Just as I love Parallels Desktop, VMWare’s Mac offering is great too. Parallels and VMWare come from two different perspectives-Parallels had nothing to lose and built it to use hardware features, while VMWare had years of work into virtual machines from the pre-hardware support era. VMWare seems to be less efficient when in the background, but is more effecient when doing heavy workloads. VMWare offers dual-monitor support, upto 4-cpu support, upto 16GB of memory, and sells for $79.99.
**UPDATE**–February 2, 2009 (2:15p)
As per a comment on this post by Peter Kazanjy, VMWare Fusion does support the same hardware features Parallels Desktop utilizes, however does not provide a means of accessing this from the user interface. I will touch on this in a later post, but for the record both VMWare and Parallels have software support for and therefore will utilize the next generation of Intel’s hardware-assisted virtualization technology: this technology ships in the Corei7 processor and in future processors of the “Nahalam” microarchitecture.