As some of you already know, I was a PC for about 15 years (although I was a Mac before that when I worked in the music biz).

When I made the leap to my MacBook Pro about 5 months ago, I figured I'd need to do some virtualization, so I picked up Parallels 4. Just got an email today about the new version 5 ($39), so I read what I could find about it (not much BTW) and went for it.

Very pleased so far! I've got a 2.5Ghz Core 2 Duo with 4GB of RAM and while version 4 was just OK, Parallels 5 is about 50% faster/more responsive and has a slick new viewing mode called "Crystal"...which is really just like coherence mode.

I only have a few apps that I sparingly use in Windows, but the biggest reason I keep it around is for Internet Explorer 6 testing (ugh!) on XP.

When I was a PC, I did A LOT of virtualization (network administration). Created a few virtual servers and also did workstation testing/dev with it.

Couple questions for the aud...

Anyone else do any virtualization? If so, what are you using...and are you happy with it? :)

I did some rudimentary eval of Fusion and wasn't overly impressed...but I didn't spend a whole lot of time with it. It may also be because I converted my Parallels image to Fusion...if I'd have built a new client OS from scratch in Fusion it may have been snappier.