That didn’t take long…
With the launch of VMware Fusion 2 Beta 2, the age of virtualization-enabled Mac software development has dawned.
Gus Mueller is an independent software developer over at Flying Meat software—developers of Acorn image editor, Voodoo Pad, FlySketch, and a whole passel of other titles.
Well, Gus has a great post up on his blog about how he’s already using VMware Fusion 2 Beta 2 to help him do Mac development better and faster now that he can run Mac OS X Server in a VM.
Virtualization for the Developers and Testers of the World
For those who don’t know, developers and testers like to be able to test their software on brand new, clean machines, to make sure that nothing they have on their machine is masking a problem that might show up on your or my machine.
Back before x86 virtualization, you do this by having a bunch of physical machines. But even then, rolling them back to a clean state can be a pain, even if you script it.
VMware Workstation has been solving this problem for Windows and Linux developers for nearly a decade now—letting developers and testers roll multiple physical machines into a single physical machine hosting virtual machines, and use “snapshots” to quickly roll back any changes to a virtual machine to a pristine base state.
Mac OS X and Virtualization At Last
Now, with VMware Fusion 2’s support of Mac OS X Server as a guest operating system, plus multiple snapshots, Mac OS X developers and testers can create a fresh install of Mac OS X Server, take a snapshot of it, and always have that ready to roll back to when they’re done—no multiple machines. No scripts. Just quick.
There’s already a handy document up on the VMware Fusion forums showing how to install Mac OS X Server virtual machines and tweak for performance optimization.
Some of these features are pointed out in one of the videos we made for the Beta 2 Launch on the “Tech Pro” features that are in VMware Fusion 2 Beta 2:
