I have been a Mac user for a while but I had neglected to use Fusion. I knew Fusion was a paid piece of software and I did not really want to pay out yet more money, so I opted for Sun's Virtual Box software running on OSX. This solution does work well and costs zero in licensing, however what changed my mind and turned me onto VMWare Fusion is the tight and fluid integration of Fusion into OSX.
Fusion has two operating modes, Basic or Unity. The basic mode behaves like Workstation or Virtual Box in the there is a virtual pc running on your desktop and once you grab focus of the virtual machine you will need to use a key combination (Mac command + Ctrl) to exit this mode. You will also need to copy the files between the devices or create appropriate shares so you can read files in both the guest and host operating systems.
In Unity mode all of that is forgotten and you can run a Windows application on what looks like directly on Mac OSX, that is how to tightly integrated VMWare Fusion is for OSX. It also offers to create handy links to the home file system to link to the same place as your Macintosh user. This means that using Fusion on the Mac is much more adaptable and forgivable for daily use. Hardware support is also very good and possibly better than competing virtualisation software such as Virtual Box.
The image above gives you a subtle hint at what to expect, you might not even notice for a moment that this Mac has some Windows Explorer action going on. Browsing my VMWare shared storage as shown in the image ! This type of attention to detail is pleasing from a users point of view and it make OSX the most integration Windows and Mac compatible computer available which means you do not have to struggle and are able to utilize the benefits and unique talents of each OS as well as avoid the pitfalls of not being able to easily use a Windows application without a second or non integrated Virtual Machine. As a paying user I can say that Fusion really is worth the money, going back on my original judgment !
