VirtualBox is functional, but it isn’t as polished as VMware Fusion or Parallels Desktop. More specifically, it has a user interface only a developer could love, its performance isn’t even in the same ballpark as its two commercial competitors, and it requires quite a bit of fiddling to get basic settings right-something I never have to think about with Parallels or Fusion. Although it looks great on paper, and the price (free) is certainly right, to me it feels rough and unfinished. In its last couple of comparisons, Macworld has concluded that Parallels and Fusion are virtually equivalent, the differences increasingly minor with each revision. I’ve seen many comparative reviews, benchmark tests, and feature checklists for these products. I just want to get my work done in the most efficient way possible, with a minimum of distraction and complication.) I have no particular allegiance to one developer or another. I have also been a Parallels user almost since its very first release.

(By way of disclosure, I should mention that I wrote books about Fusion versions 2 and 3 it’s now at version 6. But I did want to explain why I’ve settled on VMWare Fusion as my go-to virtualization choice. Each of these products has its partisans, and I’m not going to tell you definitively which one you should choose. Using any of those three, I can pop into another OS as easily as launching an app. In addition to OS X’s Boot Camp, I have my choice of three virtualization products for Mac: Parallels Desktop, VMware Fusion, or Oracle’s VirtualBox. Fortunately, as a Mac user, I have several ways to run multiple operating systems without switching computers. My work requires me to occasionally use Windows and Linux, as well as older versions of OS X.

Vmware fusion for mac mavericks