A while ago I tried using Parallels on the MacbookPro. I thought it was pretty cool, especially the coherence mode but it fell down because it wouldn't let me use the Vista Bootcamp installation. I thought that was pretty lame.

Looking around I discovered VMWare (which powers the Moka5 engine) now have a similar product in beta called Fusion.

Fusion has a couple of pretty major advantages over Parallels in that it works with the BootCamp partition and it can take advantage of both cores of the host machine - so performance it pretty good compared to parallels (in fact, it's comparable to running native under BootCamp)

Sadly there are a few issues with the current beta compared to Parallels which make it less fun. For a start there's no coherence mode (which I think is pretty awesome for seamless integration. Update: Unity is coming) and, annoyingly, the window doesn't resize automagically when you stretch the container (my bad. fiddle with the settings and it works just fine).

Both Parallels and Fusion do a great job of allowing an OSX user to access the goodness of Vista, thought at the moment Fusion is inching ahead for me - it means I can develop a Silverlight application under Vista, reboot to OSX and test it in Safari.

It's going to be interesting to see where both VMWare and parallels go with their products in the coming months - they're pretty much in direct competition so it's going to be a feature war... which is always good for users ;)

While I think the Parallels interface is really good at the moment, VMware have been around and playing in this field (and I know folks who work there - hi Reid!) so time will tell...