Leopard to allow virtualisation

MAKER of entertainment gear, Apple has made a huge U-turn in its policy and allowed its new operating system Leopard to run in a virtual environment.

So far Jobs' Mob has refused to allow Mac OS X Server to be run inside a virtual machine (VM) because that would mean giving control to the user.

Apple's software license agreement forbade running multiple copies of Mac OS X Server on a single Mac, preventing Parallels and VMware from including Mac OS X Server among the operating systems that could be virtualized legally.

However in the small print of the Tiger Server license agreement users are now told that they may install and use other copies of Mac OS X Server Software on the same Apple-labelled computer, provided that you acquire an individual and valid license from Apple for each of these other copies of Mac OS X Server Software.

Ben Rudolph, Director of Corporate Communications for Parallels, told db.tidbits.com that it will take some time to enable Leopard Server to run in a virtual machine and his outfit was working closely with Apple on it and will make it public as quickly as possible.

It seems that Apple has seen which way the wind is blowing on virtualisation and has plans to release a version of Xserve designed to work as a VM server and virtualisation products from Parallels and VMware. µ