Type 2 hypervisors are cool.
If you’re looking at the ones from VMware (Workstation, Player Pro, Fusion Pro & Fusion) then you should know that the core technology in those is not only the same, but it’s the same as in vSphere – the solution that powers many of the world’s most in-demand and high performance data centers.
Why should you care about that? Because it means that the care and attention to detail that drives billions of seamless internet transactions every day is available to work for you should you need to run Linux on your Windows, Windows on your Windows, or just about anything else you can think of.
In this demo I thought I’d be crazy and see how far I could push them. While it certainly wasn’t without its scary moments, I hit no walls, encountered no unrecoverable errors, and barely even caused the iMac’s fan to spin. I’m using a combination of Fusion Pro and Player Pro.
The only reason I stopped at 25 was that it was taking too much time to build all those operating systems – I have a day job according to my boss.
Here’s the 25 nested OS’s you can see in the video running ALL AT THE SAME TIME on a late-2014 27” iMac with 32Gb RAM, 4GHz Intel i7.
- Windows 10 Pro Technical Preview
- Windows 8.1 Enterprise N
- Windows 7 Enterprise N
- Windows Vista Business
- Windows XP SP2
- Windows 2000 SP2
- Windows 98
- Windows 95
- Windows NT 4 SP6
- Windows 3.1
- OS/X 10.11 El Capitan
- OS/X 10.10 Yosemite
- OS/X 10.9 Mavericks
- OS/X 10.8 Mountain Lion
- OS/X 10.7 Lion
- OS/X 10.6 Snow Leopard Server
- OS/X 10.5 Leopard Server
- Ubuntu 14.04 LTS
- Debian 8.1 (Jessie)
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation 7.1 (maipo)
- openSUSE 13.2 (harlequin)
- Fedora 22
- Zorin OS 9 (trusty)
- OS/2 Warp v4
- Android 4.4.2 (kitkat)
Clearly, if you try this yourself don’t phone support. They’ll be impressed but I doubt they help you. This was fun. I wonder what I can do next?
Thanks for watching.