Apple could come out with a killer technology that would increase their sales like nobody’s business.

VIRTUALIZATION

I know what you’re thinking. Everyone has virtualization products for the Mac. VMware, VirtualBox, and Parallels to name a few.

Here is the problem, virtualization is a pain in the ass. The average person would have no idea how to do it. You have to:

1. Create a virtual machine and know what hardware specifications to assign it.
2. Have access to an OS CD to install Windows, Linux, or another OS. If it’s Windows, you’ll need a retail or volume license copy.
3. Install the OS in the virtual machine.
4. Configure the OS, and install the software you want to use.

If you get to that point, you still have to start up the virtual machine every time you want to run a Windows program. Parallels has really made progress due to the fact that they create coherence mode, which allows you to use your Windows applications seamlessly in OSX.

Now we’re do the biggest problem. You have to decide how to allocate your resources. Let’s say you have a Macbook Pro with 1GB of RAM. If you give the virtual machine 512MB of RAM, that may be too little, or it may be more than you have to sacrifice. You shouldn’t have to make that decision.

Step 1 to solving this problem is somehow sharing the memory. The OS should be smart enough to evaluate what is running, and fit it all in.

Step 2. Now, lets take it a step further. Why should I even have to configure a virtual machine? I don’t want two file systems, just show me one. I don’t want to have to start, suspend, or stop the virtual machine.

So now imagine with me for a moment. This means that you could use your Mac to run Windows programs. I’m not claiming that it’s easy, but imagine if Apple could say that they can run all of their software AND 99% of the Windows software that is available. The productivity and beauty of a Mac, and the support of the Windows software industry.

Would you switch if it were possible?

Wait, did I say that right? I thought it was supposed to be the other way around?

I admit it, I loved running Ubuntu Server 64-bit on my VMware server. It ran very amazingly fast, and I didn’t have to touch it for months. I also liked the idea of all of the configuration being text based. It was easy to backup and restore.

There were just a couple of recurring issues that made me uneasy. The console screen would randomly display network adapter issues, and sometimes I would lose the network connection until I would restart the networking script.

The other issue is that my software RAID 1 array would randomly disappear on reboot. I would have to run this command to fix it:

sudo mdadm --create --verbose /dev/md0 --level=1 --raid-devices=2 --assume-clean /dev/sd[ab]

The last major issue I had was with the VMware Server installation. Out of the gate, the installation was 10 times more difficult. It wasn’t a click->next->next->next install. Once I got it installed, the VMware server console wouldn’t connect.

Since Windows Server 2008 has been released, I’ve heard nothing but amazing things. This is the best operating system to come out of Microsoft for a long time. For about the past month, I’ve been trying it out on my laptop. It’s basically Vista x64 SP1 without all of the crap. Microsoft really messed up Vista, but somehow they managed to fix it in their server product.

Installation took less than 15 minutes, and I appreciate the fact that it doesn’t ask you anything other than the location to install to. It boots extremely fast, and is impressively snappy.

All of the previous issues I mentioned have gone away (I cheated on the RAID problem, since I’m not using RAID anymore).

The most frustrating thing about Linux (and one of it’s biggest strong points), is that I never had a really good GUI tool to fall back on when things got rough. When something goes wrong in Windows, I can at least look around at my options. In Linux, you have to look at documentation and examples, and guess what the syntax and settings are for your configuration.

The biggest problem for many of my readers is going to be the fact that you can’t get a copy of Server 2008 for a reasonable price. In my case, this is a development server, and I’m able to use my MSDN (Microsoft Developer network) license.

A common question I’m asked, is if I had any problems finding drivers. Every driver I needed was automatically installed by Windows. It’s very impressive seeing as how it’s a completely custom server, with all of the parts purchased on NewEgg.

I still love Linux, but right now I’m more productive with Windows Server 2008 x64.

Update Apr. 18, 2008: I posted a follow-up to this post here