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VMWare vs. Parallels

Yet another vote for VMWare! It runs great! Right now I'm running Ubuntu, but I'm a little nervous to try out loading up my boot camp partition because of a bad experience I had with Parallels.
 
user13 said:
Well, I'm not sure, but I think that you will have to install two copies of windows for that. It will be a waste of free space. I would also try out Fusion anyway. But I'm traditionally with Parallels, and I like how it works and so on and so forth:)
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I belive that both Parallels and Fusion can use your boot camp partition, meaning one install. Not sure how this affects product activation. I haven't installed fusion yet, but I do have bootcamp and Parallels on my MacPro. I had to activate XP once in bootcamp and once in parallels. Office 2007 doesn't play as nicely. It seems you must reactivate it every time you switch over.
 
If you have a Core 2 Duo then Parallels may be faster. It uses hardware virtualization features of this chip that VMware doesn't. But if you have an older CPU VMware may be faster due to being a more mature product.
 
aLoC said:
If you have a Core 2 Duo then Parallels may be faster. It uses hardware virtualization features of this chip that VMware doesn't. But if you have an older CPU VMware may be faster due to being a more mature product.
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Both VM Ware and Parallels use virtualisation.

Both the core duo and the core 2 duo have virtualisation (in most of the CPU's anyway)
 
aLoC said:
If you have a Core 2 Duo then Parallels may be faster. It uses hardware virtualization features of this chip that VMware doesn't. But if you have an older CPU VMware may be faster due to being a more mature product.
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So you're saying if I were to buy a new Santa Rosa MacBook Pro, baseline, Parallels will give me better performance with BOTH Windows AND Mac OS X?
 
aLoC said:
If you have a Core 2 Duo then Parallels may be faster. It uses hardware virtualization features of this chip that VMware doesn't. But if you have an older CPU VMware may be faster due to being a more mature product.
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Actually VMWare uses better virtualization with both chips. Also uses less of your resources. It can also use both cores, there's an option in there to enable it. And it has better GPU acceleration, you can even use DX 8. Parallels doesn't do anything special with the new C2D, nor would it with the Santa Rosa chipset, that VMWare doesn't.

ChexBoss32890 said:
So you're saying if I were to buy a new Santa Rosa MacBook Pro, baseline, Parallels will give me better performance with BOTH Windows AND Mac OS X?
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No, worse actually.
 
i like parallels and i think the coherence mode is awesome.

if you play games then vmware might be a better option.
 
I used Parallels a while ago (when they had free betas) and got really turned off by the Linux-like UI. I'm using VMware at the moment, and will probably continue to do so once it's released. We use it at work on Windows and I expect that I'll be moving VMs back and forth between Windows and Mac, so using the same product should help there :)
 
BiTurboMunkie said:
i like parallels and i think the coherence mode is awesome.
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Coherence mode is coming. I don't know when though. They have it now, but it doesn't work so great.

Nermal said:
I used Parallels a while ago (when they had free betas) and got really turned off by the Linux-like UI. I'm using VMware at the moment, and will probably continue to do so once it's released. We use it at work on Windows and I expect that I'll be moving VMs back and forth between Windows and Mac, so using the same product should help there :)
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That was a big deal to them. The ones working on the Mac version are big Apple fans. All of them use Macs almost exclusively. They wanted to make it work as seemless as possible, but also wanted it to work completely with the Windows VM images.
 
bob5820 said:
I belive that both Parallels and Fusion can use your boot camp partition, meaning one install. Not sure how this affects product activation. I haven't installed fusion yet, but I do have bootcamp and Parallels on my MacPro. I had to activate XP once in bootcamp and once in parallels. Office 2007 doesn't play as nicely. It seems you must reactivate it every time you switch over.
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I didn't know that Fusion has Boot Camp support already. Does it?
I must agree, that Coherence mode is really great! But for gamers even Fusion won't be an option - only Boot Camp. This will save a lot of free RAM - without windows running
 
flopticalcube said:
Yes, it does.
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Although it is not very good at recognising a bootcamp partition, mine currently isn't showing up. So completely useless to change from parallels for me.

Also I don't like they way even though I have used the uninstalled tool there is about 4 items in activity monitor referring to VMware, (even after a week and 3 restarts) as well as lot and lots of hidden files all over my computer. Don't think I will install it again, seems too google/adobe esk for me.
 
BiTurboMunkie said:
i like parallels and i think the coherence mode is awesome.

if you play games then vmware might be a better option.
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I second that! Parallels Coherence is great!
Boot Camp is a better option for gamers, not any of the VMs - no need to split RAM on two OSes, that's why games will run faster
 
I'm using VMWare and have had few problems with it so far - it boots properly off my bootcamp too.

What i'm curious to know is, how does it achieve the separation without causing problems? If I boot using bootcamp windows continues to work, and when using VMWare Windows (very unlike itself) also works - yet using the hardware of the emulated VMWare environment. And it's seamless too.

Does VMWare create a separate profile for windows which it dynamically switches?!?
 
I use both but I like VMWare because it uses less processing power. Plus I think there might be a memory leak in parallels somewhere because it uses way to much ram.

Nuc
 
I'm new to Parallels, but it was amazingly easy to use Parallels Transporter to move a PC to Parallels. I'm not sure if VMWare has this feature.
 
MacUser (UK) claims of VMware Fusion in today's report 'Fusion for Macs is virtually ready' that: "Fusion builds on July's RC1 release to let Intel Mac users run Windows applications without having to install a copy of Windows." - this looks like absolute nonsense to me. I can't find anything on the VMware webpage about this, and surely this would be bigger news if true because they would have achieved what CodeWeavers is struggling so hard to achieve themselves.

Can anyone ratify or wholly dismiss this claim?
 
It's coming, and it's awesome. Blows Parallels away. Glad they took their time with it. Converting existing machines, ISO images, and Parallels images into VMWare will be a lot easier as well (eventually).
 
Here's my problem with Fusion, if my Boot Camp XP partition crashes while I'm running Fusion I have to restart with Boot Camp because Fusion won't start the crashed XP partition. I figure this is only with Boot Camp partitions but does this happen with Parallels?

Other than that I have no problems with Fusion, though I haven't tried Parallels so I can't say which is better. I only went with Fusion because VMWare has been in the virtualization business longer.
 
acrafton said:
One of the features I like in Parallels is that it comes with a tool that will create an install image from an existing system so you don't have to do a install of all your apps, data, and configure, etc. . .How to do that with VMWare? Does it come with something or is there a third party app?
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VMware has the same tool that works the same way if not better.

I use the same tool at work and i am able to image a OS across the network and into my ESX server.

What i like about VMware is that i can use my previously created images and they also have a crap load of vm appliances available.
 
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