Slashdot Mirror
Parallels Desktop For Mac Vs. VMware
neilticktin writes "MacTech performed an exhaustive set of benchmarks comparing Parallels Desktop 4 to VMWare Fusion 2 to run Windows on a Mac. To tackle this problem, MacTech undertook a huge benchmarking project starting in December — over 2500 tests by stopwatch. The goal was to see how the recent versions of VMWare Fusion and Parallels Desktop performed on different levels of Mac hardware, using XP, Vista, 64-bit, multi-procs, games, etc. ... As usual, results vary by what's important to you."
No Citrix XenServer? That is the most sophisticated of the free virtualization products. They should include it in the comparison. Especially since VMware ESXi doesn't work with, well, lots and lots of hardware.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
This is a desktop comparison, VMware ESXi is of the server variety and I assume by the name Citrix XenServer is as well.
I went to eat some animal crackers and the box said, "Do not eat if seal is broken." I opened the box and sure enough..
Slashdotted already? Bummer. I have a feeling I know what the conclusion page says... "Do NOT host a web server with IIS on a Macbook running Windows in VMware Fusion"
Parallels and Fusion are not free products.
Stopwatch != accurate...
"Oh sorry, I pressed the button 50ms too late!"
Well, apparently they shouldn't run their server in virtualization software.
Either way, I like Parallels better because it's so much better integrated (albeit more expensive) and easier to use. It also has better support for DirectX and OpenGL than VMWare which is something I needed (OpenGL).
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
Both products fail miserably at running anything older than XP. VMWare still wins here, since at least it manages to install and run 98SE successfully, while Parallels install suffers from endless crashes. But even a trivial DX game like "Lose your marbles" results in a blank screen, while it works perfectly fine in VPC for Mac on 5 year old hardware. There are many older applications and games that do not run on XP. Just how hard would it be to emulate an S3 video card and SB16 so that we can run whatever we fill like in the VM?
VMware states that you can not post benchmarks. This is why there are no benchmarks out there comparing it.
Prepare to have your page deactivated.
I have tested all three of these products. I like Sun Virtualbox not just for price (free) but for performance.
If you've never tried it, please do so. It's free and easy to setup. Supports all major platforms.
I find it is quite fast. Supports also VT-x/AMD-V, and propagates 3D support from host to guest as OpenGL.
http://www.virtualbox.org/
Ron
When people by a Mac and then run Windows on it.
I always laugh. Like now.
I'll try anything once. Twice if it tastes good
I like VMWare partially because I have clients using that to virtualize servers, so I'm familiar with them as a company. I also didn't like how I couldn't completely uninstall Parallels when I tried a demo of it. It left pieces installed and I ended up rebuilding my MBP at one point partially because of that. I don't know that VMWare doesn't do the same thing, so it may be as bad as well. However I'm also more comfortable knowing that they have experience in the server world in general, and not just desktops.
I will shred my adversaries. Pull their eyes out just enough to turn them towards their mewing, mutilated faces. Illyria
I couldn't read the article(/.'d) but I know from personal experience (and reading countless others testimony) that Parallels 4 is a humongous heap of manure. I do own Parallels 3 and 4 but never looked back after purchasing VMware 2. When Parallels sold me the upgrade to 4.0 I backed up 4 virtual machines I had (thankfully) then proceded to spend the next 4 days trying to get it to run ANY of them. The first attempt at each upgrade to v4, following Parallels explicit insructions, resulted in total destruction of the virtual machine(unrecoverable with no way to downgrade it back to v3 to use again). I sent in about 5 support requests that are still TO THIS DAY unanswered from last November. As stated before,the article is slashdotted but I don't actually care what the results are. Parallels can keep their products (like they did my money). I will never do business with that company again.
"Computers are a lot like Air Conditioners" "They both work great until you start opening Windows"
Best info I can find googling around says that VirtualBox doesn't support 3D acceleration, and adding it would be difficult. http://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?t=16 is the first hit (and from the VB site).
That would be 99.99% of home users. It's hard to conceive of an application for ESX[i] at "home," given Fusion and Workstation. ESX is heavyweight and particular in its hardware requirements, nontrivial to manage (especially with the free license), and just generally not the right thing if you don't have a spare tower server or DC handy, a full license, and someone else to pay your power bill. Although, in those circumstances, it's pretty cool.
(A bunch of the remaining .01% are going to explain why I'm wrong now.)
Disclaimer: I work for VMware. (And I would run ESX at home if there was a reason to.)
