Parallels 7 vs Fusion 4 - and the winner is....

I have been using virtual machines for 3 years. I originally tested Fusion and Parallels and settled on Fusion. It was adequate for my business needs : MS Project and MS Visio. I did upgrade to Fusion 3 and then, most recently, Fusion 4. I am running a 2008 MBP with 6 Gb of RAM and I have a 7200 rpm 1/2 Terabyte drive running OSX 10.7.2.

Fusion 4, for me, has performed less than stellar. I find it to be slow, jerky and I get a LOT of spinning beach balls when working between OSX Lion and Fusion 4. YES, I have tweaked the memory and other values to get it running at its best but it has been frustrating. Out of frustration, I downloaded Parallels 7 and installed it. I converted my Fusion 4 virtual machine to Parallels 7 which when smoothly. Guess what? It definitely runs better than Fusion 4. The windows 7 virtual environment is stable and works MUCH better than Fusion 4 with less spinning beach balls in my Mac environment.

In the past I have posted threads praising Fusion but, with rev. 4, they lost me. I am not a Gamer, just a business user wanting to run key MS apps in a fast and stable environment.

Bravo Parallels team!


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Read the 7th post in this thread...there is an update re: Fusion 4.1 which was released today.
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dukebound85 said:

I have always used virtual box and never ever had issues. Have you ever looked into that app?

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I have, but with limited success and found it to be too unstable for my needs.

dyn said:

Have you also tried the new Fusion 4.1 that was released today? It has some performance improvements and some graphic improvements.

One of the most commonly made mistakes is thinking that by using the virtual cpu (or vCPU) in Fusion the vm will be tied to a cpu or cpu core. It doesn't. The only thing it does is give your vm 2 cpu's, virtual ones. You need to have twice as many physical cpu/cores for that. So with a quad core cpu you can have 1 vm with a max of 2 vcpus. Make it 4 and you will run into lots of performance problems. I doubt that this will be the problem in your case as you've been tweaking the settings.

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I will try Fusion 4.1....will update later today or this weekend. Thx

Well, well, well...

dyn said:

Have you also tried the new Fusion 4.1 that was released today? It has some performance improvements and some graphic improvements.

Click to expand...

I have just installed and tried Fusion 4.1. It is MUCH better, performance wise, than 4.0. Actually it is quite snappy.

More testing is needed but, at first blush, Fusion 4.1 and Parallels 7 are performing equally.