by Stuart Mealor.
As a Mac user, I've used VMWare and Parallels, and I now only use VirtuaBox (just let me Parallels licence lapse a month ago).
VirtuaBox is complete free, and very good indeed.
I'll be presenting about writing MySQL queries for Moodle at the AU Moot next week, using Ubuntu Server running in VirtualBox on a MacBook Air - works perfectly