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Parallels / Fusion on MB Air M3

Biko65

Biko65

macrumors member
Original poster
Feb 5, 2009
47
36
Italy
Just pulled the trigger on M3 MBA 1TB 24GB Ram...I have quite an experience running VmWare on Windows systems but almost never used Parallels or recent version of Fusion.
Anyone can share his experience running virtual machines on such software/hardware combination ?

Thanks
 
It will not be like running the VMs on a "wintel" machine. The only OS you can virtualize will be ARM (Windows ARM or a Linux ARM), and it's early days for those distros. Driver emulation is dodgy. ARM versions of some apps are simply not ready for prime time (AutoCad/3DSMax and Adobe Acrobat) and even MS Office will try your patience. There will be lots of tinkering.
 
ipaqrat said:
It will not be like running the VMs on a "wintel" machine.
Click to expand...
Yeah thank you, I get that, the ARM version of Windows might not be optimized....what about other virtual session of MacOS under Fusion or Parallel...? In you opinion, given an initial 24GB amount of physical RAM, will I be able to run a couple of 6GB virtual sessions ?
 
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Sry, misunderstood the ask... yeah, I think you can get away smaller slices of RAM out of 24 GB, still leaving enough for the host to run. I found the M's cope with VMs as well or better than my older intel Core laptops.

Industrial Unix, itself, has always been virtualization friendly - sorta like Hyper-V after Microsoft bought finally up enough intellectual property. MacOS does have a hypervisor capability built in - you feed it an IPSW and a bootable restore image DMG. It's slog through the configurations, though; kinda frustrating for me, as I'm terrible with keyboards.

As expected, vmWare, Parallels and VirtualBox have nicer VM management tools, but no performance advantage over the MacOS built in hypervisor when virtualizing MacOS itself.
 
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I’ve got the new MacBook Air m3 with 16gb ram and also a M2 Max studio with 64fb ram both running fine with VMware.

I am mostly just using it for a simple windows application written in .net 4 and (I’ve developed it myself) and also Visual Studio, and it seems to run fine.

I used to run it with my old MacBook Pro 2016 with 16gb ram and windows 7, and both the M2 Max and m3 runs much quicker than my older MacBook Pro 2016 with i5 dual core.

However since I’ve only got 16gb ram with my m3 mba I have to allocate less memory to it than my Mac Studio (I think 4gb or 6gb, cannot remember as I don’t have it with me now). It runs ok with no noticeable slowdown however 8gb was pushing it as I think 8gb wasn’t enough for Mac OS on its own.

With 24gb I think you will be fine.

What do you do with your VM usually?
 
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I run ARM Windows 11 Parallels desktop on my M2 MacBook Air with 16 GBs of RAM and am super happy with the performance. I multitask within it and do 3d gaming.

Parallels desktop comes with a free trial. Give it a go.
 
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Biko65 said:
Just pulled the trigger on M3 MBA 1TB 24GB Ram...I have quite an experience running VmWare on Windows systems but almost never used Parallels or recent version of Fusion.
Anyone can share his experience running virtual machines on such software/hardware combination ?

Thanks
Click to expand...
Check out my post here detailing the differences I've found. Overall, Parallels is just better in every way, but price (now VMware Pro is free for personal use). VMware runs much better on my 2013 Mac Pro, as they haven't really gotten it to a good point since Apple switched to ARM.
 
Been running Windows 11 on my 14" M1 Pro for about a week now (installed it once VM Pro became free for individual users). My Machine has 16GB of RAM, so I agave the VM 8GB and 4-cores of the CPU.

So far everything works great. I'm a light-medium user, primarily using Office and a few other programs required for work. I mainly use MacOS for everything but work, so now I don't need to carry two laptops around.
 
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Edgecrusherr said:
Overall, Parallels is just better in every way, but price (now VMware Pro is free for personal use).
Click to expand...
I hope you realise that VMware Fusion Player has had a free license for a few years and, for nearly all home/personal use, Pro adds almost nothing. So it is not a big deal for features or performance. So no real change there except that it simplifies licensing, distribution and support.

The difference between Player and Pro on Windows hosts is much greater and for those users this is a major change.

Over the years, I have tried Parallels a few times, but for my use it had no advantages over Fusion and has always cost more. My view might have different if I was wanting to run Intel Windows games or found Coherence/Unity important. But my use is mostly for Linux and macOS clients - I only use a Windows client to run a few Windows apps for which there is no Mac equivalent (e.g. Deep Sky Stacker).
 
gilby101 said:
I hope you realise that VMware Fusion Player has had a free license for a few years
Click to expand...

Yep, I've been using Fusion since 2007, and Parallels since 2006, and have been on the VMware developer preview program for a few years. So I've been using these for year. Player is very basic, the difference only matters if you to clone your VMs or change network setting, which are actually important to me. However, my concern is mostly comparing it to Parallels.
gilby101 said:
Over the years, I have tried Parallels a few times, but for my use it had no advantages over Fusion and has always cost more. My view might have different if I was wanting to run Intel Windows games or found Coherence/Unity important. But my use is mostly for Linux and macOS clients - I only use a Windows client to run a few Windows apps for which there is no Mac equivalent (e.g. Deep Sky Stacker).
Click to expand...
Have you used it on Apple Silicon? It's pretty rough, nothing like it's been for the last 17 years. It's like they're a new company out the door, that's playing catch up.
 
hello,
installed fusion and parallels on macbookair M3,16GB...i noticed in the Microsoft Windows VMs in Fusion the xores are at 2.00GHz while in Parallels 3.2GHz...and all drivers are installed in Parallels, while in Fusion a usb and base model drivers are missing with yellow mark.

anyone noticed the same?
 
Biko65 said:
In you opinion, given an initial 24GB amount of physical RAM, will I be able to run a couple of 6GB virtual sessions ?
Click to expand...

I ran Windows and Kali simultaneously on an M2 MBA with 24 GB, never had any issues at all. All my x86 apps ran just fine on Windows, too. In fact, everything felt snappier than it ever did on my 5K iMacs. (I have since moved to an M3 MacBook Pro with 64 GB, but for what I need to run it has made no noticeable difference.)
 
Biko65 said:
Yeah thank you, I get that, the ARM version of Windows might not be optimized....what about other virtual session of MacOS under Fusion or Parallel...? In you opinion, given an initial 24GB amount of physical RAM, will I be able to run a couple of 6GB virtual sessions ?
Click to expand...
From my own testings, I'd say you'd be comfortable with 2 VM at 6GB, on top of a 24GB Mac, and maybe a 3rd one if you're not going much on the Mac side.
 
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