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Parallels Desktop or VMware Fusion?

J

Josh Kahane

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Aug 29, 2006
439
1
Suffolk, UK
Hi

I know there is an endless amount of videos, forums threads and posts and articles about which is better out of Parallels Desktop and VMware Fusion, but its hard to get a decision, as they are all very mixed opinions.

Simply, which is best? You say what you think, and it would be great to also have a few reasons why one is better or worse over the other. Thanks.
 
My preference is for Fusion. VMware have been in the virtualisation business for a long time, the Fusion product is fast, simple and stable.

fusion vs parallels [MRoogle search]
 
VMware, parallels screwed up my mates imac and he had to reinstall the whole machine!!


I have VMware and it is brilliant!



Simon
 
Happy with Parallels 4.0

I originally bought 3.0 only to find out that there was a free update to 4.0
Had to fill in some form and details over the net and give my code
About 3 days later I received an email with new code. I had already downloaded that version and it installed with ease.
Had to find out how to make the Imac camera work in Windows which I did.

I have also installed another 2 GB RAM purchased on the net from Crucial ( great and fast service)

I am very happy with Parallels and all programs work fine.
There were 3 programs I use that were not available for Macs, hence my decision to purchase Parallels
Can highly recommend it

Bert from Brisbane Australia
 
Your question is probably too vague for anything but another round of people yelling thnigs like,Get X I have it, or my friends Gran's Budgie says X can break your machine so use Y, etc.

Though to be honest even with questions on specific areas there is not really much in it. They are both excellent products.

If you are more familer with one then go with that, otherwise look for the one with tee best offer on!

And more importantly, whichever one you go for, put as much RAM in your machine as you can! VM's are a lot smoother on a machine with more RAM.
 
I have used VMWare and Parallels 4. In my opinion it depends on what you use it for, but for my needs I like parallels 4. Although, I also found VMWare Fusion to be very reliable and quicker. The thing that I liked about parallel is that it used my actual files, rather than having to drag stuff around between my Virtual and my mac.
 
VMWare Fusion

The choice should be made on how you want to use Parallels or Fusion. After much research, I went with Fusion.

I have a "Web Developer" setup running SQL Server Express 2.5, Internet Information Server, multiple browsers all on a NAT network.

I've defined a static IP and created a hostname on the Mac side so I can access the Windows IIS server and SQL server without ever having to use the Windows interface. I can access all my remote database connections through Dreamweaver. Overall, I am extremely pleased with the performance of Fusion. However, I do wish it was a little faster with Quicken 2009 which I also have installed.
 
I started out with Parallels. It worked but had some bugs.

Recently switched to Fusion and am pretty happy with it.
 
If you use Boot Camp, Fusion will use your existing Boot Camp partition as a virtual machine - no need to reinstall.

I've never used Parallels, anybody know if it can do this as well?
 
Download the demo for each. If you have a copy of windows, install that same copy of windows on each virtual machine. You have 30 days to activate windows. You have 30 days to demo Parallels and Fusion (but don't try to run each one at the same time; you could screw something up). See which one you like. Buy.


James
 
i just started using parallels a few hours ago and found it to be okay. wots so slow about it. i tried playn gta vice city and it was unplayable,i could be doing something wrong.but if i really wonna play the game ill just log into xp.
 
Not to hijack the thread, but I have a similar question which would be better for playing games, mainly Source engine/valve games i.e TF2/Half life etc
 
The SpinDoctor said:
Not to hijack the thread, but I have a similar question which would be better for playing games, mainly Source engine/valve games i.e TF2/Half life etc
Click to expand...
Well all the benchmarks I have seen show VMware to be faster, but not by much. Nether are particularly playable for anything made in the last few years. If you don't want to reboot into Windows to play games, then your best bet would be cross over games (assuming it supports the game you want to play).
 
I read somewhere that while using Fusion or Parallels you don't need to worry about viruses affecting your Mac. What about when using bootcamp; since you're on the Windows OS, and not mac OS X (which I know doesn't get infected) you'd need the protection right?
 
I have never used parallels, but recently acquired Fusion recently. Setup was a breeze and I have enjoyed using it and upgraded for free.
 
I have owned both but now use neither of them. All my virtualization is done with VirtualBox. Works great, is less of a resource hog, and my VM's are easily transferable between host OS's (linux, mac, and windows).
 
abominablerror said:
I read somewhere that while using Fusion or Parallels you don't need to worry about viruses affecting your Mac. What about when using bootcamp; since you're on the Windows OS, and not mac OS X (which I know doesn't get infected) you'd need the protection right?
Click to expand...
In either instance, the viruses would only be affecting either the windows partition or its VM, depending on how you're running it.
 
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