Hardware Virtualization

Exactly what are you trying to do?

you can install window natively on all the intel machines therefore you can get hw virtualisation on all

now that I am not certain .. on windows running native thru bootcamp you can. osx I don't know ..

VMWare Fusion & Parallels fully support virtualisation on all the current Macbooks & Pros.

Even my old White 2Ghz C2D was pretty good for VMWare Virtualisation.

Yes, all modern Apple notebooks support hardware virtualization.

But I would recommend you try before buying. Generally, MAC users tent to think too positive about virtualization on MAC, probably because they do not really need Windows.

Actually, according to my experience, VM on MAC work not nearly as good as on Windows. There is always a significant CPU overhead, and things may get really slow depending on what you are doing.

Also, do not believe any claims by Parallels or Wmware, those are plain lies.
May be sufficient for what you need, but also may be a disappointment.

It's true that some people really don't need a virtual Windows environment - some can get by with pure OSX environments.

To say that virtualisation on OSX is poor though? I could not disagree more. It's pretty much the only reason I stick to using OSX. I spend my days working predominantly with Windows Server systems - I'm a tech architect.

I've never found a platform that can handle as many concurrent guests as efficiently - certainly not in a desktop or laptop form anyways.

As for saying Parallels & VMware are liars - really? I find they make great products, and I use both.

You can read about why I use OSX for virtualisation here: http://www.markc.me.uk/MarkC/Blog/Entries/2009/9/28OSX_%26Virtualisation.html

You can read about my experiences with Parallels 6, including a demo of its relative performance, here: http://www.markc.me.uk/MarkC/Blog/Entries/2010/9/14Parallels_Desktop_6_forMac.html

Given my job I'm fortunate enough to have quite a substantial budget for the kit I use, so I've a lot of choice. Like I say, I've never found a similar platform that can virtualise as well as OSX when running on a desktop/laptop machine.

Just to be clear, I'm not saying it's better than ESX 😉

VMWare Fusion worked very well for me, but I had it on an 8-core Xeon Mac Pro with 18GB of RAM. Keep in mind that you'll want enough RAM to run you OS X native things, and give the VMWare Windows virtual machine sufficient RAM for whatever you need to run in Windows (plus some additional RAM for overhead for the virtual machine itself).

I would want to have the max 8GB RAM in that MacBookPro if I was going to be running a Windows VM a lot.

MacRS4 wrote:
To say that virtualisation on OSX is poor though?

I didn't say poor. I just said it may be a disappointment.
I am just now running Windows 7 on Parallels 6. Windows task manager shows 0% CPU, but prl vmapp is using 19%(could be from 6 to 20% depending on how many cores VM uses) and kernel task - 11%. Totally that is MAC OS is 9% busy, just because of idle VM running. Even more overhead during running applications.
Suspended and resumed VM, now for some reason taskbar went to the top of the screen, and task manager is no longer running.
I wouldn't call it excellent. To prove the point, take Parallels window by status bar (on the bottom of the window) and push it up under the menu bar. That is how they code.

As for saying Parallels & VMware are liars - really? I find they make great products, and I use both.

Yes. Products may be great, but they do lie.
Parallels claimed that v5 is actually working faster than native with Bootcamp. That is because their drivers are better than those in Bootcamp. Now, with v6 that would be even 40% faster.
Well, if that's not lie, I don't know what is.
And, at work I am using desktop with 6 XP guests, and when idle, CPU usage is around 2%. Programmers may have tweaked something, though.