A look at Parallels vs. VMWare on the Mac

With the release of VMWare beta of Fusion and recent betas of Parallels Desktop, the market for virtualization software on the Mac is heating up. Both are excellent products and each has their strong points. Here's a look at how they compare.

The recent beta versions of Parallels Desktop added some very significant enhancements, such as USB 2.0 support, Boot Camp support, and a new Coherence mode, which allows Windows applications to appear on your Mac's desktop rather than in a separate window showing the Windows desktop. Windows applications will appear in the dock and you can double-click Windows application shortcuts in the Finder to start windows and open that application. This makes running Windows on a Mac nearly seamless. Unfortunately that level of integration doesn't extend to Linux and other operating systems. There are still no Parallels Tools for Linux, so when you run Linux it 'captures' your mouse in the window rather than letting you move freely in and out of the window.

VMWare, on the other hand, supports a wider range of operating systems and they even have VMWare tools for Linux. However, their Windows support lacks Parallels' Coherence mode and other enhancements. If you want to run Linux or another operating system, at this time I would recommend VMWare, although for Windows, Parallels is the winner.

I've been using Parallels since the first beta and it's worked very well for me most of the time. My Windows requirements are pretty basic; I'm not using any USB devices and most of the time I'm only running Outlook, Visual Studio, and a custom bug reporting database with a VPN connection. Parallels performs flawlessly and it's much faster at running Windows on my MacBook Pro than running Windows natively on my Dell Inspiron 5140.

I also run Linux, mostly testing a new distribution, XpressLinux, which I'm working on. Unfortunately running Linux under Parallels is a lot less pleasant. I don't expect to see coherence mode for Linux, but the lack of Parallels Tools means that the Linux window captures the mouse when I click in it and I have to hit a key to release it if I want to do anything outside the Linux VM. I much prefer running Linux under VMWare, since it lets me move the mouse in and out of the window freely.