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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."
They are both tiny, and only adequate for virtual applications.
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"
ESXi is not for 90% of home users. It is built for large scale hosting where VMfusion and Parallels are often used for single client instances.
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.
I would have liked to see Sun's VirtualBoxthrown into the mix. I use Fusion and "love" it (as much as one can love having to use Windows), but a free alternative would be nice.
That being said, I also use Crossover (WINE) for quite a few things (IE6, RegexBuddy) so I don't have to launch a full VM image.
The article is loading (slowly) through Coral cache
Being on /. I should not asked if you read the article (I don't so why asking anyway) but this is a comparative between virtualizations solutions on Apple hardware and software using the VT technology found on new Intel chips to run unmodified guest x86 operating system. Main target : playing DirectX games.
Putted in other words is a comparative between two consumer grade virtualization software for Mac OS X. No datacenter, just plain old home computer.
--- Bouh !!! ---
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"
VirtualBox got off to a slow start. There were some issues for a long while that prevented it from running FreeBSD in guests, but they were fixed with the 2.1.2 release. Now it works very well, and I didn't have to pay anything to go from the old release to the one that actually works (or for the original release, for that matter). The latest version apparently supports 3D on Windows guests, but I don't have a Windows install set up at the moment so I haven't been able to test this.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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...
That's from nearly two years ago. There's now support for hardware accelerated 3D. From section 4.8 of the user manual:
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
When you're comparing performance of compressing an 8GB folder with 1000 files, or total time to encode a 2-hour movie, it's perfectly acceptable to use a stopwatch, and have your margin of error be +/- 1 second.
Convert FLACs to a portable format with FlacSquisher
This is true but it isn't yet lashed to Direct3D for Windows guests nor it OGL supported for Linux guests. This means that OGL programs can be run on Windows but Direct3D programs will still use software rendering. At least for now.
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.
I also couldn't run Parallels more than 15 minutes on my Mac Pro without it causing a kernel panic. I'm glad to hear someone else had the same problem.
I switched to VMWare Fusion and haven't looked back.
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
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
If you want to play DirectX games, you are probably best using Boot Camp, or finding a native version of the game. Neither Parallels nor VMWare will reliably support anything later than DirectX 8, most recent games, certainly anything where performance is an issue, requires DirectX 9.
I use Parallels to run MS Access and Visio - there is no native versions of either of these for Mac, and a few accounting programs that are Windows only.
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...
I use Parallels to run MS Access and Visio - there is no native versions of either of these for Mac
Have you tried using OmniGraffle. It's far superiour to Visio, at least from my point of view.
For Access... well... you could consider using a real database. Stuff like PostgreSQL runs fine in Mac OS X. I create little database applications with a web frontend using some simple PHP/Perl/Python/Ruby/whatever scripts to talk to the database all the tim, it's really easy to do and a lot more robust and portable than Access will ever be.
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
I've used VMWare fusion extensively. It has for the most part worked great. I recently tried Parallels to play some windows game. It's terrible. I tried using Parallels in my day to day work and it constantly messes up in random ways. I just switched back to Fusion today and will uninstall Parallels when I get a change later today.
Just get the result spreadsheet from ftp://ftp.mactech.com/src/mactech/volume25_2009/25.04-VM_Benchmarks-Best_Results.zip
mod me funny
Who wouldn't they just use 'time' or the equivalent, anyway? Or some python script that does that? Much less trouble, and more accurate (albeit unimportantly so) results.
Then why do you like VirtualBox?
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.
FreeBSD 7 works well on the latest release. It used to fail under heavy load for me all of the time. I've not tried OPENSTEP (OpenStep is a specification - you can't run it) but I'm told it does work if you install the correct (third-party) drivers.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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?
Well, for one thing, they timed some things that can't be measured easily without a stopwatch, like OS and app start times. Also, some GUI programs don't take command-line options (most proprietary media encoders, for instance), so your only two choices are either a stopwatch, or trusting that the app timed itself correctly.
Convert FLACs to a portable format with FlacSquisher
This is the general consensus from everyone I know who uses their VM product for more than the never-switched-on safety net of a stale Windows install:
Parallels gets you there faster if it manages to get you there at all. Fusion just works. I had largely the same experience. If I wanted it to be as fast as possible, I'd bother to BootCamp it. Speed is always secondary to reliability for me.
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?
Dude, what planet am I living on that I NEVER HEARD ABOUT VIRTUALBOX UNTIL NOW!!!??? Thanks! As for the Parallels crashing, I've not had that problem. Is it because I never come close to overtaxing it?
I cried real tears when Li Mu Bai died.
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.
When you're comparing performance of compressing an 8GB folder with 1000 files, or total time to encode a 2-hour movie, it's perfectly acceptable to use a stopwatch, and have your margin of error be +/- 1 second.
