In previous articles on Oracle and VMware, the hardware and software components consisted of a Windows-based PC and the Oracle RDBMS. This article expands upon the "Oracle in a virtualized environment" concept by looking at other alternatives for the hardware and software.
Most everyone familiar with Oracle knows about UNIX variants and Windows as the main choices for the underlying operating system. However, a relatively obscure option involves another "OS" as in the OS X found on Apple (or Mac) computers. Depending on which piece of Mac hardware you're using, you will be able to install Oracle on a Mac and not see much difference in how the database system operates, especially on the UNIX side.
Using a Mac laptop such as a MacBook Pro, you have several options as to the creation and use of a virtualized environment. The default, out of the box option is to use Boot Camp Assistant. The Boot Camp option isn't really a virtual environment in the sense of how VMware works, but is more of a choice in that you can choose to have the MacBook boot up in OS X mode or in Windows mode via this utility. So, this leads us to the option of relevance for this article.
Another application, which serves as the driver for the virtual machine environment, is Parallels Desktop 5 for Mac. Parallels gives you the option of creating any number of virtual machines based on not only Windows, but UNIX as well. Just under the Windows options, you can install XP, Vista (no really, avoid Vista like the plague), Windows 7, 2003 Server, and 2008 Server.
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