> We're looking to spend a max of $1600 on the hardware. I've already tried running vmware on my personal laptop for which my 32-bit processor is not suited for

> We're looking to spend a max of $1600 on the hardware. I've already tried running vmware on my personal laptop for which my 32-bit processor is not suited for running a 64-bit OS. If your machine is IA32 it's probably also extremely old. > Is there anything especially important to watch out for while virtualizing OSX? If you're talking about OSX and not Darwin: #1 is that it's of dubious legality (to say the least) - Only the server version is explictly available to run in a VM. #2 is that the performance will probably be woeful - and likely woeful to being unusable. Particularly if your budget is $800. There is more, but #1 and #2 are big enough issues in themselves. For $800 each you could get a Mac Mini, which is probably good enough depending on your needs. You can probably get an older Mini on eBay a lot cheaper.