VMWare Fusion vs. Parallels
In the spirit of full disclosure, this post is a direct result of a previous post I made on falling back in love with my MacBook Pro. What happened is that within a few hours of posting, a representative of VMware contacted me and gave me a free license to their Fusion product, a virtual machine client for the Mac.
So, I am running both VMware and Parallels on the same VM. I did this by using the VMware Importer. I simply pointed the Importer application at my Parallels VM and 30 minutes later it had made the VMware PC I am using as I write this post in Live Writer. Not too shabby.
That said, the importer application will not create a Fusion VM from a Windows Virtual PC VHD, which is what I wish it would do. For that, you must download a different application, which installs on the machine you want to turn into a VM for Fusion and it builds itself. Parallels also has an application that does this, an both work the same way.
This is my most frequent way to get a VM onto my Mac, create one from a pre-existing physical box or a Virtual PC VM. It would be nice if either vendor would make a Mac VM out of the PC one by simply operating on the VHD file, but not at this time.
Advantage: None.
Neither VM application will let me use the extra buttons on my MS Explorer track ball, because they both emulate a PS2 mouse driver to connect through to the mouse.
Advantage: None.
In Unity mode, Cohesion in Parallels, my favorite windows app, RocketDock, looks very pixelated and is pretty chopped up. In parallels, it looks great. This isn’t a big deal in an of itself, but the implication is the graphics are somewhat choppy coming across the OS boundary.
Advantage: Parallels
While in Unity mode, there is a menu item for Applications, which works like the start menu in Windows, only a little better. In Parallels, the Windows start menu and whole lower menu bar show up right on your Mac desktop. The difference is simply a matter of personal preference, as the functionality is exactly the same. I personally like VM Ware’s execution of this feature.
Advantage: VMware, but subjective
What about the important stuff? What about performance? Reliability?
I have no way of knowing (at least I am not aware) of how to measure the actual performance of the 2 VMs while they are spooled up. I guess I could test them by timing a run of some application, but this is a little beyond me caring. I will say that the Fusion VM seems slower. This is totally unscientific, though. I almost feel uncomfortable writing it, because it may not be true. It may just be a perception on my part.
Advantage: None.
Here’s one: VMware has one file that represents the VM. Nice. I wish the other VM manufacturers had this instead of the myriad of little nugget files that they spawn off.
Advantage: VMware
Size on my Mac disc for the Parallels hard drive: 27.7G. Size for the entire VMware virtual machine: 24.4G.
Advantage: VMware
VMware has support for 64 bit operating systems. Parallels doesn’t. Yet.
Advantage VMware
Conclusion? Not really.
So what will I run with? I am not sure yet. It is pretty difficult to find an advantage other than the 64 bit OS support. Feature parity between the two is almost scary equitable. I guess it’s a tight race. Both solutions will obviously do a good job. With VMware’s penetration into the enterprise space, I am sure they will sell more licenses simply because people will have good interop with their corporate environment. Parallels isn’t a big name in the enterprise space at this time, although they are making inroads.
They are very comparable on price point, too.
The one thing that would sway me in a particular direction is the ability to dynamically re-size a VM’s hard drive without too much pain. This is a nightmare in MS Virtual PC. Parallels provides a 3rd party utility that does it for you when you buy the $100 Premium version. This is good, but I would rather just have that baked in to the base product.
I cannot find similar functionality in Fusion. Maybe someone from VMware would chime in here to let us know wassup wit dat? Maybe it’s there and I can’t find it?
If I find anything truly differentiating in either product I will blog on it, but for now both suit my needs fine.
