Does anybody really like running PC software on a Mac through such virtualization software as VMWare or Boot Camp or Parallels or ...?
Had one of them on my iMac and did use it for a couple of PC-only programs (come on, time to port it over!), but never took the step to add it to the MacBook Pro I'm creating this blog item on.
Would be good to hear from those of you who do go both ways regularly -- and why ...
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I regularly use vmware for all kinds of things - including running Trixbox, although not as a production machine. I have several copies of different versions of trixbox and other asterisk distributions in virtual machines on my laptop for doing testing of new code. And I even leave a copy of 2.6 in a vm on a linux box to do live demo's on the internet with - I've found it to be much less glitchy on the audio than the previous versions. So, as a developer, I really use VM, but it's not something I install for my customers.
I've evaluated both Parallels and VMWare. Both of them cost equally. I was unable to install WinXP on Parallels, while VMWare worked great on my Macbook Pro.
All in all, I was perfectly happy using VMWare.
Another possibility is to employ Remote Desktop and access Windows remotely.
I became a Macbook Pro user in 2006 and, switching from PC, had to install Parallels. One of my roles is a Windows sysadmin and there's no getting around the need to run Windows-only software. That said, I only load Parallels when I need to. Bootcamp didn't make any sense to me. For the tools I'm running, rebooting into Windows is just downtime.
VM is hot in the server arena. I don't know that I'm ready to run realtime call processing servers on VMs but for web and application servers, if you have the hardware to support it, it's (becoming) the way to go.
As noted by Scott G, VM's are a terrific way to do testing and really make for a much "greener" lab - where one physical machine can provide a number of test environments - whereas before VM technology these would all be separate machines (or at least a bunch of disk-swapping/dual-booting).
I've used both Parallels and VMWARE and have had good success with both. In a quick summary, I'd say Parallels is perhaps a little better for GUI/interactive, and VMWARE performs better in server/data-center type roles, but really both appear to be quite good.
See my Headless Mac Mini running VMWARE setup: http://mrblog.org/2008/03/25/going-green-with-a-mac-mini/
Apple has created more than a nifty desktop OS with Mac OS X. It turns out to be a pretty darned capable headless server virtualization platform too.
A quick update, I've tried Sun's http://www.virtualbox.org/ and while it's a tiny bit worse than VMWare, the price is very low.