Two’s company, three’s a lot of options for Windows virtualization

You know about Parallels, right? The run-Windows-on-your-Mac-without-having-to-reboot (“virtualization”) thing? You better know about Parallels. We’ve written about it like 80 kajillion times since our inception in 2006. And if you know about Parallels (which you do), then you should know about VMWare Fusion-the other Windows virtualization software for the Mac we’ve also written about so much we’ve violated countless provisions of the Geneva Convention and will inevitably wind up at The Hague because of our callous indifference to the pains of-and the crimes against humanity inherent in-writing about stuff way too much.

But we’ll hopefully get some leniency when they learn Parallels’ and Fusion’s monopolies on our virtualization coverage may slowly begin withering away, thanks to Sun’s (free!) alternative, xVM VirtualBox. We’ve written about VirtualBox before, too, but only twice, a long time ago, back when it didn’t quite work too well.

Things have apparently changed, as today both the Mothership and TUAW posted in-depth tours and analyses of Sun’s Windows-in-a-window solution-the Mothersip has a great VirtualBox demo video by Rob “I’m gonna eat your brains and gain your knowledge” Griffiths, and TUAW has a detailed written-post with lots of pretty pictures. And yes, they liked it. TUAW’s Steven Sande sums it up:

While vMX VirtualBox may not have all of the special features that you see in Parallels or VMWare Fusion (i.e., the ability to use Boot Camp partitions, Unity or Coherence modes, etc…), it has several great features — it’s free, it’s stable, and it has a small footprint. How small? The application is only 55.6 MB in size, compared to 132.1 MB for VMWare Fusion and 77.9 MB for the Parallels Desktop folder…

So check it out! And act interested, will ya? Our freedom’s at stake here.

Mmm, steak.