Whats better - VM Ware or Parallels?

[stockscalper]

All of the professional reviews I've read picked Parallels over Fusion. So I bought it and run Windows 7 on a MacBook Air with 4gigs of ram. It runs smooth on 4 gigs. I'm surprised your laptop lagged with 8 gigs as I find 4 gigs to be plenty.

 

[waynep]

Not true. Its somewhat true but not fully. They do see the hardware but with some software help. If they didn't see the hardware I would be able to move virtual machines between macs and I can't. Windows has to activate again.

They only hardware they see may be something that gets passed through like a USB disk drive that you present to the VM for some extra storage. The Processor, vdisk, and others things are virtualized through a software layer.

Windows activation does not prove anything. I have moved VM's from one PC to another (VMware Workstation) and never have had to reactivate Windows in the VM.

 

[waynep]

they're related, but rely on vastly different philosophies and technology.

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/338993/Emulation_or_Virtualization_

Yes similar but different. Similar in there is a software layer sitting between the actual hardware and the VM. That was my main point, though you are right on the deeper details.