Question of the Day: What is the largest hardware market share without a virtual machine?

Answer: Apple OSX.

With a growing market share, and now using standardized intel hardware why isn’t there a Macintosh OS X 10.4 virtual machine?

This seems like it could be pretty simple. Take a program like Xen, and adjust emulated hardware to match that of a Mac and it will run OS X.

Hardware virtualization has emulated hardware from Sony (playstation), Nintendo (NES, SNES, Gameboy, etc), Atair (2600), Commodore, Apple Computer (Apple IIe, Mac Classic) and Standard Intel x86 machine. So how soon until we see this? Well recently we have seen the announcement of Parallels being owned by SWSoft, This means, they have close ties and understand of the Mac kernel, and how to do machine virtualization. So how long?

Apple has spent more money then anyone protecting their name, and future names, and have even fired employees for testing out OSX on their own equipment. So I doubt they will allow people to release software which could run OSX on no mac hardware. But will they be able to stop it?

The future of Virtualization is open source, it can be modified and adjusted to fit your needs. If you need to build a radio station data center your virtualization needs will be different then a doctors office. So will the off the shelf VMWare or Microsoft software be the best match. No, you will see customized virtual enviroments, such as a shoutcast vm, email vm, and even digital xray vm.