Parallels: Still More Windows on the Mac: Page 2

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For those using Parallels on Mac OS X in a VMWare shop, Parallels has released the first beta of their Transporter product. This allows you to use VMWare and Windows Virtual PC images for use in Parallels. Not a critical feature for all users, but if you already have the VMWare images and the licenses, it's convenient.

I find that there are a lot of "little" improvements to Parallels, too, like how changing my optical drive source from the physical drive to a disk image file is much easier in this beta than in earlier versions. And as the release notes say, support for different screen resolutions is greatly enhanced.

Overall, even outside of the major new features introduced, this is a solid upgrade and shows the Parallels team’s commitment to making their product not just slightly better, but a lot better with every release. They're definitely raising the bar for VMware, whenever VMware for Mac OS X comes out.

If Parallels can put out a version that's suitable for Mac OS X Server to host multiple simultaneous VMs on the new Intel Xserve, that would not suck at all. For all its beta status, and the warnings that beta carries, I've found this build of Parallels to be stable enough for my daily work, so while I normally don't recommend betas, in this case, the stability and the huge new feature set of this build make it well worth the risk.