iPhone News and Information

VMware announced Thursday that version 3.0 of its Fusion virtualization software will include support for iPhone OS virtual machines.

Available in the next public beta, the added functionality is a result of recent changes to the iPhone software license agreement, which allows users to run multiple copies of iPhone on a single piece of PC or Mac hardware, provided that users acquire an individual license for each copy.

In fact, VMware says Fusion 2.0 will run many copies of iPhone on brawny Mac hardware — like Xserves or Mac Pros — as long as there is RAM to support them. The virtualization software itself will support up to 8GB of memory per virtual machine.

Alternatively, users can simultaneously run a mixture of server operating systems, such as the combination of Windows Server 2003, Linux, Mac OS X Server and iPhone OS. This capability will be particularly useful for cross-platform developers, VMware notes, because they’ll be able to run Xcode and Visual Studio on the same machine, compile, and then test the software in multiple virtual operating systems that are running as virtual machines.

Running multiple instances of iPhone OS should also help developers shave time off their debugging procedures. Instead of tinkering with configurations and settings to reproduce a quality assurance tester’s system, they’ll be able to simply copy the tester’s virtual machine, quickly reproduce a bug, write a fix, and then use Fusion’s ‘roll back to a snapshot’ function before testing again.