Love the Mac, but must put up with Windows I work for a large computer company (won't say anymore) that has, as most businesses, relied heavily on the windows platform.... I can not avoid it.... I work from home so I am forced to use their VPN Client (Windows only) - they have/had a Mac VPN solution... but the Nortel Contivity client does not work on Intel based Macs........and Lotus Notes for Mac gives me fits as far as compatibility of my single mail file among the 2 different platforms.... also, our company still has a good number of people that use Lotus SmartSuite which only does Windows.... Boot Camp is nice, but it does not allow me to use my very productive Mac apps alongside my required Windows apps...... So Parallel is going to be an ENORMOUS productivity saver for me.... no more need for having both a Windows and Mac running at the same time.... and Parallels is running XP faster than my Windows laptop...... Bonus ! Thanks Parallels team !
I am a software developer and the main deployment environment for my application(s) is unix (Linux, OSX, Solaris) talking to a Microsoft SQL Server database. I do the majority of my work on my MacBook Pro, but for obvious reasons am forced to use a seperate machine for my database server, meaning that until now I could not have a completely self contained development environment. Now that I can run Windows in a VM with my development databases, I am able to take my entire application and database with me and contine development wherever I happen to be. Parallels is going to save me a ton of headache.
At home and office I use different systems. At home, I typically use OS X. For my job, I need to use Windows [word/Excel] and Linux [deployment target]. Apple Boot camp is OK, but booting to swtich OSes isn't an option for me. Thus, I'll use parallels WS to make my business apps available at home - and keep my noisy PC off ;-) Moreover, I'll use parallels WS to run certain Linux system configurations and test certain stuff. MOving VM images from home to office is a nice option too. Great work, folks! PS: Do you (partly) use any of those hypervisors like XEN in your solution?
Run multiple Win / Linux / BSD "machines" I like to test our software on multiple Linux Versions. A VM is the perfect solution for this. I also have to compile some of our software on windows - parallels with a W2K running is perfect for this. A running linux in my VM does allow me to do my ORACLE programming on OS X machine until ORACLE comes with something for Mac/Intel - but probably our port to Postgresql is complete until this ;-). From time to time I like to play a little bit with OPEN-/FreeBSD - now I can do this all on one machine. I'm going now to replace my 6 month old PB 15 :-( - with a MBP because the performance boost on OS X and the VM make me much more productive.
That's fun VM monitors seem to be mainly used by developers. Maybe, 'standard users' didn't started testing VM monitors right now.
SQL Development We will be using SQL Server 2000. Enterprise Manager in particular. We do web / database development and all our customers are on SQL server.
Any reason you didn't put "Linux: Developer use"? It's going to be far easier for me to support my three-platform work.
I teach Digital Media at a college. Next year we will require all our students to purchase a laptop. Since students are required to know and use both OS X and XP operating systems, this has solved a HUGE problem. It will change everything.
Watching Meet The Press and Yahoo Music Videos... other than that setting up virtual servers in various OS's to take over the world with some funky creation that is unknown to me at this time.
I’m a recent switcher and I have several tools in windows that I use allot. Lotus Notes, Website Watcher, Robform, NewsLecher and several others. I still own several PCs and move between the two platforms frequently. I also subscribe to Yahoo Music which is Windows only so getting sound support working will be nice too.
If possible, I intend to learn more about cluster setups with RedHat / Fedora and Heartbeat version 2. We have such a setup in production but you cannot testing new options/properties on a productive system and there is no money to duplicate the system in hardware. I think that Parallels could be rather helpful for this task. Now I need to convince my supervisors to replace my years old PowerMac G4 500 MHz;-)
Software I'm an indies software publisher, porting Japanese dating-sim games for PCs. This allows me to test different systems, test a "raw" system vs. one set up a certain way, and so on. Very handy.
1) My company is moving to an all-in-one management package whose client only runs on Windows. This is where Boot Camp falls down for me: I'd have to reboot to use it. Parallels fixes that problem. 2) I'm the project leader for an open source software package, Hercules, that has distribution binaries for Windows, OS X, and Linux. Parallels will let me build all three versions on one box. 3) Parallels will also allow me to test some stuff for work without having to set up a whole different system for it.
I make my living working full-time from home writing Windows (Visual C++/MFC/OpenGL) software, but I *strongly* prefer Mac OS X, so running Windows on a Mac is a wonderful thing for me! I pre-ordered Parallels Workstation tonight for my 20" iMac Core Duo 2.0GHz. I'm transferring my XP license from my now-retired old PC, and so am saved from having to purchase another PC! I'd much rather use that $$$ buying a new PowerMac-replacement this fall than buying a new Dell (or whatever) for my work machine!
Thats what i'm using it for too, or what I hoped to use it for that is. My short experience thus far isn't too positive (crashed on start immediately first time I ran it because I had qt installed in its default location, and when i fixed that I find that the | key doesnt seem to work in freebsd [and other unixes i hear]). It's a beta though, so i'll cut em some slack.
