I thought you might also like a reply from another end-user.
Yes, Fusion would work great for what you describe. You can have your running VMs and host Mac all tied together as if they were on a single network.
In this regard (running multiple networked VMs) the two immediate differences between the Workstation product and Fusion for the Mac are:
- Fusion currently doesn't offer the 'teaming' feature that Workstation does. Which essentially means that you have to manually start up the multiple VMs you want to use together. While teaming would be a convenient feature to have, it's not a big deal (for me). Clearly, it's a feature more suited for developers and seems a bit more appropriate for Workstation rather than Fusion.
- Fusion doesn't easily (i.e. using the GUI) allow you to have detailed control over multiple network interfaces for each VM. If you intend all your VMs to be networked together as if on a common LAN segment, then no problem. On the other hand, if you're testing a VM that will straddle two distinct virtual network segments (e.g. you're testing a VM acting as a firewall) and you need to specific control of the network parameters for each interface, you're going to have to manually edit a few config files outside of the GUI. Again, unless you have specific requirements such as the aforementioned firewall example, Fusion's available networking options should work just fine for the majority of scenarios where you need to connect multiple VMs.
