General Question

cboone's avatar

Is VMware Fusion any better than Parallels Desktop?

Asked by cboone (2points) June 11th, 2008
5 responses
“Great Question” (0points)

Is it less buggy? Is the interface any better designed? Does it crash less? Et cetera.

Observing members: 0
Composing members: 0

Answers

b's avatar

From what I hear: yes. Everyone I know that uses virtualization in OS X prefers Fusion. But remember, you will get better system performance if you use boot camp instead of a virtual machine.

b (1873points)“Great Answer” (2points)
zarnold's avatar

@b:
I agree; I’ve heard that VMware makes more efficient use of dual core CPU’s, and is thus less of a resource drain. That said, the interface of the last version I used is primitive compared to parallels – Coherence (a feature of parallels) allows pretty much seamless integration of the start menu and window panes into OS X.

I’ve been using parallels lately and it has been a bit buggy, using almost 100% of my CPU (both cores) just to perform a system update, so I’d probably recommend fusion. A good way to integrate it into OS X Leopard is to just use Spaces and set the VM to open full-screen in another space automatically, so you can switch back and forth with just a keystroke.

felipelavinz's avatar

I don’t really know how it would work on a Mac, but some time ago I tried VMWare Server and VirtualBox, on a Ubuntu (Linux) host, and VirtualBox was much better overall experience… very easy to set-up and worked really smooth (actually, I still use it, and I’ve never had any problem with it).

benseven's avatar

@Zarnold -VMWare Fusion now has a coherence mode they call ‘Unity’, and it’s improved a lot recently…

Certainly gets my vote.

Answer this question

Login

or

Join

to answer.

Mobile | Desktop


Send Feedback   

`