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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).
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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
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.
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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.
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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.)
That's from nearly two years ago. There's now support for hardware accelerated 3D. From section 4.8 of the user manual:
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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.
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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.
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.
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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...
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/
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.
Yes.
It works really well too. I mean REALLY well.
Basically any game that runs under Wine currently will run under Virtual Boxes 3D hardware implementation (they used a lot of WINEs implementations for the graphics functions).
The performance is about what you'd get running under WINE in Linux natively.
For home use i wouldn't bother with anything other than VitualBox. No other Virtual Machine out there approaches its 3D hardware virtualisation.
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 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.
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.
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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.