I had not really tried Parallels Desktop before this review, since I was more familiar with VMware and the other client in this review, VirtualBox. But having used it for the past week in an office environment on an OS X Lion machine, I have to say I came away impressed.

Parallels Desktop is a commercial-only client, which means that, after the 14-day trial, you're going to have to pay for it; there's no free "mini" version as with VMware Player. At $79.99, it's not as sharp of a bite on the wallet as VMware Workstation, but that's still something to pay attention to.

Parallels, the company, seems focused on the Mac version of the Desktop product, though there are Windows and Linux versions of the Desktop client as well. But while Desktop for Mac is up at version 7, Desktop for Windows and Linux is all the way back at version 4. Interestingly, that $79.99 list price applies to all versions of the software -- something I found interesting because the Desktop 7 for Mac seemed to be loaded with better features.

The most important of these was Parallel's Coherence view. Like Unity in VMware, it integrates the windows and menus from the guest virtual machine into the native machine. It does a very good job, too, as I found when I ran Internet Explorer on my OS X desktop alongside Firefox 6.

Parallels is, in my opinion, the friendliest VM client to set up. It was simple to set up new virtual machines, and you can even purchase a Windows 7 license from within Parallels to use directly on the Desktop client.