Server in a Virtual Machine
Running Mountain Lion Server on a Mac is a powerful addition to a network. Running two Servers can be even more powerful. You can run multiple operating systems on one Mac by using virtual machine software.
When running in a virtual machine, each operating system thinks and acts like it’s running in a real machine. It can network, communicate with other computers, and use peripherals, all of which makes virtual machines a great way to test server configurations. Instead of having them running on drive partitions, virtual machines exist as sets of files. To uninstall the OS, just throw away the file. And with one or more copies of Mountain Lion Server running in virtual machines, you can keep them separate from your user files and applications.
Two worthy virtualization products for the Mac are Parallels Desktop (www.parallels.com) and VMware Fusion (www.vmware.com). Both products are less than $100 and can import virtual machines from each other, so if you decide to switch, you can move over your virtual machines.
For running OS X Server in a virtual machine, I think VMware Fusion has the edge. The installation is easy: Just drag the OS X Installer file into a new virtual machine window, and the installation process begins by itself. Parallels Desktop, however, runs Windows a bit faster.
Macs are the only computers that allow you to run OS X along with Windows at the same time. Apple doesn’t allow running copies of OS X in virtual machines on non-Apple ...
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