To answer your original question anyway: yes your right it's kind of like Virtual box - but they do specialty products. Data center virtualisation for example.
We use the VMWare workstation product and it's a really solid piece of kit (as others have said; they know their technology)
I'm interested in testing deployments locally with some virtualization. Currently I've been looking at doing this with a Python library against VirtualBox. Would I perhaps be better off doing this with a free variant of VMWare? (currently looking at http://github.com/cloudkick/libcloud/blob/master/libcloud/dr...) - are vCloud and workstation solutions mutually exclusive products? Sorry for questionnaire dump!
Im not sure if that works with VMWare workstation or not - I cant see anything obvious which says yea or nay.
We have an in-house cloud but the only virualisation we use is for the management nodes - for which we use Virtual box (everything else is just commodity servers).
Or in other words: I've only ever work with VMWare workstation on individual mounted disks. With that said it works solidly for pretty much and disk/OS setup you can throw at it. Of the 100's of computers we process monthly it handles 99.99% without a hiccup.
We use the VMWare workstation product and it's a really solid piece of kit (as others have said; they know their technology)