Recently there has been a lot of buzz around virtualization of operating systems. In the past I have never really seen the point of virtualization for myself, but after listening to a few podcasts on the subject and reading quite a lot of information about it on the web, this technology is looking more useful all the time. It can be used for anything from running Windows apps in Linux, having a secure sand box operating system to test out new software, to trying out new operating systems before installing them.

So the first thing I wanted to do was download one of the popular virtualization packages and give it a spin. There appear to be two main products out there at the moment, VMWare and Parallels. VMWare is the grand-daddy of them all, and has been around forever, and Parallels is the relatively new kid on the block. Parallels has been getting a lot of press recently with it’s Mac line of products so I thought I would start with that and see how it performs in Linux.