Next. I am asked if I want to do an upgrade or custom install of Vista -- if it's a new install, I can only do a custom install. Once I've selected custom, I need to select my virtual drive image as the target for the installation (as seen below), and then click Next.

The installation is on its way! The SuperDrive starts spinning like a madman at this point, and the Vista installer (below) shows that progress is being made.

After a while (I think it took about 30 minutes in my case), the installation is complete and you just need to create a user name, enter a password, and then choose a desktop background and computer name:

Vista then asks you to set up security tools, and you can then set your time zone and the current time. A click or two later you're using Vista in a new virtual machine.

Vista does a quick check to see what kind of performance your computer has so it can determine what sorts of goodies to deliver for you. On my first boot, I noticed that I had no sound and no network connection with my virtual machine, so I shut it down, went into the setting for the virtual machine, enabled sound, and changed the network adapter to an Intel model so it would work with Vista. On the second boot, I had sound, a network connection, and I was able to then download my browser of choice (Firefox 3.0.1) and set the home page to a good starting point (see below).

Windows Vista found a few new drivers for me to install, some of which were recommended by the xVM VirtualBox team. All in all, the setup and operation of xVM is as easy and fast as either Parallels Workstation or VMWare Fusion, both of which I've used extensively. In terms of performance, I did not run any benchmarks but it seems slightly faster than a Vista virtual machine running in VMWare Fusion 1.1.2.

While vMX VirtualBox may not have all of the special features that you see in Parallels or VMWare Fusion (i.e., the ability to use Boot Camp partitions, Unity or Coherence modes, etc...), it has several great features -- it's free, it's stable, and it has a small footprint. How small? The application is only 55.6 MB in size, compared to 132.1 MB for VMWare Fusion and 77.9 MB for the Parallels Desktop folder (the actual Parallels application is only 24.1 MB, making it the tiniest footprint of them all).

I'm sure that our readers have plenty of opinions about which virtual machine environment is the best, so be sure to leave a comment and let the battles begin!