Comments on: Parallels vs VMware Fusion – No Contest?

By: Bo Zhong

Bo Zhong — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 14:35:08 +0000

Having tried both fusion and parallels 3 and 4, for basic stuff like excel, word, plus some unique stuff [updating using a usb device for datacards], speed is not noticeable between the two [maybe fusion is a bit faster]. however, usb connectivity is *much* better with fusion. BUT what makes fusion *much better* is customer support–parallels customer support is non-existent! you have to purchase each upgrade, and pay *again* if you malware or whatever crashes your machine and you need to download the program again. as well, several emails to support went totally unanswered.
So performance-wise, advantage to fusion, particularly if you use usb peripherals; with respect to customer service, parallels gets an F.

By: Tips, tricks and tools for the Windows/Mac switcher « Dave Nicoll’s personal blog

Tue, 29 Jul 2008 15:36:17 +0000

[...] you’re considering Parallels, I wouldn’t bother. Most users agree VMware Fusion is a more stable product and generally performs better. Afterall, it [...]

By: Aaditya_DMW

Aaditya_DMW — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 15:06:49 +0000

I already Have An Installed XP and Ubuntu 8.04 on My Hard Disk. Currently I Installed VMware On Ubuntu 8.04 ,
I want to Boot My Already Installed XP Using VMware(I Didn’t Installed Xp Using VMware) And Work on it. Plz Help By Giving Ur Suggestion, i m Desperately Waiting For FollowUp Comments

By: Brian

Brian — Wed, 14 May 2008 13:05:36 +0000

Virtualbox with Ubuntu 7.10 , crashed the disk and had to restart. While it was working, it was really good, but for a work computer.. didn’t cut it.
Parallels, might be slower, but it works all the time, no crashes with Ubuntu, XP or Vista for me. It could only run Ubuntu with ~500M Ram, I believe some people found work arounds, but really who has that kind of time. Anyway it worked..
So I am Trying Fusion. So far I hate it. I wanted to use it because we use VMWare on Ubuntu to run windows, and XP to run Ubuntu. Works great and I wanted to share VM’s. Its basically killed my mac because of the networking setup. It crashes far to often with ubuntu and seems to have significant disk issues. If I didn’t like it some much on other platforms, I wouldn’t give it a second look, but it would be nice if it worked.
Fusion did locate and use my Boot camp partition very well, of course XP made me register again, nice… but it went pretty quick.
Sadly if I want to run ubuntu, its better to boot to window and run VMware there. Even when I don’t start the Fusion vm’s it causes syslogd trouble because of the networking. I would say don’t buy this product at this time.
I’d say parallels, stills wins in this space, if you need reliability.
I have a MacBook with 2gig running 10.5.x. if that makes a difference.

By: Jay

Jay — Mon, 12 May 2008 03:21:00 +0000

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.

By: Chinarut

Chinarut — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 13:52:55 +0000

ok – I’m ready to be part of this debate now – for me, it hasn’t been really about speed – it’s been about usability. There are lots of pros & cons to both but the one that really killed Parallels for me is installing Linux TLE (Ubuntu 7.10-based) as a guest OS on both sides. it just worked on VMWare Fusion the first time – I had to deal with X not starting up on the Parallels side and now dealing with a shutdown issue.

I know this is just one scenario but it is a real one for me.

Parallels does get kudos on the support side of things – I find the forums quite helpful.

It’s a tough call and decide in another 15 days when my VMWare Fusion eval license is up.

By: lorenchuk

lorenchuk — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 23:26:52 +0000

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!

By: Breckenridge

Breckenridge — Sat, 29 Dec 2007 14:21:38 +0000

From my personal experience I would say that if you are planning on using windows XP, parallels is much faster than Fusion. If you intend to use windows Vista then Fusion is the key, it runs windows much faster than parallels.

By: Patrick Fridh

Patrick Fridh — Sun, 23 Dec 2007 12:26:30 +0000

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 – http://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

By: Pete Kazanjy

Pete Kazanjy — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 22:18:11 +0000

J stevenson: I’m sorry that you’re having trouble with your VMware Fusion implementation. I’m sure that’s totally frustrating.

Instead of going the support route, at first, I would recommend posting your issue to the VMware Fusion community message boards. There is a great community of users and VMware people who hang out on the boards, helping each other out. Someone on there may have seen your problem before, and already solved it.

Here’s the link: http://communities.vmware.com/community/vmtn/desktop/fusion

I hope that helps.

~Pete Kazanjy
VMware Fusion, Product Marketing

By: j stevenson

j stevenson — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 06:21:18 +0000

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?

By: John Callahan

John Callahan — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 01:34:03 +0000

I bought Parallels back when it first came out and have struggled with non-existent support, buggy updates and now the 5160 version destroyed my Boot Camp installation in Leopard. Parallels admits this is a problem and hidden in a long forum post “5160 Leopard problems” they strongly encourage Leopard users not to install 5160 yet the main page STILL encourages customers to download and install it.

Numerous calls to Parallels and four email have never been returned.
We are pulling it off company wide this week and good riddance – worst ’support’ I’ve ever encountered and after handing over your $79 you relaize very quickly you are on your own.

I now know more people who have and are abandoning Parallels than using it anymore.

By: Platform Peace » Parallels vs VMWare Fusion

Platform Peace » Parallels vs VMWare Fusion — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 16:14:21 +0000

[...] are several reviews and comparisons you can read about so I will not rehash them here. I did a (very) brief evaluation of both [...]

By: Ron Sager

Ron Sager — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 16:54:01 +0000

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??

By: Yvan Lamontagne

Yvan Lamontagne — Sun, 19 Aug 2007 19:59:28 +0000

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.