I'm currently working on a task where I needed to create a virtual machine. Typically my virualization software of choice is VMware (Server and Fusion depending on platform). In this particular case I was working on an 8 core Mac Pro and had a paid version of Parallels Desktop 3.0.

This was my first go-around with Parallels. My mission was simple, I needed to create a dev environment running a LAMP stack on Centos 5.2 (RHEL5). Considering I had a freshly purchased copy of Parallels it should have been trivial. It wasn't. I couldn't get Centos to install. Kernel panics every time! I spent an hour slogging through message boards and tried various kernel config options, CPU emulation settings, etc. No matter what I tried I still got kernel panics.

Having gone through this routine dozens of times using VMWare Fusion i was about to bite the bullet and just buy another copy, then I remembered VirtualBox. Having (fairly) recently been taken over by SUN i figured it was a little more mature since last time I attempted to run it on a Mac.

I downloaded it, installed it and pointed it to the Centos ISO. Boom! In about 10 minutes I was rocking a virtualized LAMP server. Moral of the story... Open Source Software rocks!

** Update **

VirtualBox performance is excellent and the admin interface is easy and intuitive. My only gripe is a large one. The OSX version only supports NAT networking. Yes, NAT supports port forwarding, but it is inelegant and "hacky". Until VirtualBox supports bridged networking out of the box I'd have to give it a grade of B-. SUN are you reading this?