A look at VMware Fusion beta 3
Although I’ve been using Parallels Desktop since early beta, I tried VMware Fusion and I’m very impressed by it. Based on what I’ve seen with beta 3, I might even switch when it’s released.
Parallels and VMware both let you run other operating systems on your Intel-based Macs without rebooting. Even though it’s still a beta, VMware supports a wider variety of operating systems and supports more hardware features including multiple CPUs and power management in virtual machines.
If you’re interested in running Linux, VMware is the clear winner, since they have full tool support for Linux (improved mouse & video support, clock synchronization, shared folders). Parallels still lacks tools for Linux, so as a result it captures the mouse in the VM window rather than letting you move it freely in and out of the window as you can when running Windows.
A few days ago I decided to take the plunge and switch to VMware for running Windows. Although VMware has a utility for converting a windows system (including a Parallels VM), the result was a VM that froze immediately with no mouse or keyboard. I ended up installing a fresh copy of Windows XP. VMware’s Easy Install made it completely painless. You just insert the CD and enter the product key. It will then complete the installation with no further prompts and even installs VMware tools.
I haven’t run any graphic intensive applications or games - I run windows mostly to use Outlook & Visual Studio - and I found the performance roughly equal to Parallels. The only feature I miss is Parallels’ Coherence mode, which lets Windows applications share the desktop instead of running in a separate OS window.
VMware seems to have much less of an impact on my MacBook Pro’s performance than Parallels, which sometimes slows it down to a crawl. On several occasions when running Parallels I’ve seen WindowServer using over 100% CPU, which André Pang documents in his blog. I’ve never seen it happen with VMware. My MacBook Pro also seems to run cooler when running VMware.
Tags: Intel
April 13th, 2007 at 2:20 pm
One important detail that you left out: The price for VMWare for Mac has not been announced yet. Looking at VMWare’s other products, they are all significantly more than Parallels for Mac. Of course there’s no telling what they will finally announce for Fusion, but it’s probably no coincidence that they are letting people get a feel for how well the product works before telling you how much it is going to cost!!!