VMWare Fusion Looking REAL Good

S

snpower

Member
I've been using Parallels since it was in beta. Generally speaking I've thought it to be a good product. I waited for USB support for my devices, and it came. However; I've been generally disappointed in the speed at which the program boots windows. It takes around 4 minutes. Reinstallation of the software has not helped.

I downloaded the VMWare Fusion Beta today. It flies in comparison.

I hope Parallels keeps working on this program, but I have to admit I am going to give VMWare a serious look now.
 
Have you tried doing a fresh XP VM install in Parallels? My boot time flies, it's the shutdown that takes time. i really do not see any difference in boot up time in XP with Parallels or VMware.
 
Booting or resuming?

For me, I see the big slowdown not when booting a virtual machine, but resuming one from sleep. It always takes at least a minute after the screen shows up for the VM to swap itself in. Way back when, Parallels used to spend a minute actually reading the RAM file back in. It had a progress bar and everything. Nowadays, I'm pretty sure they are just memory mapping a file, which means that they can pop up the video in a hurry, but then every page that gets touched has to be read in from disk, which means the guest acts like it's stuck in a tar pit for an indefinite period of time.

Quite frankly, I'd prefer the old way. At least with the progress bar, I have some clue how long it's going to be before I can be productive.

As for VMware, I tried the beta early on and all it did was crash OS X. Now that they're close to 1.0, I'd be interested in trying them again if I didn't have to reinstall, but so far as I can tell they don't have an equivalent to Parallels Transporter to migrate virtual disks, and I'm not entirely sure I want to bother with installing Windows and all my apps all over again.
 
At the moment Fusion is winning easily for me due to CPU usage. Both XP and Vista in Fusion idle below 10% (as shown by activity monitor). In Parallels both idle at or above 30%, which seems pretty high and causes my MBP's fans to kick in even when the machine is sitting doing nothing.
 
wingdo said:
Have you tried doing a fresh XP VM install in Parallels? My boot time flies, it's the shutdown that takes time. i really do not see any difference in boot up time in XP with Parallels or VMware.
Click to expand...

No, just the Parallels software. I should do that I suppose.

I beleive in loyalty, if at all possible. I'd be happy to give Parallels the benefit of the doubt.
 
The only problem I'm having with VMWare is that their program for converting VMs only runs on Windows, which means I couldn't get started converting my VPC VMs because VPC wouldn't run on my new Intel MacBook Pro, so I didn't have a Windows environment to run VMWare's conversion program in. Bootcamp wasn't really an option because the only version of Windows I had was the one that came with VPC, and I couldn't install it in Bootcamp. Converting my VMs was the only way to go, and Parallels did that for me.

Granted, I've had some problems with Parallels. There are some serious bugs they're going to have to fix, but I think VMWare waited an awfully long time to release anything for the Mac, and when they did they didn't offer a smooth migration path for VPC users like me who have migrated to Intel Macs. I have to wonder how serious they are about supporting this platform.
 
I am so sad that it looks like they will be losing another customer, me. Also a customer since the beginning, I am sick of the lack of reliability that is coming on more and more, the still "hoggy" CPU requirements, and the lack of response to support issues and what appears to be poor beta testing. The latest release has had pretty bad results with the OS integration, and it just feels like no real effort was made in properly testing it before getting it out the door.
Yes, VMWare is looking VERY Good
anyone know how well it works with both installed? I am afraid of their interaction and wonder if I should uninstall parallels first?
 
Don't lose sight of VirtualBox .

I have just tried the beta 2 and it does seem to work very well , and at a price that can't fail to impress . For the odd time I need to boot Windows , I may well consider removing Parallels and running the release version of VirtualBox .

Especially as I have never had any reply on my upgrade query . A polite 'Sorry but no' is better than no reply .
 
Windows XP Pro SP2 Boots in 5-10 Seconds for Me

snpower said:
I've been using Parallels since it was in beta. Generally speaking I've thought it to be a good product. I waited for USB support for my devices, and it came. However; I've been generally disappointed in the speed at which the program boots windows. It takes around 4 minutes. Reinstallation of the software has not helped.

I downloaded the VMWare Fusion Beta today. It flies in comparison.

I hope Parallels keeps working on this program, but I have to admit I am going to give VMWare a serious look now.
Click to expand...
Windows XP Pro SP2 boots in 5-10 seconds (I have not timed it with a stopwatch, but I know it is FAST) in Parallels 3.0 build 4560. Actually it booted that fast in 2.5 too, regardless of build.

Perhaps you may want to consider a clean install of Mac OS X, as it sounds like something is seriously wrong.
 
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