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You are here: MacNN Forums > Software - Troubleshooting and Discussion > Alternative Operating Systems > VMware fusion vs. Parallels

VMware fusion vs. Parallels (Page 2)
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dprichard
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Aug 22, 2007, 03:52 PM
 
Originally Posted by chefpastry View Post
I would appreciate test of specific apps to see the differences. Secondly, I'd like to know if there are differences when using a virtual drive as opposed to using a Boot Camp partition.

Thanks.
Tell us what apps you would like for us to test. We also did a test on Vista in Parallels and Fusion.

We still have all our test machines setup and can test whatever you want. Let us know what you would like to see.

Vista Parallels vs Vista Fusion
David A. Prichard
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dprichard
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Aug 22, 2007, 03:55 PM
 
Originally Posted by ghporter View Post
Welcome to the MacNN Forums! Just for the record, who is "we" in your post?
We = Guys that work at an IT company. We are trying to get our blog up and running full time, but only really have time to work on it at night and on weekends right now.
David A. Prichard
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dprichard
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Aug 22, 2007, 03:57 PM
 
Originally Posted by MacosNerd View Post
additionally I'm not sure what (or how) vmware does the virtual cpu thing, so by turning one off , how does that truly effect performance and how is that comparable to parallels.
I am working on round three of our speed test right now with the second processor enabled to see if there is much of a speed difference.
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chefpastry
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Aug 22, 2007, 04:43 PM
 
Originally Posted by dprichard View Post
Tell us what apps you would like for us to test. We also did a test on Vista in Parallels and Fusion.

We still have all our test machines setup and can test whatever you want. Let us know what you would like to see.

Vista Parallels vs Vista Fusion
I guess GeekBench and CineBench are good... Thanks!
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drkrueger
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Dec 17, 2007, 01:09 PM
 
I have been using VMWare Fusion 1.1 for several days on a Macbook Pro 2.16 Ghz, 1GB. Installation was smooth and effortless. More importantly, performance and ease of use far exceeded my expectations. While I don't have applications that beat the daylights out of an OS and cannot scientifically state performance characteristics, I can emphatically endorse the stellar performance at the keyboard. There is no lag or delay. The applications run and look perfectly. There is no heating up and the fan does not run. Switching between applications can be confusing only b/c it's so seamless you forget which OS you're in. I think I can say that Windows XP Home runs faster under VMware than natively on a Compaq x1000 laptop. I am thrilled with this product.
     
Toyin
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Dec 20, 2007, 09:26 PM
 
I've used both extensively and the last version of Fusion is the 1st one that I found useable. I used it for a couple of weeks recently because I needed Shared Networking and that option was dropped from Parallels in one of the beta builds (it's back now).

My pet peeves with Fusion
-Now almost as fast as Parallels.
-Graphics are not as good as Parallels. A lot of flickering. Start bar doesn't fill in until you run the mouse over it
-STILL kills my airport connection after several minutes to hours. At least I can reconnect to airport without having to shut down Fusion.
-cmd-tab, cmd-H, cmd-Q don't work as they should.
-Harder to share files between both environments

Even with these issues, I was poised to start using Fusion as my default, but then Parallels released their latest build that re-introduced shared networking. It's definitely faster then Fusion and now there are benchmarks to prove it. I didn't realize how much I missed smart select and the more seamless nature of Parallels. This latest build also resumes from suspension in about 2-3 seconds, unlike the 30+ seconds of Fusion and previous Parallels builds.
-Toyin
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chefpastry
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Dec 20, 2007, 10:15 PM
 
I always felt that Fusion was slower than Parallels (especially networking). I'm happy to find out that I'm not crazy.

The one thing that I've noticed about the last few beta builds of Parallels is that I have difficulty burning DL discs. I also think that the latest build of Fusion has gotten more stable.
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PaperNotes
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Dec 21, 2007, 08:16 AM
 
VMWare leaves some invisible crap lying around after you uninstall it.
     
chefpastry
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Dec 21, 2007, 10:14 AM
 
Originally Posted by PaperNotes View Post
VMWare leaves some invisible crap lying around after you uninstall it.
Do you know where and which files they are? Thanks.
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Cold Warrior
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Dec 21, 2007, 12:43 PM
 
If you're having issues with Fusion, try deleting everything from it -- caches, prefs, application support stuff, etc. -- and reinstall it. Cumbersome, I know, but it fixed an ugly shared networking issue I was having.
     
PaperNotes
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Dec 21, 2007, 01:04 PM
 
Originally Posted by chefpastry View Post
Do you know where and which files they are? Thanks.
It leaves some crap in a hidden folder in your Windows partition under Users/something/something/Application Data. It also modifies launchd on OS X. See the Console for exactly what.
     
zeetime
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Aug 25, 2008, 01:18 PM
 
I own a catering company and for almost 2 years I have been dealing with the MESS that Parallels puts out... sluggish... does not see devices... etc. I was at the Apple store in Charlotte and spoke to a tech that highly recommended Fusion... I did a little research and did not come up with too many wonderful things about Fusion... everything pointed to Parallels being the better. I was depsperate and would try anything at this point. I reinstalled everything on my system last week and now installed VMWARE FUSION... let me tell you this is AWESOME... so seamly, and fast ... no problems what so ever. I wish I had done this months ago. Thanks Mac Geniuses, you are all great and help me so much everytime I come in. So to any of you thinking abutt Fusion... go for it!
     
forumhound
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Aug 25, 2008, 02:57 PM
 
hi all, does anyone know if there will ever be firewire support in PD? there was a point in time i needed to capture video thru a camera there...not sure i need that now, but i think i wanted to capture via premiere pro into an avi container instead of the normal qt format...thx! ps. does VMware allow this?

