Excerpt:

If you care about running Windows on a Mac, you’ve undoubtedly heard that the end user license agreement (EULA) for Windows Vista Home Basic and Home Premium forbids you to use these versions of Microsoft’s latest operating system release with virtualization software—software that allows you to run operating systems other than the Mac OS in a windowed environment within the Mac OS. Such virtualization software includes the popular Parallels Desktop for Mac. What the reports on this matter don’t reveal is whether this is simply a legal restriction or also a technical one….
Cutting briefly to the chase, Vista Home Premium installed perfectly well. Once it was up and running I noticed that the Aero effect was nowhere to be seen—Parallels simply couldn’t emulate the kind of graphic card/power necessary to make it work. I then asked Vista to install the latest Vista updates—something I understood to be a problem for others who tried it.

Vista Home Premium running on a Mac via the latest Parallels Desktop beta

No problem. Vista downloaded the updates, installed them, I restarted, and everything continued to work.

Parallels is an indispensable tool that lets us test our applications in all the browsers we support on a single computer. We can even test IE 6 and 7 side-by-side by running Windows XP in one VM and Vista in another. As a web developer, Parallels is easily the single best reason to own an Intel Mac.

The article is mainly a criticism of Microsoft’s Windows Vista, but still, it’s an interesting, albeit brief, look at how VM software such as Parallels Desktop is being used by web designers.

We have just made available a new build (1898) for Desktop for Mac that substantially improves Mac Pro and 64-bit iMac performance and eliminates kernel panics and major bugs.

For those users who have Mac Pros and 64-bit iMacs with more than 2GB of RAM, you’ve had to manually limit your RAM via the command line in Terminal. In this build, we’ve included a tool that will help you take this action without any command line coding. With a single click you can limit your RAM and make your Mac Pro fully compatible with this build. You can easily revert your memory back at any time to the full configuration with the same tool.

NOTE: Its very important to note that limiting your RAM configuration to run Parallels Desktop will NOT prevent you from running any other OS X application (although they may run slightly slower). It simply helps our hypervisor “play nice” with the Mac Pro.

Originally, I told you that we’d have full PAE support by year’s end. Now, I’m pleased to let you know that we are working on a new RC version that will be compatible with ANY Mac with ANY amount of RAM, and will have it much sooner than originally anticipated. The engineering team tells me that this build should be available in a week or two.

This build also adds support for Windows Vista RC1 as a guest OS, and adds an improved Parallels Tools package for all of the Vista builds that improves mouse movement, and video resolutions, and beefs up networking.

Thank you again to all of our loyal Desktop users and beta testers. Everyone here appreciates your feedback and your patience.

More information can be found in this thread.

It can be downloaded from here.

The first was that Virtual PC (Microsoft.com) (for PCs) would be free. Virtual PC for Macs would not be free. They also mentioned that virtual PC 2007 (VPC 2007) was in development and that it would support Windows Vista in both host and guest modes, as well sa support for 64-bit Vista as a host OS, and that it will be faster than Virtual PC 2004.

The second (and fairly relevant to us) involves how Windows Vista Enterprise will be handled in a virtualized environment:

Customers who deploy Windows Vista Enterprise have the ability to install up to four (4) copies of the operating system in a virtual machine for a single user on a single device. Even better, nothing in the license requires that Microsoft Virtualization technologies be used – if you want to use a competing product as your Virtualization solution, you still get the four extra installs for use with VMs.