[bossy22]

Originally Posted by sclitheroe

That's where I'm leaning - I'd run the PC apps in VMware Fusion (or Parallels, but VMware is the better of the two imho), and what I would do is set up folder sharing with whichever virtualization product you choose, rather than copy all the work related data into the VM itself. This means the data will live in a folder on the Mac, that the VM will see as a mapped network drive (that's how VMware does it, I assume Parallels works the same way or something similar)

Why would I do it this way? Because then, when the external drive gets repurposed for Time Machine, the individual work files get saved as distinct versions each time they change. If they are inside the VM, you'll only be backing up the VM (since a VM is essentially a collection of very large files representing a physical disk), which makes recovering a previous version of a data file awkward (extremely awkward in fact).

I'd stay away from bootcamp, unless you want to game (and if you want to game, the iMac is the wrong choice regardless). For anything other than CAD or other 3D apps, the performance of virtualization is more than sufficient, and you gain all the benefits of other tools like VM snapshots, the time machine backups, etc, that you don't get with a bootcamp setup.

That's awesome, thanks!