A real mixed-bag here. I absolutely have to virtualize many environments (school, still the crazy occasional need for Windows, plus all kinds of junk I just don't want to install directly on dedicated hardware, like state-mandated-testing-servers). For years I used Fusion after older versions of Parallels proved terribly unreliable (we are talking 7 or 8 years back). However, Fusion recently dropped support for the vast majority of our hardware, including ALL of our servers (Mac Pro 4,1s flashed to 5,1s). Apparently VMWare doesn't want our business - So it was back to Parallels. VMWare loses our business even for those systems that they do still support because I try to standardize as much as possible.
The good; Parallels 13 (and now 14) installed quickly, converted VMWare images with few problems and is much, MUCH faster than VMWare. The difference is stark. VMWare was routinely performing poorly, and would even drag the host computer to a crawl at times. With Parallels we see none of those performance issues whatsoever. Both the virtualized environments and the host systems run very quickly. It's also been rock-solid on every system so far, something it sure wasn't all those years ago when I had to abandon trying to use it. In fact, it's been successfully running VMs that used to routinely lock-up in VMWare, such as legacy WinXP installs. I'm happily surprised.
The cons? They still hide the guest-os installation process behind a fake "installing" screen, causing problems when you do need to troubleshoot, and they only allow a single license to be installed once (trying to do so again requires deactivating the prior install), meaning that if a single person uses it on both a laptop and a desktop they will need two licenses; something nearly every other software house no longer does, at least not in the Mac world. It's not a terribly expensive product, but that's still just an absurd way to work.
