VMware Fusion Vs. Parallels


VMware Fusion Vs. Parallels (None Of These, I Use Only Bootcamp)  

61 members have voted

  1. 1. Which Of These 2 Virtual Machines Softwares You Use Day by Day

    • VMware Fusion
      42
    • Parallels
      9
    • None Of These 2, i Use Bootcamp Only ! ! !
      3
    • Dont Use any Of These 3
      7


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Parallels Desktop for Mac user here, I have tried them both and found VMWare to just be slow, clunky, and unstable.

Now if we go Beta to Beta it's a bit closer, Parallels 4 versus VMWare 2 presents a major upgrade to both softwares, however deciding on a product through an unreleased version is never a good idea due to the inherent nature of feature incompleteness. If I had to go one way or the other though? Parallels. They were first on the Mac, they have actually innovated in their product and seen many of their key features copied by VMWare long after release...they are just more inline with the ideals I hold near and dear.

VirtualBox user here.

it's free, and if all you're going to be running is XP, which is lightweight as far as OS' go at this point, I don't think the 3 really differ too much, supports Intel/AMD virtualization too. On the downside, it doesn't support network bridging in Leopard, but again, it's free. For Vista, I recommend Fusion, Parallels is quite slow with that.

I've only used it to run a Solaris 10 VM in Leopard, but under Linux, it ran XP SP3 just fine. However, I only use RDC now, as I prefer accessing a real PC, and I can always switch to it, if I want to play games.

Take the step up to Parallels. Love how it integrates the Windows apps on the Dock, runs Windows apps transparently, and integrates Windows apps in Expose. I can even use Mac's Universal Access to zoom on the Windows machine when it's full screen. Huge benefit when I am presenting on the Windows platform. Not sure why anyone would use anything else.

Fusion can do 64-bit.

Very unstably from my experience. During one week of running Vista 64 through Fusion I had 12 kernal panics and countless BSOD's in Windows, to me it just wasn't worth it. (Running Vista 64 in bootcamp was flawless I might add)

I work at the Hospital for Sick Children here in Toronto. We started off using Parallels as our virtualization software for the mac desktop platform. As soon as we started testing VMWare Fusion we noticed how much better it ran and how stable it was. 64bit was also important to us especially when it came to running statistical programs.

We have not encountered any blue screens of death on any of the macbooks, macbook pros, imacs, mac pros or xserves here. I am not sure what you are doing to cause this but you are probably not alone. We have encountered numerous problems iwth Parallels especially HAL.DLL corruption causing a repair of the operating sysytem if a user decided to move the window around while Parallels was loading.. That should nto realy happy.. only crapware. The discounts we receive in licensiing is also astounding.

We can purchase our copies of VMWare Fusion for $40 a license whereas the "discounted" price for Parallels is $90.

The decision is very easy to make. :)

VMWare has been in the virtualization game for almost a decade, why go with an upstart like Parallels?

Edited by dtomilson

I use Fusion with XP Professional on my MacBook with 2GB RAM. It works great and haven't had any issues thus far. My favorite way to use Fusion (and I'm sure Parrallels does this as well), is by having my OS X desktop on my 24" widescreen monitor and my XP desktop on my MacBook screen. It provides a seamless integration and more screen space for the XP desktop. To each his own, though :)

Personally I found Parallels to be one of the worst Mac OS X applications I've ever used. I don't like it's interface and the awkward flip effect, the way it stores virtual machines can be a bit messy and I've seen more than one occasion where they became corrupted because another application supposedly accessed it. Next to that Parallels' performance was disappointing on my iMac.

So far I haven't had any issues with VMware Fusion and I'm looking forward to version 2. Does anyone know when it's supposed to be released?

I have to admit I hardly run Windows, but it's nice to have it laying around just in case.

Edited by .Reo
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