FTA:"A few years back, Apple switched the Mac platform from PowerPC to Intel processors. This introduced some interesting opportunities for the Mac, including the ability to run operating systems other than Mac OS X on a Mac"
Wrong. Linux ran and runs on PowerPC based macs. Do your research please...
Parallels is to problematic in my experience. VMWare seems to work alright but bogs down and locks up occasionally, though it does work a bit better since McAfee was removed. I'm messing with Virtual Box now, so far it's promising but I need to mess with it more. I've run out of reasons to boot Windows, and to chain myself to my desk recently so I haven't been testing it as much as I could.
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
Does that mean we can play PC games?
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
In the majority of overall averages of our tests, Parallels Desktop is the clear winner running 14-20% faster than VMware Fusion. The one exception is for those that need to run Windows XP, 32-bit on 2 virtual processors, VMware Fusion runs about 10% faster than Parallels Desktop.
The exact opposite appears to be the case, according to the legend at the bottom of the graph.
"I do not avoid women, Mandrake . . . but I do deny them my essence." - Gen. Ripper
Gee, who would have thought that spreading your article across TEN BLOODY PAGES would increase the load on your servers? Idiots and their ad impressions...
I agree that for many things WINE is a good solution, with a lot less overhead. And, theoretically, much lower cost (no Windows license required - though Crossover isn't free).
Actually, I wonder why more folks don't use WINE or WINELIB to port Windows stuff to the Mac. I think WINELIB needs higher visibility in general.
Also, with a new generation of ARM-based netbooks on the horizon, I'm wondering whether there's a decent open source X86 emulator that could be paired with WINE to run Windows apps under Linux on these things. X86 emulation with WINE should be much faster than, say, VirtualPC was on the old PowerPC Macs. With VirtualPC, you had to emulate everything, including most of the Windows API. But WINE would provide the Windows API as native ARM code. Only the application logic would have to be emulated. I think that would result in surprisingly acceptable performance.
Posted from my Android phone. Oh, I can change this? There, that's better...
... as Parallels 3 did? Seriously, I've seen more kernel panics in 6 months of using Parallels than I had seen in 15+ years of working on *nix systems.
Just get the result spreadsheet from ftp://ftp.mactech.com/src/mactech/volume25_2009/25.04-VM_Benchmarks-Best_Results.zip
mod me funny
Sorry all for the slowness this morning. Turns out that OpenAds was struggling with the load from being slashdotted. Once we figured that out, everything is loading much better now. Thanks for your patience. Neil Ticktin Publisher/Editor-in-Chief MacTech Magazine
Sorry ... all is better now. Try it again.
OpenAds was having trouble and once we figured that out, all is fine.
Thanks - Neil
You said, "There *ARE* viable alternatives [to Trados]..."
Off topic, but what are the alternatives?
Nope. Works quite nicely actually.
Damn ... you caught us! (Love the IIS comment).
Actually, the banner ad system got crushed by SlashDot. Once we took OpenAds out of the picture, all went well.
Try it again now.
http://www.mactech.com/articles/mactech/Vol.25/25.04/VMBenchmarks/
When I setup my Mac to dualboot as I'm leaning towards it I may use VirtualBox myself. It would have been nice if Mactech had included it.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Virtual Box rocks, cross platform and I swear it is faster running Windows on my home box versus the ESX server I run stuff on at work.
I was leaning towards using Virtualbox if I install Ubuntu on my Mac. However I'm not clear whether it can run another OS installed on a dualboot computer in a VM. If not then I'll need either VMWare or Parallels as they can both do that.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
I never even bought it (thank gods) and it caused me problems. I demo'd it for a while, and found it not as good as VMWare Fusion at the time, so I uninstalled it. My Mac Pro took an impressive dive in stability after that, and IIRC, I couldn't even do a software shutdown due to a kernel extension Parallels had left behind. I had to go on the web to find out what files it left behind, and how to remove them, and sure enough, my computer worked fine after that.
I'm not a huge fan of VMWare Fusion nowadays either, though. I suspect it's what broke my XP Boot Camp partition twice (made it hang at the loading screen when booting it native) and I know it somehow managed to make it so when using X Chat Aqua, in OS X, without VMWare Fusion even _on_, XCA would crash if I right-clicked anything in it. I uninstalled VMWare Fusion, and everything went back to normal.
I'm thinking of trying Virtual Box out, but I kind of am reluctant, considering the current track record of virtualization on my machine. :/
By reading this you acknowledge that you have read it.
