VMWare v. Parallels
- Thread starter ChAoTiCpInOy
- Start date
Parallels and Fusion both accomplish the same tasks and pretty much provide the same functionality.
Fusion has Unity which lets your Windows windows sit on the OS X desktop as if they were native. The plus side to this is that they respond to Expose, have drop shadows, and there is no pesky taskbar.
Parallels has Cohesion which does much the same way, just not as polished IMO, but that may have changed since I last played with it.
I personally find that Fusion runs smoother on my machine than Parallels, but others feel the exact opposite. So I would recommend getting the trials for both of them and giving them a whirl.
Fusion has Unity which lets your Windows windows sit on the OS X desktop as if they were native. The plus side to this is that they respond to Expose, have drop shadows, and there is no pesky taskbar.
Parallels has Cohesion which does much the same way, just not as polished IMO, but that may have changed since I last played with it.
I personally find that Fusion runs smoother on my machine than Parallels, but others feel the exact opposite. So I would recommend getting the trials for both of them and giving them a whirl.
For Parallels you can, but I'm not sure about Fusion. But running a boot camp partition instead of an image is alot slower. I don't know why that is, but I eventually ended up getting rid of my bootcamp, to run windows xp from a disc image/virtual whatever. It's a hell lot faster that way.
You can run Boot Camp from VMWare, no problem whatsoever. Running from the bootcamp is handy if you want to have a dedicated windows install for gaming and other high level needs, but if you just need to do something quickly, or whatnot, run it in a VM
TheStu has the right idea, if it's just regular things like creating word documents then using the virutal machine would be fine, but if you want the full capabilities of your computer, then you boot into Boot Camp. Are there any differences between Fusion and Parallels? Anything that distiguishes one from another?
Basically just the polish really. And like I said earlier, some people have better results with one or the other.
I personally have preferred VMWare Fusion since Beta 3, but at that time, Parallels was only in V2.
I started up fusion again because parallels crashed hard on me.. and took out weird stuff.. like spotlight stopped working right. my dhcp died too.. but now I'm not sure if it was just coincidental because I formatted (both to fix things, and install boot camp, it wouldn't let me w/o a fresh format).
Parallels 3.0 was an upgrade mistake IMO. It seems less stable than either 2.x or what Fusion has now. Support from what I hear is a little lackluster, altho I'm sure they'll work out the bugs.
Fusion has VMWare behind it.. which is pretty big. Parallels has SWSoft, but for virtualization, I hear more about VMWare. They have a larger appliance support if it's what you need, and I hear it's easier to manage your VM's (it's all one container). I do have an issue w/ my mouse in that until I click outside of my VM back into OS X on first boot, the sensitivity is off the charts. After I click tho, it readjusts properly. Yes, I have VMWare Tools installed.
Right now, VMware is offering a $20 rebate if you buy from their store. I wish I preordered so I could have gotten $40 off instantly though, but I had bought the Parallels 3 upgrade already.
Performancewise, if you have a Mac Pro, get VMWare.. it supports multiple cores now. And does it well from what I could tell. It seems to a bit faster than Parallels 3.0 (when priority is set for the mac).
Right now I'm just trying to get bootcamp to work, heh.
Parallels 3.0 was an upgrade mistake IMO. It seems less stable than either 2.x or what Fusion has now. Support from what I hear is a little lackluster, altho I'm sure they'll work out the bugs.
Fusion has VMWare behind it.. which is pretty big. Parallels has SWSoft, but for virtualization, I hear more about VMWare. They have a larger appliance support if it's what you need, and I hear it's easier to manage your VM's (it's all one container). I do have an issue w/ my mouse in that until I click outside of my VM back into OS X on first boot, the sensitivity is off the charts. After I click tho, it readjusts properly. Yes, I have VMWare Tools installed.
Right now, VMware is offering a $20 rebate if you buy from their store. I wish I preordered so I could have gotten $40 off instantly though, but I had bought the Parallels 3 upgrade already.
