Can you elaborate? I've run VPC on Mac (I bought PVC with office 2004 for my G5), but this leave a LOT to be desired. I'd rather avoid the virtualization. the only success I've had with virtualization is with Xen. Other virtualization attempts (VMWare and MS VPC) has failed for performance and driver reasons. This could very well be different on the X86 architecture, hence why I'm asking for advice.

In my opinion and personal experience, I would recommend using Parallels rather than VMWare for running VMs. There is also VirtualBox if you prefer using something open-source.

Here is a link to an exhaustive benchmarking test for Parallels vs VMWare. Good luck.

http://bit.ly/4DZtVg

There's no limit to URL length here, and it helps to see where an URL points -- so please don't use URL shorteners.

(Here's the target link: http://www.mactech.com/articles/mactech/Vol.25/25.04/VMBench... )

My apologies, it was my first comment here at HN and I was not sure if posting long-urls was appropriate. I will remember next time, thanks.

Despite its name, VirtualPC on the PPC chip was actually an emulator, not virtualization. I've tried and had success with all of the following on Intel Macs:

QEMU - http://www.nongnu.org/qemu/

VirtualBox - http://www.virtualbox.org/

Parallels - http://www.parallels.com/products/desktop/

VMWare Fusion - https://www.vmware.com/products/fusion/

Windows support ranges from good (QEMU, VirtualBox) to great (VMWare Fusion, Parallels). My personal pick is VMWare because of its excellent support for non-Windows OSes. I've managed to get Ubuntu, FreeBSD, DragonflyBSD, Haiku, and Plan9 working with it. Under Windows, I've been able to use a USB MobileConnect dongle and VPN, and if you happen to be running OS X Server you can even virtualize other OS X Server instances (Edit: I should mention that Parallels also has support for this).

It's a lot faster on x86. Give it a shot.

Also try sun virtualbox (free) - best VM I've tried.

virtualbox is good.. +1