Makes you wonder why Apple doesn't insist on proper uninstallers, like Windows apps.
Installers for Windows can be just as bad if not worse. Those who release software need to make sure there is a good installer/uninstaller.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
I switched from Parallels Desktop to VirtualBox and it has one feature which I really like; the ability to run for over a week without causing a kernel panic.
There is one feature both Parallels and VMWare has that Virtualbox does not have yet, the ability to run an OS than is installed on a dualboot computer. I may install Ubuntu on my Mac and if so then I will want to run Ubuntu in a VM when I bootup Leopard, as well as the other way around, but Virtualbox doesn't do that.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Parallels was much faster than VMWare except under only a couple of instances... wow.. very interesting.
I use VMWare on a MBP all day long coding C# in VS2008, and there are definitely times when it freezes up or runs very very slowly. Sometimes it does really well, though.
I definitely will be checking out Parallels 4, though.
At this point in time there is no Direct3D support, but its on its way. I believe the focus is on WineD3D, but I have not been able to use it yet to run GoogleEarth in DIrect 3D - I am using this as a simple capability test.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
I switched from Parallels Desktop to VirtualBox and it has one feature which I really like;
Another thing Virtual Box has going for it is that it doesn't need a network interface driver external to the VM.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
I just can't believe I can't boot a VM from either product off a USB drive.
KeS
but for home use there is no better option than VirtualBox.
Unless, of course, you manage to hit the "guest CPU utilisation never drops below 25%, even when the guest is idle, on a dual-core processor, using either a FreeBSD or Linux guest, on a Windows XP host" bug. *sigh* This, and the fact that there have been at least two separate tickets opened for this issue for several months, are the reasons I went back to VMware.
Most of the communities online seem to have the same opinion. Fusion seems to be more "solid" than Parallels. Most of my users have come to the conclusion that Parallels is just very glitchy and unreliable. Even though their benchmarks show Parallels is faster, it visually doesn't feel faster. Running Fusion brings up the session much faster, apps feel faster and printing is definitely better within Fusion than Parallels.
A terrible upgrade process that took forever and resulted in VMs that ran so slow I couldn't even install Parallels tools without timing out. Support tickets and forum posts failed to get a useful response.
I switched to VMWare 2 (free after competitive upgrade) and will never go back.
For those people making posts about why run Windows in a VM, I would respond that I think all software developers should run each of their projects in a separate VM (as I do) to prevent contamination of the OS's. I run 3-5 VMs at once, all running Visual Studio, with different projects in each. The freedom of this also allows me to use the best tool to host the VMs, surf the internet, read my mail and do everything else, except write software for MS based clients, in Mac OS X.
You know, normally EULA's are pretty confusing, yet everyone seems to be unable to read plain english. If they don't approve of the methodology, you may not publish the results. Following the EULA, they really have an easy out to just claim they don't like your study and they don't approve. Why would the words "and approved" be in there otherwise?
Hello for a non official list of unsupported hardware confirmed to run both ESX and ESXi please see the following site.
http://www.vm-help.com/esx/esx3.5/Whiteboxes_SATA_Controllers_for_ESX_3.5_3i.htm
The site is run by Dave Mishchenko who is quite knowledgeable on VMware
The current versions of Parallels Desktop and Parallels Workstation run on 64-bit architecture computers if a 32-bit primary OS is installed on it, however, the current versions of Parallels Desktop and Parallels Workstation do not support 64-bit operating systems. We are working on adding the 64-bit OSes support in future versions of our products.
From http://kb.parallels.com/en/4780
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
You know, since it does exactly the same thing as both and is completely free.
I'm not someone who's done a lot with VMs. I worked with Softwindows ages ago, but performance was pretty dreadful. I recently picked up a MacBook Pro - a nothing special 2.4 Ghz machine & decided to give VMWare Fusion a try. I gotta say I was absolutely floored by the performance. Once you've launched it, restoring a suspended Vista session is really fast. The biggest shocker - at least for me, Flash CS3 launches faster through a Fusion/Vista VM on my Mac than it does natively on my Windows machine. If Parallels is actually faster yet, then...wow.
Vote Quimby.
Don't support corporate radio any longer - listen to X1FM, raw and uncut internet radio. Go to x1fmradio.com for more in
I'm confused about this. From their site:
Later BBCI would maintain an 8 year business relationship with "Clear Channel Communications," which made BBCI a leader in the communications Industry.
http://collectivesys.com/item/compare/jiOfkdakRQLc%3BZNirZgJyK3gh
Tickin is an idiot.