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You can manage the license on their dashboard. If I remember correctly, you can also enter a license already used and have the app disable the license in the other location.
Parallels is cheaper than VMware for sure, but the company is focused on macOS and maintained with frequent updates. They need to pay developers.

You can say that is not really useful for a MacPro5,1, but how can something be cheaper than free?

Both VMware Fusion and Workstation are now free for personal use.
 
You can manage the license on their dashboard. If I remember correctly, you can also enter a license already used and have the app disable the license in the other location.
Parallels is cheaper than VMware for sure, but the company is focused on macOS and maintained with frequent updates. They need to pay developers.
You're right about the Parallels license - I just gave it a try. I just put in my existing serial number, and I got a dialog saying it would disable the license on the machine to which it had been previously installed. I had no idea it worked that way. It sure makes it a lot easier to try it out on different computers, or just to re-install it if I rebuild a machine from scratch. Thanks for the suggestion!
 
It's been a while since I looked into this. What is the latest and best current product to run VM's on 5,1, presuming Monterey on OC?

From what I've read here, sounds like VMWare Fusion is over and out for this hardware...might be a great free solution on newer Macs.

Then I guess we have parallels...though their licensing model stinks...is that working on 5,1's all the way up through their current releases or did we get capped off somewhere and need to stick to an older version from them also?

I'm not sure the status of Oracle's free VM or any others? I think VMware and Parallels in the past always had noticeably better performance
 
I can confirm that the latest version of Parallels will work on the 5,1 under OpenCore, all the way up to Sequoia. Be sure to select the Parallels hypervisor and NOT the Apple hypervisor. The Apple hypervisor, Monterey on up, needs the AVX2 CPU instruction which is not available on any of the 5,1 Xeon processors.

The Parallels license model is not great, but at least it's very easy to transfer a license from one computer to another. You just paste in your license key, and it will ask if you want to remove the license from the previous computer and add it to the current computer. So even if you're moving the license around a lot, from one system build to another or maybe one 5,1 to another, it's very easy to do. You don't have to contact support each time you need to move the license.
 
Parallels Desktop 19 (Pro) runs fine on a Mac 5,1 in Monterey, but there are GPU issues in Sonoma and Sequoia. There was a 25% discount in november but I am afraid this is gone. VMWare Fusion Pro doesn't work.
 
I'm not sure the status of Oracle's free VM or any others?

VirtualBox?

I tried that on one of my 5,1 machines and it was dreadfully slow. The Windows VM crawls, even just clicking the start menu was really slow. I gave up.
 
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