Virtualization Apps for the Mac

Vmware Fusion is program that I find invaluable. If you are like me and you have created a Bootcamp partition for use with Windows, you will love this program. Instead of rebooting into windows every time I have to use a windows specific app, I fire up Fusion and it runs my bootcamp partition while in the Mac OS. I still have the option to boot windows natively but it isn't necessary. Another feature of Fusion is Unity mode, which allows you to run both OS's at once. It appears as though you are in OS X but you can run windows apps and have them minimize to the dock, pretty fun. Parallels desktop is another application that does most of the same things as Fusion. I have tried both products but I like Fusion for the fact that you can assign multiple processors and you can address more Memory to your VM's. One other thing to mention about these technologies is that you can download pre-built virtual appliances (Disk Images) for testing... for instance you could get the latest beta of windows server 2008 or run the latest distro of Suse linux, already configured and ready to boot.