An old friend and I were deep in conversation Saturday night about our iPhones, app development for the platform, and related business when I asked if he had converted to using a Mac. He told me his kids were converting, but he had too much invested in his PC for work and couldn’t bare to part with it right now. When I told him about how he could virtualize his existing PC and run it on his Mac without reinstalling anything, he was in awe. It occurred to me that many people may not know just how easy this can be.

A Brief Personal History
I’ve been working on Macs for many years in the creative field, but became a full time Mac user about two and a half years back. Being that most of my software development at the time was using Microsoft’s .NET framework I needed to run Windows. So, I run Vista with all the gui junk disabled inside Parallels and later VMware Fusion. Of the two I prefer VMware, but really have no complaints about Parallels.

Tell Me About My PC
You have a lot invested in your PC and perhaps wish you could take it AS IS and run it on a nice new, fully awesome Mac. VMware has a FREE utility called VMware Converter that you can install and run on your PC. It will make a virtual copy or clone of your PC and create a rather large virtual machine file (vmdk and other files). If you don’t have enough space on your computer for a copy, use an external USB drive.

But will it perform well?
I remember seeing my father-in-law show off Virtual PC on his Mac back in the early 90s and it was one of the most painful, grueling experiences of my life. Windows took forever to do everything.

Here’s the skinny - Intel Processors such as are running on the inside of new Macs have optimized instructions for running virtual processes. In my experience this means that Vista runs really really fast; faster than on my old Dell with a Core 2 Duo processor. The “player” that allows you to run a virtual machine (or virtual computer if you like) is VMware Fusion (or Parallels or Virtual PC on Windows - or others).

What’s Next?
You need a Mac, so run on over to http://www.pcprices.net to see the best deals going for Macs. Don’t buy a lot of RAM from Apple, rather buy that later from a RAM specialist for super cheap. You’ll also find those deals on http://www.pcprices.net. Get lots of RAM, as much as you can. Why? Because it’s cheap and most evidence I’ve read indicates it’s more important than processor power.

Some deals will bundle VMware Fusion, though you won’t be needing a new copy of Windows. Otherwise, you can purchase and download Fusion from http://www.vmware.com. Typically you can find a deal or coupon that’ll run you about $50.

The only challenge, besides waiting for VMware Converter to generate the files, is copying those large files to your Mac. It’s not hard, just time consuming…you’ll want to open Facebook or Twitter on your nice new Mac and waste some time.

Then fire up VMware Fusion, create a new profile, allocate 1GB or more RAM to the virtual machine, point to your virtual machine file(s), and run it.

When I did this about 4 months ago for my family we didn’t have any significant problems that I can recall. Printers worked fine, though we had to revise the shares on the PC instance since the IP and such had changed.

The Bonus
You can run LOTS of other computers or operating systems inside VMware Fusion. I use these virtual machines for developing and testing software:
- Windows 7 Beta
- Windows Vista
- Windows XP with IE6
- CentOS

VMware virtual machines are also cross platform meaning you can run VMware Workstation on a PC or Linux and run the same virtual machine you just created on your Mac.

VMware Converter can also convert a Virtual PC vhd to files that will run in VMware. VMware also has a library of community contributed virtual machines for anything from firewalls to internet appliances.

Enjoy!