Five OSes running at once

MacWorld has an article up about running Windows XP, Windows 2000, Fedora Core, Debian simultaneously on a Mac Mini with Parallels Workstation, and they’re even usable. Crazy stuff:

Four VMs plus OS X, and all were usable and stable (once I had them all running), on what is the second-cheapest computer that Apple currently sells. Fairly amazing. Even more impressive is the fact that the VMs continue to operate in the background—switching from one to the other doesn’t pause that VM until its reactivated. The Linux systems, for instance, were both showing screensavers while I was working in the XP VM. Despite all of that, the frontmost VM, even if that “VM” was OS X itself, was always responsive to clicks, and I didn’t notice any dropped characters when typing, or other annoying slowdowns. I can’t wait to see what will be possible on the high-end Macs when they’re released this fall.