However, it is *not* acceptable to use a calendar. ;)
KeS
Beta versions of Virtual Box support DirectX just fine.
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NzAyNA
Basically they use a WINE wrapper that runs in your Virtual Machine. It'll run DirectX games at pretty much the same level of performance and compatibility as Wine runs natively.
It's not perfect but it beats the pants off any of the commercial solutions.
And they don't get nearly as much use as all the other alternatives out there.
I agree on both points (especially OmniGraffle!), but just thought I'd point out that one often does not have the privelege of using one's apps in a vacuum.
For example, I run Eclipse inside a Windows VM because the Java code I'm developing interfaces to commercial Windows-native code. I could develop "remotely" from the host OS, but it would be a fair bit of hassle just to replace a solution that works.
Additive identity, multiplicative cancellation, distributive multiplication over addition: pick any two (unless 1 = 0)
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.
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. This was something the version of Parallels I paid for couldn't do. Apparently they messed up the IPI handling (doing something that was wrong but relatively harmless on the Core 1, and very bad on the Core 2), but the only way of 'fixing' the problem way to buy the next version of the product. Since I don't like paying for bug fixes, I never found out if the new version actually did fix the problem, but there's no way I'd give the company any money after that.
VMWare also has that feature of stability, and not having to pay for upgrades. (First hit is not free, however. ;-) ) Virtualbox is pretty good, but can't do stuff like run bootcamp partitions or graphics, and VMWare Fusion outperforms it and out-compatibles it. Other than that though, Virtualbox is a good choice if you don't want to pay about $60 for the privledge of virtualizing Windows or various other operating systems on your Mac. (Though unless you're running a server or deploying on Linux, I'm not sure what the attraction is for running Linux on a Mac; OS X *is* Unix under the hood after all and runs most of the Linux and BSD programs, even X11 if you like that kind of punishment. ;-) )
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
I paid all of $29 for my legit copy of Fusion and it runs beautifully, allowing me to use the screwy Java remote console with Sun's ILOM. Close enough to free
Will OmniGraffle allow me to work on other people's Visio files? From the feature chart, it appears probably not.
I use Access for things where Excel can't really cope, but setting up a proper database system would be overkill, and take far too long.
> 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.
Same here.
> Since I don't like paying for bug fixes, I never found out if the new version actually did fix the problem, but there's no way I'd give the company any money after that.
Exactly. I bought Parallels v2 at the very beginning, and even updated to v3 before I really used v2. Then I had two troubles with them:
1) The product is buggy, and I don't like paying for bug fixes (automatic upgrades didn't really improved the situation). I am ok to pay for a new version of a product I already have if I am happy with it, which is not the case.
2) They never sent me the wine source code I asked for.
In general their support team waves hands, and pretend everything is ok in their side and that the issue is on your side (you apps or even your ISP (!))
They are not going to get any more money from me.
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.
Little tip: VMWare often has education offers at least in Germany. Right now they offer a "CeBIT special" VMWare 2 Education license over Unimall for 35 Euros (~44 USD) and in the past I've seen Fusion bundled with MBPs sold via Unimall. If you are a student you might do well to look up if there's a comparable offer in your country. Almost half the price off is a pretty good deal.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
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.
If you REALLY like to punish your Mac... you can also get Gentoo for OSX. Of course, to some Gentoo is punishing yourself, too... but personally I love having the prefixed Gentoo environment for all my Linux-style tools, while still being able to run my Mac tools in the same terminal window.
I'm not quite ready to have that as my default shell environment though... but I do have a shortcut to start up "startprefix.sh" in a terminal window :)
Note that if there's BSD or Linux type software you just HAVE to have and can't live without, but also can't get as an OSX package or Gentoo emerge... there's always DarwinPorts, which is a version of Port for OSX. I have that as well, but I tend to use Gentoo as my first source, Port as my second.
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.
Will OmniGraffle allow me to work on other people's Visio files? From the feature chart, it appears probably not.
Yes, OmniGraffle can import and export in Visio's XML format. You will need the Professional version for this though, but it does work.
I use Access for things where Excel can't really cope, but setting up a proper database system would be overkill, and take far too long.
I can't really comment here. I've never worked with Access, so I have no idea how long it would take to create an application with it. I usually don't spend more than a day or two on my own little database projects, but if that's already too much, than I guess it's not really a viable alternative. Maybe something like FileMaker Pro could do the trick for you? I've never used that myself also, so I really can't say anything useful about it, but I have heard from other Mac-users that they enjoy working with it.
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
OpenStep (guest) installed but couldn't boot.
Wow. Quite frankly, I'm amazed you even got it to install. The last release of Openstep was what ? 1995 ?
http://collectivesys.com/item/compare/jiOfkdakRQLc%3BZNirZgJyK3gh