Performancewise, if you have a Mac Pro, get VMWare.. it supports multiple cores now. And does it well from what I could tell. It seems to a bit faster than Parallels 3.0 (when priority is set for the mac).
Right now I'm just trying to get bootcamp to work, heh.
On a Mac mini (integrated gma950
) there is no question that Vmware comes out on top. I use it for a variety of uses and love it ( got it for $30 too) The video performance is clear as day. Parallels would struggle with everything, and yet Vmware was able to play the Netflix streaming movies in full screen...
this on a mac mini , 1.66ghz core duo, 2GB ram, 60Gb HD and of course the integrated intel gma950 ...quite slow
I found that Parallels seems to have more bells and whistles, but at the end of the day all I want to do is use the guest operating system, and Vmware is best at that.
Oh, and the multi-core deal is hot.
) there is no question that Vmware comes out on top. I use it for a variety of uses and love it ( got it for $30 too) The video performance is clear as day. Parallels would struggle with everything, and yet Vmware was able to play the Netflix streaming movies in full screen...this on a mac mini , 1.66ghz core duo, 2GB ram, 60Gb HD
and of course the integrated intel gma950 ...quite slowI found that Parallels seems to have more bells and whistles, but at the end of the day all I want to do is use the guest operating system, and Vmware is best at that.
Oh, and the multi-core deal is hot.
Sorry if I'm sounding like a broken record, but Goosemaster said something about bells and whistles, what would those be?
Kadarin
Lifer
- Nov 23, 2001
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I'm using Parallels, and the only issue I have run into is that the VM won't start when I have OSX piped to an external monitor (Dell 30") with the MacBook Pro lid closed. It complains that it can't allocate memory.
Parallels offers limited 3D hardware support, to the point where EVE-Online will launch in the VM. However, it's buggy in that there are all kinds of weird artifacts and whatnot. This isn't a bug per se, in that 3D support isn't by any means complete.
Speed isn't an issue with Parallels on the MacBook Pro, for applications that I have tried.
Parallels offers limited 3D hardware support, to the point where EVE-Online will launch in the VM. However, it's buggy in that there are all kinds of weird artifacts and whatnot. This isn't a bug per se, in that 3D support isn't by any means complete.
Speed isn't an issue with Parallels on the MacBook Pro, for applications that I have tried.
At least from the experiences I had with it, OS X integration (the cohesion integration stuff) and snapshots and the gui consistency (the Vms flip over like widgets do in Dashboard)
Frankly it goes a long wa to feel like a part of OSX, but at least for me, that wasn't what I found to be important.
Once again, keep in mind that I am on limited hardware, and my main point is that vmware's usage of Direct X 8.1 works out better for me on limited hardware. for all I know, parallels could kick ass with good hardware.
From what I read, the user experience is pretty similar when you factor out the multiple cores support of Fusion, and ou get perks with each.
Try try 'em out on your hardware and see what works best.
I think the key is that while both are new products (in terms of inexpensive and user-friendly vritualization on the desktop) seem to perform quite maturely despite their age.
have fun
The free trials are definitely worth looking into.Originally posted by: Goosemaster
Try try 'em out on your hardware and see what works best.
I think the key is that while both are new products (in terms of inexpensive and user-friendly vritualization on the desktop) seem to perform quite maturely despite their age.
have fun
I wouldn't say these are new products. Parallels is in its second major release; and VMware Fusion 1.0 is built off of a highly mature VMware product family. Virtualization hasn't been a mainstream product (until possibly now) but I can't recall VMware botching a software release in the past.
64-bit guest OS and multi-core CPU support.
Compatible w/ VMware "virtual appliances".
I think he was referring to what bells and whistles parallels has over vmware.
at one point, it was coherence, but VMWare hit back w/ unity. Right now, I find parallels far easier to share files. I use a VM to transfer files from my Mac to an NTFS drive, paralllels was slow, but it worked (I'm talking nearly 50GB's). VMWare looked like it was buffering it somewhere, and crashed the copy. I'm not sure who has the better USB 2.0 support though.
Does VMWare have anything like parallels explorer, which basically lets you browse the VM w/o "turning it on." I haven't dug too deep into VMware, I'm just playing w/ booting from boot camp partitions.
