Parallels vs VMware Fusion - No Contest?

I know it’s not parallels or vmware, but as a linux user (ubuntu feisty) I have to say… I love virtual box (www.virtualbox.org) Not as featurerific as the other two, it still has a few things going for it - it’s free, and its open source. Available for Windows, Intel Mac, and Linux it still has some nice features.

P.S. I use Linux, and i can swear I’m not from another planet.

Chris Pirillo »Parallels vs VMware Fusion - No Contest?Posted 2 hours ago

I think it’s important to remember that there are two VERY different Linux camps. The Command Line commandos and those who are tired of having to upgrade for every release of a specific OS. ;)

Perhaps this is something we need to do a call-in show about? Because it seems that there is still a LOT of generalization in this area. That said, I do think that the new Macs are fabulous for movie editing, but I am lost as to why I would buy something that does not have instant access to hundreds of free and open software programs? That and if I cannot get access to Evolution, you’ve already lost me. Entourage is craptacular and does nothing for me, personally.

At the end of the day, my wife remains a die-hard Mac fan, despite that she has been quietly using my Linux notebook to check email, use sMSN and browse the web with Firefox.

Again, I simply do not care for the OS X UI layout - it does nothing for me, but it does offer the ‘casual user’ plenty of well deserved functionality. It is Then again, the same can be said for any OS I suppose. And I will admit openly that many of the cool bash scripts I have written would work just fine, with a few minor modifications.
http://tinyurl.com/3e25aq

OS X is attractive, visually impressive and works very well. You can do amazing things with a Mac. But for my needs, the needs of a number of others out there, it’s just not a good match.

Wow, cut and pasting just bit the big one there - yikes..lol. Sorry for the typos.

[…] Chris Prillo has chimed in the VMWare vs Parallels topic.  As usual, he doesn’t have much insightful to say about it other then linking to some other people’s reviews.Parallels vs VMware Fusion - No Contest? ~ Chris PirilloGive his post a quick read then move on to the useful info.   […]

, which is another Mac virtualization program. I played around with it a little, but ultimately used Parallels, that is until VMware Fusion was released. UPDATE 2: Chris Pirillo has posted a video of hiscomparison between Parallels vs VMware Fusion. Chris says that “idea of ’switching’ is finally worth seriously considering for those of us dyed-in-the-wool Windows users”.

I also found that VMWare runs circles around Parallels for ease of installation. Its functionality and ease of use is also as good if not better than Parallels.

I purchased version 2.5 of Parallels 6 months ago and never succeeded installing properly on my iMac. It’s only after downloading the demo from Parallels’ site that I succeeded. I later registered the product using the number enclosed with the product that I purchased.

Lately I had to uninstall the whole Parallels setup and to proceed with a clean install in order to get rid of some weird misbehaviors resulting from unknown virus(es).

As expected I still did not succeed installing my original copy of Parallels and the demo on their site has now been replaced with one for version 3.0. Demos and updates for earlier versions of the product have been wiped out from their site. So that’s it for me. I’m stuck with a product that cost me $100 cdn only months ago. They now want me to pay a large amount to add features that I really do not need. AlI I want is to be able to install and use what I paid for.

I week ago I sent a similar evaluation of my experience with Parallels on Apple’s site (choose the Apple Store, then Software and then Parallels). You’ll see that it has not been published. As if Apple filtered the evaluations in order to make sure that their ‘protégés” do not receive too many bad ratings.

Both are cool apps, but the VMWare seems really cool for performance. This stuff is really amazing, and this is a great example of something that’s a lot easier to explain by showing it to you. Chris has an archived video (see below) anda related blog postwhere he did a comparison of the two products (Parallels vs. VMWare Fusion). If you have not checked out Chris’ video show, it’s pretty slick, he does call-in’s for tech support and all sorts of stuff — and

I purchased VMWare fusion 1.0 and installed it on my brand new MAC PRO desktop and MAcBook laptop. I had one problem, I have an external hard drive I bought for the MAcBook. When running OSX it works perfectly. When running Windoze XP Pro under VMWare fusion 1.0 it won’t recognize the drive.
I contact VMWare for help. I have gotten several emails (only way to get them?) and they keep asking for tons of files to be sent to them with very inaccurate instructions. I am very frustrated at this point when I got an email saying there is a new beta out for VMWare fusion pending an upcoming upgrade. I decided to try it in the hopes it would fix my problem that I had in the first place. Now I have two problems, when attempting to run Windoze XP under VMWare fusion, it locks the screen and gives me a “screen of death” that tells me in 4 languages I must restart my computer. I still have the original problem as well..as still getting emails from VMWare tech support asking for tons more files with very poor instructions. Don’t any companies provide good quality service for the products they sell??

preference happens to be Matte. Ponzi likes glossy. On the heels of that email, comes a vote of confidence (and question) from Michael Gutierrez: First, I just wanted to send you some feedback regarding a recommendation you made for me aboutVMWare Fusion for Mac OS X. I took your advice shortly after the you recorded the video and downloaded the 30 day trial. I was amazed how advanced Fusion was compared to Parallels product. I particularly like Unity, VMWare’s setting allowing you to run your windows apps

preference happens to be Matte. Ponzi likes glossy. On the heels of that email, comes a vote of confidence (and question) from Michael Gutierrez: First, I just wanted to send you some feedback regarding a recommendation you made for me aboutVMWare Fusion for Mac OS X. I took your advice shortly after the you recorded the video and downloaded the 30 day trial. I was amazed how advanced Fusion was compared to Parallels product. I particularly like Unity, VMWare’s setting allowing you to run your windows apps

