VMWare Workstation vs. Parallels for Windows

[GWarner]

I am considering upgrading to VMWare Workstation v8 but have recently heard about Parallels for Windows and was wondering how the two compare.

Does anybody have exerience with a recent version of Workstation (v6 or better) and Parallels for Windows v4 that can give their thoughts on which of the two is the better product?

Other thoughts about each are welcome too even if you don't have experience with both.

Thanks!

[J. Baker]

I haven't used either of them or even this one, http://www.virtualbox.org/ . Just thought it might give you a third option.

[sphinx]

I tried Virtual Box and I did not like it especially when I installed 'Windows ME' on it for testing a legacy application and it was very very slow.
I tried the same with Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 and it was great.

VMWare are the market leader when it comes to visualization.

[GWarner]

Yeah, I've used Virtual PC right after Microsoft acquired it and offered me a sweet deal on it, the 2004 version and the 2007 version. I'd still be using it because it was free except that Microsoft doesn't appear to be supporting it anymore except as the Windows PX mode in Vista and 7. They also didn't support running it on XP Home and while it did run some things did not work, like printing from a virtual machine.

So I switched to VMWare Workstation 6 and found that it worked really well. But since then new virtual machine software has emerged such as Parallels and VirtualBox, so I just want to know more about them before I commit to upgrading to Workstation 8, just in case one of them is better, though I have my doubts about that.