This past week the battle of virtualization technologies heated up. Parallels released Parallels Desktop 3 and VMware released Fusion Beta 4. The new versions were big for both companies. Parallels touted DirectX support and snapshots, while VMware promoted Unity. Essentially, both programs added features which the other already had.
Being a user of Parallels from the start, I thought I would be excited about Parallels 3, but VMware managed to sway me over. I was getting frustrated with the performance of Parallels, and the extra cost of version 3 was icing on the cake. Sure, Parallels is a bit more polished, but it lacks on basic performance. VMware has supported 64-bit chips, dual core utilization, and DirectX since the early betas, while Parallels just now added DirectX and still lacks 64-bit and dual core support. Besides, I noticed VMware runs a heck of a lot smoother on my computer compared to Parallels.
VMware has been in the virtualization market a lot longer than Parallels, so I have a feeling when Fusion comes out of beta, it will be superior to Parallels. Although, there is no telling what could come. For the most part, Vista is still untouched by both companies, leaving Aero support up for grabs. Not to mention Apple might surprise us with a virtualization announcement at WWDC. However, I feel VMware is reigning supreme on the Mac for now and will for sometime to come.
4 Comments
I’m just getting into the virtualization market myself. After hearing such good things about Parallels for so long, I was honestly a bit disappointed when I gave it the trial run. Now, I’m not running the latest and greatest Mac, but it also seemed a bit sluggish to me. Not to mention I couldn’t even get it to boot from an Ubuntu install CD the first four tries.
Until Fusion comes out of beta (I wasn’t able to get a successful install on that either) I’ll be working with VirtualBox (http://virtualbox.org/) which is a FOSS app originally written for Linux, but offering a beta for OS X which seems to suit me just fine.
I’m not after all the fancy features as the only thing I’ll be doing in a virtual environment is browser testing. I just need it to work.
Parallel have done quite well for me (although it crashed several times that made my mac crashes too), but I might try VMWare a try. Any news on the pricing?
@Jon: There’s a “trick” to install Ubuntu (or even to run it) via Parallel. Do not choose Linux as your parallel OS, instead use Sun Solaris and all is fine for me. There’s a tutorial about it somewhere, just google it.
Thanks for convincing me to stay with VMWare. I’ve had a feeling that Parallels was more polished all along, but decided to stick with VMWare until it was out of beta (as in free), and then compare the two offerings. VMWare runs very smooth on my Mac Pro, that’s for sure. 2 cores for Vista and 2 for OSX
Only thing I’m bummed about is the new Unity feature. I was all excited, and then it seems it only works with XP and not Vista. Oh well, there is always tomorrow…
@Oskar Syahbana: VMWare Fusion is being made available for pre-order at $39.99. Check it out on their site: http://www.vmware.com/beta/fusion/buy.html
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