VMWare Fusion wins out over Parallels. It’s by no means perfect, but I am able to get Solaris Nevada (B77) installed – which is a big start. I’m really hungry to start playing with the in-kernel SMB server, as Mac OS X doesn’t yet support iSCSI natively. I’m really looking forward to a day that I can build out a physical server with plenty of drives to host all my files and store time machine backups, but I know it’s going to be awhile. Probably going to have to wait until I’m back in a house again – there’s just not enough room in an apartment for the kind of goofing off I want to do with it.

But I digress. VMWare Fusion has got some problems. I’ve got some issues when using one of Apple’s new slimline keyboards in that the F-keys stutter and repeat a lot if you’ve got the keys working as their function equivalents (Sound, Dashboard, Expose instead of F1, F2 etc). Further, the “mkfile -n” trick fails pretty miserably with ZFS, yielding an un-mountable ZFS pool – which I assume is due to the fact that I’m using the self-expanding virtual disks, and something’s just gotten munged.

The other thing that prompted my decision – Ubuntu Server just works. No need to replace the kernel, it just works. And works well. That’s about the end of it.