So, after I’ve reconfigured the Demo VM to speak SSL, I created two different Groupware users and created the account for the first user on my iPod. I only tested the whole product using the E-Mail sync-service – since I did not wanted to lose my existing contacts or calendar entries – and configured “Push” for the new Exchange account. With the credentials of the second user, I logged-in via Zarafa’s (damn ugly) web-interface and wrote an e-mail to the first user, while having my iPod Touch lying on my table, unlocked, in “Home”-screen. The second I clicked the “Send”-button within the browser-window was the second in which a new badge popped up on my iPod, telling me that I have one unread E-Mail.

So actually the whole Zarafa/Exchange/Push stuff seem to work pretty good, though I don’t know yet how reliable it is. I will test this out a bit longer some time, because if it works the way it should, I could really think of using Zarafa on my private E-Mail account. Nor the world’s most advanced operating system‘s E-Mail client neither the iPod support IMAP IDLE yet, what makes it pretty uncomfortable when waiting for new E-Mails.

But eh.

UPDATE: I just talked to gicmo, since he has Parallels installed on his Mac, and asked him to give me the ouput of ps aux | grep -i parall, so that I can compare it to my ps aux | grep -i vm (yepp, I’ve just installed the Fusion Demo) output… and well.. I guess I can call it equal. Each of these two products has some daemons running in background, even if the application itself isn’t or even hasn’t been running since the Mac started up. For me, both of them solve the actual problem I have: Virtualizing other operating systems (Linux, Win, UNIX, etc.) on my Mac. Now I need to figure out, what the details are, that make one product look better than the other. I guess I’ll need to search for some comparison of “Parallels vs. VMware Fusion“, using the recent versions of both. Maybe I’ll find something.