
You can run Windows 8 and XP side-by-side or a Linux install on top of Windows and so on. VMware Workstation is one of the best virtual managers and will enable you to install and user more than one operating system. There’s no reason why you couldn’t run and test Windows 8 on your XP machine or vice-versa, using an old copy of Windows XP on your Windows 8 machine, to test software before you install on your primary operating system. These days running a virtual version an operating system is practical. Using Windows on a PowerPC Mac was just not feasible apart from testing software. On a single-core machine, this resulted in severe slow-down. It also integrates with Exposé, the dock, and Boot Camp without any problems.A few years ago running virtualisation tools was a bit of a disaster, particularly when the virtual operating system had to emulate the CPU, graphics card and shared memory with your system.

VMware Fusion is compatible with the latest Mac systems, with multicore processors and 64-bit support. Furthermore, VMware Fusion can be totally transparent to the user, launching just about any Windows application on a Mac as if it were a native application. The virtualization performed by VMware Fusion is so refined that it even allows us to emulate DirectX 9 with its advanced 3D possibilities. The task of virtualizing basically consists of emulating a computer inside another one, with its own operating system installed. This means we can have any OS ready to go without even rebooting our computer.

Windows, Linux Novell or Solaris can be virtualized easily, as VMware Fusion is compatible with more than 140 operating systems.

Now, VMware Fusion allows us to virtualize any operating system inside Mac OS X.

Run Windows on your Macīefore, to be able to have several operating systems at our disposal, it was necessary to partition our hard drive (a relatively dangerous task) and quarrel with configurations. Having said this, Linux is also a perfect candidate in many other aspects, so if we would rather make the most of each system according to its possibilities, VMware Fusion is a solution that will keep the integrity of our hard drive. Mac OS X is probably the most advanced and usable operating system that currently exists, but Windows is still the one that monopolizes the market and therefore the one that offers the grand majority of applications.
