I hate VMWare Fusion. I installed it on my original Macbook.
TERRIBLE customer support. Complete disdain for their customers. They ignore all emails and phone calls.
VMWare Fusion is the WORST. Do not buy it.
I think you might have gotten a mislabeled product because that's what Parallels' #1 complaint across the Interwebs is - support. VMWare, being a much larger and more established company, has the boards, email, and phone, and diligent folks have had no problems getting support.
OP: Having used them all in various versions over the years I can tell you this with confidence.
Parallels - The fastest of the three, bar none, seemingly designed from the ground up to be the best Mac OS virtualization experience. Best migration tool of the three, supports swipe gestures. More flexibility for memory allocation. HOWEVER, it is extremely unstable. VMs that corrupt themselves over time, snapshots that get corrupted and hose the VM, VM sizing issues, plus not every OS is supported. Parallels support is nonexistent.
VirtualBox - Obviously the cost advantage (free), and better support for non-Windows environments. Smallest overall footprint. Issue here is compatibility. Does not support popular gestures. Small customer base means it's not easy to share with others as they're likely using one of the other two. Does not hold up well when run for the long term.
VMWare Fusion - The pioneers of virtualization and the gold standard in business applications means more money in the coffers for support and updates. Cautious about how they deploy fixes and patches. Supports a wide variety of operating systems including full server support. VMs are interoperable with Windows with no file conversion necessary. Problem with VMWare Fusion is that they are not nearly as up-to-date as their other products and don't seem to care to be. Drivers still don't support the latest Windows technologies properly. Aero hogs the VM's resources severely, unlike Parallels which seems to run it just fine (this is a graphics card driver issue). Does not support swipe gestures for zooming and other things.
Of the three I prefer VMWare, simply for the interoperability. I get VMs shared from various places and it's nice to be able to plug-and-play rather than have to do conversions and all that. Additionally, VMWare seems to work the best with the various flavors of Windows as hosts, which is the only other OS I use.
If you're using non-Windows OS, you'd probably have a better experience on VirtualBox.
Personal experiences.
