It is rumored that Apple is working on a virtual machine for running Windows along with Mac OS X for the next version of OS X due out early next year.  The just released boot camp from Apple is a step in the right direction.  A virtual machine lets two or more operating systems run at the same time using the hardware natively.  Virtual PC or other solutions in the past have emulated another chip which seriously undermined performance.  This would not be the case with virtualization.  The guest OS would run at near native speeds as if it was running all by itself on the hardware.  This is exciting because you could run Mac OS X and then run say Microsoft Project or Visio with out rebooting into Windows.

Well it looks like company call Parallels is already working on a virtualization machine for the Mac.  We may not have to wait for Apple.  Their virtualization machine will also run Linux , Microsoft’s Windows and Sun’s Solaris .  Wow.  For more information go check out Parallels website.  The beta is free and will be $50 when the product is done.