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The new version was demonstrated yesterday at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference 2006 in San Francisco and allows Intel-based Macs running OS X to run a whole host of guest operating systems within its virtualised environment without having to dual boot.

Apple's first concession to allowing other platforms onto its hardware came in the form of Boot Camp, which allowed the installation of Windows XP alongside Mac OS X in a dual-boot environment.

But VMware allows users to flick between different platforms via tabs, and even drag and drop files between operating systems in a manner similar to the solution offered by Parallels.

Apple endorsed Parallels over Boot Camp, but it remains to be seen if its larger competitor VMware will receive such a warm welcome.

VMware means Intel Macs can run pretty much any x86 client, both as a guest operating systems in emulation and as performance-enhanced paravirtualised operating system: as well as the more obvious choice of Windows, users can

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also create virtual machines running distributions of Linux, BSD, Novell's NetWare and Sun Microsystem's Solaris Unix platforms.

In addition to VMware's virtualisation environment, Intel Mac users also get full access to the community side of the technology. This amounts to some 250 virtual appliances available for the technology: pre-built, pre-configured and ready-to-run software applications to handle security and load balancing as well as collaboration, database, development, communications and business applications - even entire operating systems such as the Debian and Ubuntu Linux distros are available as a virtual appliance. Each sits within a virtual machine that can be run using virtualization products such as VMware Player and VMware Server. These are free to download from www.vmware.com/download/.

'We are excited to bring our desktop platform product to Apple Macs. The demand for this has been unbelievable and it is clearly front and centre for Mac users,' said Diane Greene, president of VMware. 'This announcement brings our desktop platform and add-on capabilities to Mac users, and it will allow them to run a wide variety of operating systems without rebooting. Mac users who also use the PC will be able to use this product to consolidate onto the Mac.'

The company says its roadmap includes plans to make virtual machines platform agnostic, so that virtual machines created on a Mac can be switched over to other hardware platforms, and vice versa.

Those interested in trialling the beta can register at the VMware website.