VMware Fusion vs Parallels Desktop

Looking to get a VM software to run Windows but undecided as to which one. I will try both as they both have a trial but Fusion is at $39.99 pre-order price which is tempting and i'm pretty sure it's going to be released soon. What are the pro's and cons and opinions of the two and are there any others people would recommend?

 

I'm not sure if it matters to you, but VMware supports 64 bit OSes (Vista, XP, Linux). I'm fairly certain Parallels does not.

I've only really come across one problem with VMware. I was trying to install drivers for a USB microcontroller adapter for my research project. It crashed OS X when I tried to install the drivers. After I installed the drivers in Boot Camp, whenever I would plug it in via VMware, it would still crash OS X. I don't know if trying to use USB ports through a virtual machines just messes things up in general or if VMware just screwed up.

Also, virtualization requires you to activate Windows every time you install it. I'm not sure what kind of license you have, but I had to activate via telephone and say that I had a motherboard swap (aka, lie) so that I could still use my XP.

 

i did not have to reactivate windows after installing the virtual machine on top of my boot camp partition.

i also would avoid installing drivers inside of the virtual machine. thats gray territory because the virtual machine definitely uses its own set of drivers to replace most, if not all, of the ones you have installed for boot camp.

after trying both, i like vmware better.

you should definitely try them both though. free beta for vmware and a free trial for parallels.

 

Did you configure your virtual machine to be the same specs as your regular machine?

 

VMWare all the way. Its not all functionality of Parallels (bar the OpenGL support, but you wouldnt want to run games in virtualized thing anyway) and is half the price right now.

 

Yeah I used to be annoyed with having to reactivate Windows, I simply installed windows only activated then made a dmg back up of XP using disk utility on Mac OS, and for Vista I used winclone I believe it was called....

for virtual machines I did the same backups right after activating, that way I can tamper with configurations all I want without having to call back microsoft 50 times to reactivate. It seems like a lot of trouble but those back ups will come in handy. Just a side note, it's better to use the smallest partition possible when you're backing up, empty space still adds to the file size even with compression. It also makes for a faster restore process.

For vista it took a boot camp partition of 8GB with all of my simple programs like Office, media players, browsers installed. For XP it took a 6GB partition. In both cases I still had about 1GB of space left (be sure to disable the paging file, system restore, run disk clean up, then reboot prior to the back up process) when I did the back ups. The file sizes were between 2GB and 4GB, just right to fit onto a DVD

 

What mac utility did you use? It does sound like a lot of work.

 

I'd go with VMware. It's very stable on my Macbook Pro and feels much lighter and more responsive than Parallels.

 

does VMware have anything similar to the Coherence mode of parallels?

 

It does it's called Unity.

 

can Unity display the Windows taskbar on the button of the screen like in parallels?

 

Have a look on fusion's website:
http://www.vmware.com/beta/fusion/

 

Unity displays the Windows start button in corner, and every windows app open has its own Icon in Dock just like normal Mac apps. Also, when you use Expose, every windows app appears seperate like normal mac apps. (this feature is missing in Coherence i think)

 

Well, I've used both and VMWare ran like crap compared to Parallels. Granted, I didn't use one of the more recent releases...

But yar, using 2x the ram, it's half as slow compared to parallels.

 

I think VMware Fusion will be the better product in the end. But, until they get some of the performance issues fixed, I am sticking with Parallels. Competition will make both products better.