You also get Kaspersky w/ Parallels. And parallels transporter takes your pc and turns it into a paralllels image, no idea how well it works though.
As you can see, Parallels definitely has it's own strengths. With regards to calling them "new," they are indeed new products in that they bring strong virtualization to the normal user base.
Vmware has always had a great workstation product, but it is designed more for a development workflow, and it's cost and feature-set are prohibitive and useless, respectively, for the average user.
Once again, things such as free client AV, and a very OSX-like interface make parallels very attractive to a certain crowd, while Vmware's ability to fully take advantage of multiple cores and addressing more memory make it more appealing to another crowd.
As it's been pointed out, try them out and see what you think
im going to try VMware Fusion tonight. i set it downloading before i came to work.
for me though parallels works fine. it was SUPER quick to boot XP if you had it installed through parallels, but now that i set up a bootcamp partition and set parallels to boot a VM from that it is a lot slower, and you cant really do anything heavy in OSX whiles its loading XP either because XP is doing its trademark HDD thrashing for ages (MacOS never seems to do this) also because you now have a NTFS partition with XP on it.... you get another disk drive on your OSX desktop, and then you must put in your password at least twice before paralles will boot from it (i think one is to run the VM, 2nd time is to unmount the partition from OSX to use with parallels) and then you have to put in your password a third time when you stop the VM (permission to let OSX remount the XP partition)
apart from the slower boot ups, password input, and HDD thrashing.... once its loaded its nice and quick. i have AVG free edition installed on XP, but when i use parallels AVG cant find its licence and it complains.
oh, dont bother trying to play videos in xp thru parallels....the results arent very good generally.
but i can use dynamic photo HDR with ease and its very quick. however it quits without error when you try to start a new HDRI (after already completing one HDRI)
for me though parallels works fine. it was SUPER quick to boot XP if you had it installed through parallels, but now that i set up a bootcamp partition and set parallels to boot a VM from that it is a lot slower, and you cant really do anything heavy in OSX whiles its loading XP either because XP is doing its trademark HDD thrashing for ages (MacOS never seems to do this) also because you now have a NTFS partition with XP on it.... you get another disk drive on your OSX desktop, and then you must put in your password at least twice before paralles will boot from it (i think one is to run the VM, 2nd time is to unmount the partition from OSX to use with parallels) and then you have to put in your password a third time when you stop the VM (permission to let OSX remount the XP partition)
apart from the slower boot ups, password input, and HDD thrashing.... once its loaded its nice and quick. i have AVG free edition installed on XP, but when i use parallels AVG cant find its licence and it complains.
oh, dont bother trying to play videos in xp thru parallels....the results arent very good generally.
but i can use dynamic photo HDR with ease and its very quick. however it quits without error when you try to start a new HDRI (after already completing one HDRI)
Ripped from FatWallet.
http://crave.cnet.com/8301-1_105-9760910-1.html
VMware Fusion is cheap at Amazon & Frys.com right now, after rebate(s).
http://crave.cnet.com/8301-1_105-9760910-1.html
VMware Fusion is cheap at Amazon & Frys.com right now, after rebate(s).
nice. I might get it. Altho I'm having huge problems trying to copy files to my boot camp partition (which is NTFS). It always fails with large groups of files. Anyone else? I'm talking like gigs of data...
They just released a new version of parallels. (beta 2)
Supposed to have some improvements in general performance as well as coherence.
Added a new feature to use your Mac docs/pictures/desktop as the windows pics/docs/desktop. pretty neat.
http://www.parallels.com/en/products/desktop/beta/
Supposed to have some improvements in general performance as well as coherence.
Added a new feature to use your Mac docs/pictures/desktop as the windows pics/docs/desktop. pretty neat.
http://www.parallels.com/en/products/desktop/beta/
The Parallels Desktop update was recently released.
And VMware Fusion 1.1 beta is out today with DirectX 9 support.
And VMware Fusion 1.1 beta is out today with DirectX 9 support.
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