VM ware Fusion or Parallells?

[Irosaki]

Parallels 5 works much snappier for me when compared to VMWare. Just my 2 cents.
Try them both out (they both offer demo periods), and see for yourself.

thanks, ill give them a try

 

[Gabriel GR]

They are slower with boot camp because they have to translate NTFS to HFS for it to read

Isn't the bootcamp partition NTFT? Also doesn't the VM host read ntfs? I thought skipping HFS altogether would be the advantage of using the bootcamp partition in VMware.

 

[Inconsequential]

I use VMware 3 on both my MP and MBP.

No BSODs or crashes to speak of but it seems performance is lower than Parallels it seems.

 

[sysiphus]

I use VMware 2 with great success. WinXP, various Linux distros...the works. I love it.

 

[wickedpapercut]

I looked at the descriptions of both and couldn't tell much difference either. So, I did the logical thing and picked the cheapest. Found an inexpensive source for VMWare 2.0 with a free upgrade to 3.0. It might have been Amazon -- don't know if the deal still exists or not.

Works like a charm. I really hate going back to Windows for anything but until Intuit releases a good version of Quicken for the Mac (February??), I'll run Windows once each week to keep track of the finances.

 

[dankybear]

i use VMware 3 on my MBP and its flawless, no lag and the file system integration is nice

 

[keithOrbit]

i think VM Fusion is better than Parallels

 

[iBunny]

Windows XP seems to run better in VMWare...

Win 7 and Ubuntu seem to run alot better in Parallels 5.

 

[dyn]

Actually Parallels lets you take advantage of the multi-core more effectively than VMWare Fusion. Under Fusion, you can only allocate 4 Cores to a VM, under Parallels you get up to 8 Cores.

The problem with this is that you need a Mac with twice the amount of cores in it. If you appoint 2 virtual processors (no cores!) it means you have to have 4 physical cores, if you want 4 virtual processors you'll need 8 cores, etc. This is only possible on 3 Macs: the quad core iMac, the Mac Pro and the Xserve. If you have anything else this feature is simply useless. If you don't have enough cores you'll run into problems as performance in the vm and your Mac will degrade an awful lot. It might even degrade to a certain level where it seems the system has locked up and the only way of fixing it is power-cycling the machine. Use this feature wisely when you have enough cores to be able to use it!

Most people won't even need this feature as single core will do. This multi-core/smp feature is only useful for people who actually need it, like when testing multi-core/smp setups/software.

In other words this feature is not that much of an advantage, it mostly is a burden as a lot of people using it complain about really bad performance. This feature also has nothing to do with the multi-core support of Fusion and Parallels as it is only a way of simulating smp environments. When using a single virtual processor (which is the default) both Parallels and Fusion will use the cores in your Mac (they have multi-core support by default). You could consider them to be no different than any other app that has multi-core support (there are some technical differences but in the end it boils down to the same principle).

 

[roadbloc]

I would personally go with virtual box and here are my reasons why:

- It's free.
- It supports a lot of OS's
- It is a lot more customisable than Parallels (which is what I used previously.)
- It uses less resources, including disk space and RAM, meaning your virtual machine has a lot more to play around with.
- It lacks features that I find annoying (like coherence and hot corners.)
- It doesn't make my fans blow.

Give it a try, it's free. If it doesn't suit or doesn't have features you want, buy one of the products.

http://www.virtualbox.org/

 

[0186279]

I think parallels is better, but if I only need to be in Windows I prefer bootcamp.

 

[Sneakz]

VMware Fusion is what I use.