To understand what I am harking on about, you need to understand how both the VMware and Parallels NAT implementations work. The creators of VirtualBox are incredibly helpful and intelligent, but much like the wonderful people behind the Milwaukee Sawzall (which despite several incarnations, still throws waste back into the eye of the user) need to use their creation a bit more in the real world. VirtualBox does have one major issue that was almost a non-starter for me - its terrible network address translation (NAT) implementation. Right now it is just too much of a moving target for them to concern themselves with.

But, to the credit of the community, one of the VirtualBox developers mentioned that this is a known bug and will be fixed when the final version of Snow Leopard is released (I’m running the latest developer’s build of Snow Leopard). Albeit, there are a few annoying bugs such as it always wanting me to re-authenticate whenever I perform a seemingly innocuous action (clicking on the help menu for example). VirtualBox is a wonderful hypervisor, it has active community forums and members waiting to assist you on its internet relay chat (IRC) channel.

As I’m a fan of open source, and VirtualBox is free compared to Parallel’s 79 United States Dollars (USD) price tag, I chose VirtualBox. So the decision that had to be made was, “Which hypervisor do I use?” It really boiled down to two choices: Parallels Desktop for Mac or VirtualBox. Fusion has a nice feature set, but I have never known a program to be more of a resource hog, or to be so annoying (always grabbing my input, yanking me into another space) as VMware Fusion for OS X. Another decision I made was to forgo VMware Fusion for a more light-weight desktop hypervisor. Since I was forced to rebuild my system I decided to do a clean install and not copy over any preferences from my backups, just the data that I needed (documents, secure shell (SSH) keys, music, etc.).

Parallels bridged network greyed out