Review by J. mcnalley

I’m not yet a VMWare power user, but I’ve managed to get plenty of value out of my copy.

VMWare has been great for running virtual Linux servers on my MacBook Pro. There are prebuilt virtual appliances for every flavor and version of Linux. If you want something custom, it is extremely easy to build your own Linux VM from scratch. Once the image is up and running, you can ssh from your favorite Mac terminal into the virtualized linux box and get to work. Alternately, you can use the VMWare console to directly interact with your linux box.

I didn’t expect to need to run Windows XP in vmware, but doing so has been surprisingly useful. I’ve spent the last few days consolidating small external drives onto a larger drive. Along the way, I found some of my NTFS drives were having read problems. I spun up my XP instance, assigned the drive to it, and was able to run the native NTFS repair utility.

I paid the full retail price for VMWare, and would happily do it again. At the current discounted price, VMWare is a must-buy for anyone who needs to work in a native Linux or Windows environment on their mac.

Several people have mentioned that you need lots of memory to run VMWare. While more memory will definitely help, I’ve seen very decent performance on my 2GB MacBook Pro when running Linux instances. Windows can chew through memory, but it runs fine if you shut down non-essential mac apps. If you use VMWare extensively, you may want to bump up your system’s memory, but 2GB should be plenty to get started.