Do Vista's restrictions about virtualization affect Mac-using businesses?

There’s been a lot of discussion generated over the fact that Microsoft has restricted how Vista can be used in virtualized environments. Most of the discussion has focused on consumers and end users, how will arguably be the most hard hit by the restrictions. So far as I’ve seen, no one has talked about how this will impact businesses that run on Macs.

The number of small businesses relying on Mac OS X as their primary platform has begun growing dramatically according to every developer of Mac business software that I’ve talked with over the past few months. One of the reasons that seems obvious is that virtualization makes it possible to run the occasional Windows application right alongside (or technically, inside) Mac OS X. This sidesteps one of the major concerns that had always been expressed about using Macs for business: the need for one or more Windows-only applications.

So, what kinds of fall-out do these newly or soon-to-be Mac businesses face from Vista’s restrictions about virtual machine use? Probably very little. Most businesses would be planning to purchase the business version of Vista rather than either of the home versions, so there shouldn’t be a problem in terms of running Vista under either Parallels Desktop or VMWare Fusion.

The other restrictions primarily seem to relate to DRM-content access. Again, this is a huge impact on consumers who might be using a virtualization as a way of accessing music or video from a service not available on the Mac. The truth is, if you’re a business owner or manager, these are the types of things that you don’t want your employees to be using anyway. Since most, if not all, business-related software will not be using DRM, there should be limited ,if any direct problems.

The Vista license agreement does also caution against using full volume encryption in a virtual environment. This doesn’t seem to be something that’s explicitly outlawed so much as a recommendation. However, while that could have some security implications, it doesn’t seem to be a overly strong reason to not run Vista using virtualization in a business environment.