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webjive
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Aug 27, 2008, 10:42 PM
 
I got tired of parallels and fusion both and decided to give Sun's virtualbox a try. Not bad for a free product!

www.virtualbox.org

The only thing I really need to boot windows for is testing websites in IE6&7 so I don't need all the bells and whistles. Now it's all I use. I don't see any speed differences between the 3 for this need so I'm not going to keep throwing money at it.

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calverson
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Aug 28, 2008, 03:37 AM
 
Try VirtualBox.

Free. Cross platform support. I admit that it is no where near where Parallels is (I have 3.0) but for a free app it works great, especially under Ubuntu.

And to use boot whatever you want (I have Slax on my flash disk, and can boot into it) use a program called refit which works really well, and supports booting just about anything from an arrary of devices.
     
wooky
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Aug 28, 2008, 10:41 AM
 
I think it has been just under 1.5 years that I have been using VMWare, Parallels and VirtualBox (as they became available for OS X)

VMWare Fusion and Parallels Desktop both have had stability issues on my 4 core xServe in the past, but I rarely see those issues now with the latest builds. Performance on all of them have been almost bare-metal speed. Fusion has the distasteful inability to assign a network interface to one of the bare-metal interfaces (without hacking around in some config files). Parallels Desktop handles this very elegantly. VirtualBox can't even bridge a single interface. Everything is NATed. That is no use to me. I hope they overcome this limitation on the Mac platform. There are other threads in their forums about this. All three products show great promise, but are not fully mature in my opinion. So what did I do? Spent over $1k for Parallels Server. I must be nuts. Talk about 'not fully mature'. It is stable. Just not feature complete. There is no snapshot feature yet but I am told that the next great release is due out in a few weeks time and is suppose to have this and several other missing features added.

-James N
( Last edited by wooky; Aug 28, 2008 at 10:51 AM. )
     
satdacvr
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Sep 3, 2008, 11:46 AM
 
I have 2 questions/problems with Fusion:

XP defaults to running on 512MB of RAM. When I boot XP thru Bootcamp it runs on 2GB. Why does Fusion allocate so little RAM to XP and can I increase it to speed things up?

I run 3 monitors. This works no problem thru Bootcamp. XP thru Fusion does not recognize my additional 2 monitors. Why? How can I fix this?
     
sek929
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Sep 3, 2008, 01:17 PM
 
Originally Posted by satdacvr View Post
XP defaults to running on 512MB of RAM. When I boot XP thru Bootcamp it runs on 2GB. Why does Fusion allocate so little RAM to XP and can I increase it to speed things up?
It's because when in Boot Camp it's running one OS natively instead of running two side-by-side.

In Fusion you can allocate as much RAM to XP as you physically have but if your machine has 2GB I'd say 1GB should work fine without bogging down your Mac.
     
luckado
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Sep 4, 2008, 01:35 PM
 
Originally Posted by satdacvr View Post
I have 2 questions/problems with Fusion:

XP defaults to running on 512MB of RAM. When I boot XP thru Bootcamp it runs on 2GB. Why does Fusion allocate so little RAM to XP and can I increase it to speed things up?

I run 3 monitors. This works no problem thru Bootcamp. XP thru Fusion does not recognize my additional 2 monitors. Why? How can I fix this?

Without being booted into your Boot Camp partition in Fusion, go into the Settings for the partition (click on your Boot Camp partition in the Fusion menu, then click "Settings"), and click on "Memory." Then change the amount of memory to the desired amount. IMPORTANT - don't allocate the entire 2GB. I usually suggest 1GB, which is what I use. Runs very smooth on 1GB with XP, I can run Outlook, multiple instances of Firefox, etc. with no problems. You can go higher if you upgrade the amount of memory in your Mac; I currently run 4GB, but still only have 1GB allocated for Fusion.

Currently, version 1(.0 through .1.3) of VMWare Fusion does not support multiple monitors, so there is nothing you can do to "fix" this. According to VMWare, the next version of Fusion (2.0) will have multiple monitor support. The beta version is out now if you want to give it a try, but personally, I am going to wait until the final release, since I depend on Fusion to get my work done.
     
lteo
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Sep 4, 2008, 10:40 PM
 
I'm a very happy VMware Fusion user. So far it has managed to run all the OS'es I've thrown at it successfully -- XP, Vista, Ubuntu, OpenSUSE, Zenwalk, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD. Plus I also use VMware Server and am accustomed to VMware-style GUIs.

i've never tried Parallels.

I tried VirtualBox once but ran into show-stopping issues running OpenBSD on VirtualBox 1.6, which I needed to use for work. I'm sure VirtualBox would run Windows and Linux fine though. But one needs to be aware that there are actually two versions of VirtualBox -- free and non-free (or rather, partially-free). Only the "partially-free" version comes with binaries for Mac OS X. I elaborated on that on my blog post.
     
 
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