Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

VMware Fusion 2.0 and Parallels 4.0 Beta

lowbatteries said:
Yes, but do either of them play well with Time Machine? Such as moving to a sparsebundle-like virtual drive format instead of giant monolithic files?
Click to expand...

Actually it works really well. The Fusion and all of it's goodies is located on the Documents folder. And you can copy this folder (Fusion) and take it with you. Yes I am a trainer for Fusion :)
 
Fusion 2.0 is amazing. I'm running a full DX9 demo in virtualized environment.

I can't wrap my head around it, it's amazing!
 
lowbatteries said:
Yes, but do either of them play well with Time Machine? Such as moving to a sparsebundle-like virtual drive format instead of giant monolithic files?
Click to expand...

Yes. I think you could make it work. With VMware you can "mount" the Window virtual disk and access Windows files from Mac OS X. It mounts just like an ISO or DMG file even when VMware is not active. I think the trick to using Time Machine is to mount the VM's disk image and let TM back up the mounted volume but be sure to exclude the VM's disk image because it remains monolithic. Kind of a work around rather tha the fix you were asking for but not hard. That said, I've not tried it yet.

The key here is that VMwares disk images work like dmg files now f you install the optional software that comes with Fusion. It's a separate Mac OS X app that mounts the images
 
Parallels and Boot Camp

I'm moving to Fusion.

Parallels keeps its own Registry hive separate from the "live" registry, thus if you end up doing a SP3 update (or other updates) while virtualized, you will render your boot camp abilities useless.

Here is Parallels's response to that: http://kb.parallels.com/en/5447

"Parallels recommends to perform all Windows updates when running Windows in Boot Camp."

This basically eliminates the ability to use something like SMS on that windows machine to keep it updated, because if updates occurred while virtualized, it would ruin the ability to boot into Windows.

Also, I can't believe Multi-Core support has taken this long. Currently the guest OS will only see 1 processor core.
 
hodgjy said:
Fusion 2.0 is not ready for prime time. For starters, it's slow and jittery on my iMac, which version 1.x never was. It also has a huge problem with capturing my mouse--the cursor jumps around all over the place completely unexpectedly and without any pattern. While 2.0 adds many new features that will be excellent once the bugs are ironed out, it's made my Mac and Windows-in-Mac unusable. I can print just fine from within Windows in Fusion, but now my ability to print directly from the Mac has been killed. I've tried everything. The only way to fix it is to learn how to use the terminal or format and reinstall. I've done everything, but the CUPS Mac printing is toast.

Not impressed. Once I get the printer issues ironed out, I'm going back to 1.x.
Click to expand...

I've been using Fusion 2.0 beta for months, and I've seen NONE of the issues you note above, using a MacBook Pro 2.2GHz. I am downloading 2.0GA but I don't expect it's going to introduce all those bugs. I print from Mac and Windows, hop back and forth between them all day (I don't use Unity), use them on single or dual screen mode, etc. Great product, not sure why your system is so sensitive to it.
 
Does 3D acceleration apply to Vista or just XP? I have WC3 installed in Vista Bootcamp. Wondering if I can just play it without having to reboot.
 
I have been using Parallels for over a year now and have been very happy about it. The biggest problems have come with trying to use it to run Vista off my Bootcamp partition. I wanted to be able to boot up in native Vista or to virtualize with bootcamp using the same Vista installation. This worked great until the Vista SP1 came out. Parallels hasn't come up with a good solution yet so I have been stuck with just my virtual Vista for a few months now. Good thing it works well.
 
VIrtualBox is free and nice. But VMWare runs better. Parallels always had lots of unfinished areas in it that caused issues on my Macs, while Fusion can run for months without any issues. 2.0 has been fantastic in my personal experience.
 
bilboa said:
This already works with both Parallels 3.0 and Fusion 2.0. You can make shortcuts in your dock to any Windows program, and when you click on it, if Windows isn't already running it will fire up, and then the program will be run.
Of course the "fire up" part can take a couple of minutes while Windows boots up, but that's not any different than what people used to put up with when running MacOS Classic programs on early versions of OS X.
Click to expand...

Yeah, the firing up part is fine... but when you quit the Windows program, Parallels/Fusion is still running and you have to quit it separately. If you could set it to shut down when the last program quit, then it really would work as if the Windows programs were running in OSX.
 
bilboa said:
This already works with both Parallels 3.0 and Fusion 2.0. You can make shortcuts in your dock to any Windows program, and when you click on it, if Windows isn't already running it will fire up, and then the program will be run.
Click to expand...

Really?! I'm going to have to try that! Cool tip, bilboa! :cool:
 
I'd like to get Fusion, but unfortunately my version of Vista cannot be used for virtualisation and bootcamp at the same time. :(
 
Mr Skills said:
Yeah, the firing up part is fine... but when you quit the Windows program, Parallels/Fusion is still running and you have to quit it separately. If you could set it to shut down when the last program quit, then it really would work as if the Windows programs were running in OSX.
Click to expand...

What are they using their computer for? They might not even notice it running in the background. I have kept Fusion (with XP) running in the background all day and not noticed a difference.

I'm on the 2.0 release now. Running in Unity with no windows open gets the following stats in activity monitor:

CPU: between 0.2 and 15.0
# Threads: 6
Real Memory: 60MB
Virtual Memory: 1.14GB

I should note that it is consistently below several apps in resource usage. For example, iTunes and Safari, both of which I keep running all day. So it's not like it's a huge resource hog.

For what I'm using it for, I don't really notice. I have 2 gigs of RAM and give the XP virtual machine 512MB of that. It runs just fine for my needs. I don't make a habit of leaving it running, but sometimes I forget and never notice.

Anyway, maybe they need it for something else, but I'd imagine most users could probably have it run in Unity mode all day and not notice on the right system.
 
I've just upgraded on my fresh install of leopard, and things are not going well for VMWare. The beta was perfect, but now a fresh install of XP locks up and then VMware crashes. Might try parallels, even better if its more lightweight.
 
Competition is great - both products are great

This is great news. I've had Parallels since version 2.5 -- got the free upgrade to 3.0 because I bought 2.5 late and I've seen steady improvements and new features for over a year (all free). I'm actually surprised they haven't upped the version number to 3.1, 3.2, etc. with some of the improvements they've made.

I tried VMWare 1.x and it was good -- I didn't see any compelling reason to switch from Parallels 3 to VMware 1, they were about equal IMHO. VMWare had some better features, but the free upgrades to Parallels have added almost all of those and went beyond VMWare in some ways -- VMWare 2's "mirrored folders" sound a lot like the user folder sharing feature in later builds of Parallels 3, and now they're both adding DirectX 9 and better vSMP support -- sounds like they're staying competitive with each other. This is great!
 
ESP Vision in VMWare

Has anyone tried, and successfully used ESP Vision under VMWare Fusion?:rolleyes:
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back