Are VMware virtual machines sandboxed?

Does anyone here know if VMware virtual machines are completely sandboxed? (If an operating system running on a virtual machine gets corrupted, will it affect OSX in any way shape or form?)

If by "sandboxed" you mean isolated from OS X, then the answer is yes. An example would be running XP in a VM and contracting a virus or some malware, that virus or malware could not effect OS X - or "leak out".

Regards.

Just yesterday some nimrod emailed me a virus. I knew it was a virus and should just be deleted outright, but I wanted to examine it. Since it would do absolutely nothing to my Mac I dragged the virus-laden (netsky win32 BTW) zipfile to my desktop and fired up my Parallels VM running XP, dragged the file over to it's desktop to see what it would do. It did exactly what I figured it would do, which was make itself invisible, then the Symantec anti-virus thing on the VM did it's thing, which was to clean it out.

Nice experiment, and with no fear that it would do anything to the Mac OS X host system.

So yes VMs are sandboxed nicely.

You'd want to watch out if Parallels has given your Windows machine "network" access to your home folder though:

Some malicious apps (actually lots of them) are designed to cause havok on networks, so if they could access your networked home folder, they could potentially cause damage there.

If you share files between a guest and host, then a virus running in the guest will have at least some access to the host's file system. In theory, the virus could erase some files or copy itself to the host. However, the virus can neither "spread" within the host nor from the host because Windows executables won't run on OS X.

Yes. But has the guys above said you need to watch out for shared environments. For example, my OS X desktop is shared with my Windows XP environment in VMware