I have had no problems with either of them. I use Parallels on my MacBook and Fusion on my iMac. Harder to backup and restore if something goes wrong (unlikely to happen though and you can always do a clone). Performance can be slower than using an image but it shouldn't be noticeable on a Mac Pro.

The drive is always visible (can be unmounted though). FAT32 has a disadvantage of not supporting file sizes over 4GB, which isn't very good if you rip/burn DVD images. This is assuming you used FAT32 to format the partition and not NTFS. You can also see the contents of the drive when the VM is shut down using the Bootcamp method and you can easily read/write stuff directly to the C drive.

Coherence doesn't always work in Parallels for example and you may find one is less stable that the other. You can use both apps with the same Windows installation so you can test the demo of each and see which works better for you. This has a number of advantages over using a drive image. You can boot Parallels and VMWare from the Bootcamp partition. Since I'm going to be using one of the internal drives as a server drive for my home network I don't want to use Boot Camp since I don't want to have to reboot. I have read so much both ways of which to go with and it seems it all depends on when the last one was updated but I also don't want to go with one just to switch soon so am wondering if one is more safe and future proof. At the office they also have some Linux machines and my husband wants to set up a Ubuntu Linux machine so someday we could even have Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Linux machines. For now I plan to use just Windows XP but if Vista ever gets more stable I will switch to it. I assume this won't require heavy use and with 6GB of memory memory shouldn't be an issue. I don't do much gaming and just use a few programs such as QuickBooks, a couple other accounting programs, and I also burn some DVD's and CD's on it.

My question, which of the virtualization products should I go with? For Windows I don't use it heavily. The different is this Mac Pro is replacing my Windows Desktop. I just bought a Mac Pro, my 2nd Mac to compliment my MacBook Pro.

Vmware or parallels software for mac