Hello, and welcome to one of what I hope will be many chances for me to communicate to you through this forum. I use a Macintosh in my life, and sometimes I need to run another OS. Rather than Have 4 or 5 machines I make use of virtualization to run these OSes. Here is what I did.
I went to every developer that has some stake in the virtualization market and downloaded a test of their product. I went to Parallels, VMWare, and Oracle/Sun. In every case except Oracle/Sun the cost was rather minor, usually less than a $100. The Sun product was free, and showed it.
Parallels is an up and comer in the virtualization market. They were built when Apple went to the Intel architecture to provide a way to run Windows within the Mac OSX. They were first in the Mac environment with a product, and so they have the experience edge for the platform than the others. The Interface is very Mac-like, and they have something called cohesion that may blow your mind. Cohesion is Parallels way of getting rid of any windows artifacts. The windows program actually looks like it is running on your mac. Parallels also allows you to guest other OSes other than Windows.
VMWare has a product that they call VMWare Fusion for the Mac. They saw how well Parallels was accepted and decided to enter this market space. In many ways VMWARe is the leader in virtualization on every other platform except the Mac. They are following and have to respond to Parallels. I will say that the products matches most of what Parallels does, but if you want a feature first on a Mac, it may come out on Parallels first.
VirtualBox is Oracle’s open source virtualization product. As an open source project it does not have all the bells and whistles of the others, but it has one benefit. It’s free. It is rough at the edges and does not have an easy mode for installing the virtual machines. It hasn’t been around as long VMWare.
Of the three, I own both VMWare Fusion and Parallels. Both work very well. I feel gaming is better on Parallels, but VMWare Fusion seems a little more solid. It really is a toss up and the price is the same for each one, so choose one, I don’t think you could go wrong with either.
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