Parallels Desktop vs. VMware Fusion

I recently spent some time to check out virtualization capabilities on the Intel Mac. There are in general two commercial products to use: Parallels Desktop and VMware Fusion. Both of them promise that you can run Windows and other operating systems in parallel to the Mac OSX – and of course each one of them “is better than the other”.

I currently evaluate both. For this, I freed 32GB on my hard disk and installed Windows XP professional (a legal copy!) via Boot Camp. This is a boot manager which allows you to choose the operating system at startup, similar to grub for Linux etc. Currently it is beta, but according to Apple, it will be official part of Leopard somewhen in the end of this year. It was a bit scary to install it in the beginning, especially when you know it is beta, but it went very smoothly and all the hardware works on Windows… bluetooth, wireless, sound, remote control etc. Great!

Then I installed both, Parallels and Fusion on the Mac OS X. With Parallels, you need to create a virtual machine and specify the bootcamp partition for startup. For Fusion, you just tell that you start the bootcamp partition as a virtual machine. The first way is a little cumbersomely but anyway. The real evaluation can start. Here are some of the results that I gained:

Startup of the virtual machine

Both products let you install a set of programs for easier communication between host and guest OS, called Parallels tools or VMware tools respectively. This went fine in both cases, took longer for Fusion. Then you need to startup again.
Parallels takes very long to initialize before the actual startup process starts. Also, there is an annoying warning all the time that “Parallels tools are initialized” and “you should not switch off the VM”. Informative the first time but annoying from the second time on. Startup of Win XP went very fast after the long init phase, but it sometimes happens randomly that you need to reinstall Parallels tools to make this warning go away.
VMware Fusion starts as fast as if you would start from real hardware. No initialization phase and no strange warnings. When you know VMware workstation or player from other operating systems, you are used to that.

Working with the VM

Both products let you switch to different operating modes. You can have a full screen mode, so that nobody guesses that the guest OS is actually a VM inside Mac OS X. Also you can run it inside a window and – most interestingly in the first place – you can run Windows applications and make them look like they were running inside OS X, minnimize them to the dock etc. This seems to be interesting, but when I tried it once, I lost interest in this feature. The comfort and speed in graphics rendering and display is so much worse compared to windowed or full screen display that it is a pain… I concluded that the unity view feature is just a nice to have but it does not need to be there. This applies to both products – but eventually it will get better in one of the next releases? I like to know in which environment I am anyway, so I wouldn’t use it anyway probably.
Parallels has nice effects when you switch from windowed view to full screen view. But the shortcut to get back to windowed view seems to be a bit awkward to remember… I had some trouble to get back to windowed view. There is currently no DirectX support for windows and therefore no support for 3D effects. I can imagine that this makes in half interresting for Windows Vista users or gamers to use it on Parallels – but personally I don’t care too much. I don’t play graphics intensive games on the computer and I don’t want to have Vista in the near future. Everything else regarding graphics goes smoothly and sufficiently fast. One problem that I recognized is, that whenever I start Parallels, Windows tells me to install two security patches (I don’t remember their KB names right now) although I have installed them many times before. This must be a bug in Parallels, it does not happen in BootCamp and also not in Fusion. Remarkably, my VPN client (Cisco) works on Parallels, this means I can connect to the VPN at work.
VMware Fusion has also a nice blending effect when switching from/to full screen view. Not so nice as parallels moving cube effect but still ok. Here we have experimental support for DirectX and 3D effects, so VMware is a little ahead. Apart from this everything runs smoothly (no need to reinstall patches after every startup) – but the VPN client does not work. A workaround is to connect to VPN via the host OS… then I have access to it in the guest OS as well. With VMware fusion it was also very easy to create a pure virtual machine for Ubuntu Feisty, which I use mainly just to have a look at it. Very fast and smooth working without any trouble. I experienced this before with VMware workstation on Windows too… But to be fair, I didn’t try this with Parallels so far.

Configuration of virtual machines

The configuration options for virtual machines are mainly very similar for both products. For Parallels you can configure a BootCamp partition for a virtual machine, whereas for VMware, the BootCamp partition is already a virtual machine. Interestingly, you can assign one or two virtual processors to the guest OS in VMware, but not in Parallels. Does this mean you have always one or always two processors in Parallels? The setting option in VMware is useful. BootCamp partitions are, AFAIK, not resizable in both products, whereas pure virtual machines are. You can for both products specify the size of memory and the devices that start connected.

Fazit: Both products are good and easy to use. I have the impression that VMware Fusion runs more smoothly than Parallels (despite from the VPN client on Windows). It is also well suited for running pure virtual machines of other operating systems. So I think I will buy VMware Fusion… The price is, by the way, virtually the same for both products.