Hello everyone, I am currently trying out Parallels Desktop 13 and VMWare Fusion 10 to host Windows 10 and Fedora 27 VMs. As of right now, Parallels Desktop appears to be the clear winner. In Parallels: - I can watch high-definition videos in Youtube without hiccups; - The GUI seems much faster (drawing in general: menus, windows, switching tabs on the browser, etc); - Mouse scrolling with my Macbook's Pro trackpad works very well (kudos forthis!). Under VMware Fusion, scrolling sensitivity appears to be broken and jumpy (this appears to be a well known issue, with many "workarounds" floating around). Out of the box, Parallels impressed me. Things just work. And they work well. Fedora 27 seems more "laggy/slow", but it could be just a Linux/Xorg/Gnome thing (any tips?). Anyway, there is only one big thing remaining. As you may be aware, starting with Windows 10 Fall Creators Update, Microsoft has introduced some impressive security features [1]. One of those features is "Virtualization Based Security" [2]: "Virtualization-based security, or VBS, uses hardware virtualization features to create and isolate a secure region of memory from the normal operating system. Windows can use this "virtual secure mode" to host a number of security solutions, providing them with greatly increased protection from vulnerabilities in the operating system, and preventing the use of malicious exploits which attempt to defeat protections." In order for VBS to work, I must activate UEFI, UEFI secure boot, and the "Enable Nested Virtualization". Then activate the Hyper-V hypervisor inside Windows 10. This works, but the performance is very very poor, with high CPU usage. On the other hand, VMWare Fusion appears to have much better support for this [3]. The curious thing is that VMWare's performance does not seem to be affected by enabling Virtualization Based Security. So with VBS, VMWare is considerably faster than Parallels. Somehow, Parallels is affected by this. The question is: Can Parallels work with Windows 10 VBS, having acceptable performance? Is there an hidden option? Thank you very much. Joao [1] - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/design/device-experiences/oem-highly-secure [2] - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/design/device-experiences/oem-vbs [3] - https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-F...UID-DA229CFF-AB85-401F-9DA5-35E429649893.html
Just to follow up on this. Initially, VMWare Fusion seemed to work fine with Virtualization Based Security (VBS) enabled, after a while I discovered that it suffered from noticeable slowdowns. Not as much as Parallels, but still. I ended up purchasing a License of Parallels. Overall, without VBS the experience is much more smoother. I hope that someday Parallels will be able to support VBS without a significant performance impact. Not sure if that is even technically feasible (running nested VMs without much overhead), but it would be great. Best regards, Joao