preference happens to be Matte. Ponzi likes glossy. On the heels of that email, comes a vote of confidence (and question) from Michael Gutierrez: First, I just wanted to send you some feedback regarding a recommendation you made for me aboutVMWare Fusion for Mac OS X. I took your advice shortly after the you recorded the video and downloaded the 30 day trial. I was amazed how advanced Fusion was compared to Parallels product. I particularly like Unity, VMWare’s setting allowing you to run your windows apps

preference happens to be Matte. Ponzi likes glossy. On the heels of that email, comes a vote of confidence (and question) from Michael Gutierrez: First, I just wanted to send you some feedback regarding a recommendation you made for me aboutVMWare Fusion for Mac OS X. I took your advice shortly after the you recorded the video and downloaded the 30 day trial. I was amazed how advanced Fusion was compared to Parallels product. I particularly like Unity, VMWare’s setting allowing you to run your windows apps

sits there . . . I have left it there for hours, no good. And of course it wreaks havoc on the entire system. [IMG 2007.11.02 No Bootable Device] So I thought . . . why not get VMware Fusion , which seems to have great reviews everywhere, includingChris, who makes a very compelling argument. I surely did not want to drive to the Apple Store, and while I was at VMware site, I found out that you can actually download a fully functioning 30 day evaluation copy

RE: VMware Fusion unrecoverable error: (VMX) Unexpected signal: 11.

Has anyone else had this error message popping up after using Fusion version 1.1? I bought a Mac about 6 weeks ago, my first, and immediately bought VMware Fusion and Microsoft Vista to run on the Mac. Version 1.0 ran fine but after a couple of weeks version 1.1 was available, so I downloaded it and started having this message appear randomly at startup of Fusion/Vista: “VMware Fusion unrecoverable error:(vmx) Unexpected signal: 11.” I am not a techie, but I was able to follow the path right up to the last step to find the vmware.log, but the WindowsVista.vmwarevm directory (or whatever it’s called in Mac OS) was grayed out and wouldn’t open to reveal vmware.log. I feel ripped off paying for support to fix a buggy program for ANY company and hope that in the Mac community I would fare better with suppport than I had for my old HP PC with Vista Ultimate. VMware apparently wants to sell me the opportunity to tell them I have this error message!!
Any comments from others with this problem?

Hi there!

I am just trying out VMWare on my brand new little cute Mac Mini - the cheaper version with 1,83 Ghz C2D CPU. The Mac runs OS X 10.5.1 (the reason why I tell you this is that it ships with both 10.4 and 10.5).

The background is that I run VMWare on a daily basis at my work, and I run it on a 2,13 Ghz HP 5750 PC with Vista Business.

This Mac Mini has 1 Gb ram and my work PC has 2 Gb’s of ram.

I must say I was really glad to see VMWare being featured on the Mac platform and it seems to be running pretty well.

Having a bit of history in the world of computing, I belong to those who used to run Virtual PC back in the Connectix days, running it on machines like PowerPC 7200, 8600, 9500 and 9600. Back then, I ran Win 95 and NT 4 in virtual enviroments so this whole thing of VMWare is giving me flashbacks of old days.

However, truth to be told, I must say that VMWare on the PC platform clearly outperforms its sibling on the (Intel) Mac platform.

This week, for instance, my colleague showed me some tricks and set up a virtual network on his two year old Acer 8100 (with 2 Gb’s of ram). We ran three simultaneous OSes - two instances of Windows 2003 server and one instance of Windows XP Pro. One of the servers being a SQL 2000 machine and the other being a IIS platform. This allowed us to set up a model of how we work (I work at Snow Software - www.snowsoftware.com). We could switch almost seamlessly between the environments and at coffe breaks, he’d check his e-mails on his native XP Pro installation as well. I think that’s rather impressing for a two year old laptop.

I’m going to try several VMWare machines running simultaneous on my little cute Mac but I’m almost sure it won’t touch the performance of Windows-based VWMare installations yet. I’m evaluating VMWare Fusion so I have version 1.1 of it, installed yesterday.

Anyway, it’s all very sweet and I’m quite happy with it so I consider taking the plunge and buying Fusion, but I doubt it’d work well for games - but I’ll for sure try my old favourite C & C Generals.

I’ll come back here to continue reporting on how it works on my Mac Mini.

Let’s just hope they find some more magic lines of code to optimize for VMWare 1.2 - if it’d be up to the Windows-based performance it’d be a true killer app. My feeling about VMWare fusion tellls me its probably about 75% as fast as the standard VMWare run in a Windows based host. Perhaps some kind of a benchmark test would be cool - I can probably do something like that by next week, having the machines set up side by side.

Kind regards and MERRY CHRISTMAS!,

Patrick - Stockholm, Sweden

I just watched the video and read all the previous posts. I can get in on your last day of a free Parallels program. Or can try to download VMWare Fusion. I need this product for a grad course I am about to take. A 3-D world platform. I have never done this before and don’t want to destroy my MacBook. What is the final verdict? The last post I see on this is from December 29th and that guy says for XP Parallels is faster? Is that better, do all of you agree, or has the month since he wrote improved anything? I have Windows XP on its way and have to decide before the weekend. HELP!

Moved to a WinXP machine in 2003 for some specific apps that I needed. That was in the “Virtual PC” day, which was slow on G3 machines.

After not touching a mac for 5 years A friend brought over her MacBook 2.4, 2 gig ram, 250 gig hd running the newest version of OSX

I bought and installed Parallels with no problems, insalled WinXp, and a bunch of Xp native software. Everything has been easy and seamless. Gave the computer back to friend, and with no instructions, she was up and running, copying and pasting between applications in both OSs.

I’m going to buy a mac again… My Windows applications ran FASTER, on a macbook with parallels, than on a desktop pentium 4 3.0 ghz, with 3 gig of ram running its own XP.