For a class project last semester I needed more machines than I had for a demo and given that the demo was going to be on my MacBook that currently is only set up to dual boot between 10.4 and a developer seed of 10.5, it was time to research the virtualization market. Thankfully (uh..) there was only choice, Parallels Destkop. I'd never heard of Parallels and I'd been waiting around for VMware to release their x86 Mac OS X tool, but it wasn't here so Parallels it was. I downloaded and installed Parallels, set up a few virtual machines, and all mostly went well. Except running more than one virtual machine at the same time when they are all working pretty hard. That led to nasty kernel panics and rebooting which isn't good for class project demos. Other than that I didn't have any problems and was planning on buying Parallels... ...except a few days ago VMware announced their "Fusion" beta for Mac. I've used VMware a whole lot including personal use for a few years and "real world" use at work for the past 6 months, so something from VMware was welcome. Instead of spending $80 on Parallels, I downloaded Fusion to try it out and hopefully the final product will be some form of free like most of the other low end virtualization products from VMware. So far Fusion has played fairly nicely. I'm installing Gentoo on it from an install ISO on a samba share on another machine, and it's held up well under load compiling lots of things.