PARALLELS DESKTOP VS VMWARE FUSION MAC OS X
PARALLELS DESKTOP VS VMWARE FUSION INSTALL
PARALLELS DESKTOP VS VMWARE FUSION DRIVERS

Unfortunately, without running Windows you don't get a lot of the features that VMware and Parallels offer, but support for Linux in both seems to be coming along nicely. However, VMware did allow the user to drag files from OS X into the virtual guest.

PARALLELS DESKTOP VS VMWARE FUSION DRIVERS

The VMware drivers also required me to update before automatically moving the cursor from the virtual guest to the host at the edge of the screen.

PARALLELS DESKTOP VS VMWARE FUSION INSTALL

The VMware tools were slightly more involved to install and had to be copied to the guest and extracted and Parallels tools slightly more simply. VMware seemed to be slightly faster in booting and launching applications, but Parallels had simplicity and video responsiveness on its side. VMware ran glxgears at a mere 155FPS, but the Parallels guest was able to run at 231FPS. Surprisingly, the tests seemed to swing the opposite way and Parallels excelled at this test. No performance test involving Linux would be complete without glxgears. iso again using drag-and-drop to the VMware machine and it ran almost as fast as the SFTP transfer, transferring in 2 minutes 18 seconds.

Parallels didn't offer support for that and neither offered drag-and-drop transfers going back. VMware also allowed drag-and-drop files from OS X to the Ubuntu guest. I transferred the file in Parallels in 3 minutes 7 seconds and transferred it using VMware in 2 minutes 15 seconds. iso file from my home directory over to the guest. I opened up SSH on my OS X box so Ubuntu detected it from the 'Places' menu in Gnome as an SFTP server. Upgrading the kernel was definitely recommended anyway, but I thought it would be worth noting. I had to update the Ubuntu kernel to make it work.

After the first install, the mouse driver wouldn't let the cursor leave the guest when it got to the edge of the machine window. The VMware tools installer was easy as well, but a bit longer with a few more options. It took just a couple of minutes to install and a quick reboot and we were up and running. The Parallels tools installation was a very simple menu-driven installer from the terminal. The Parallels tools and VMware tools installations were significantly different. In Parallels, it took 11 seconds before it was usable compared to 9 seconds in VMware. VMware was also slightly slower when I opened OpenOffice 2.4. Really, there's not a lot of difference there. Ubuntu booted in 1 minute 28 seconds from the time I clicked the power button to when it was usable in Parallels and 1 minute 20 seconds in VMware. After the installation, I did a quick test of the boot speed of each. I didn't take any time measurements during the installer, but the installer in VMware was noticeably faster than Parallels. Since I wanted to start with fresh installs, the first step was to lay down an install of Ubuntu. Most of my tests were very unscientific, but general observations about the usability of the machines in each software. I gave each machine access to both cores and 1GB of RAM.

PARALLELS DESKTOP VS VMWARE FUSION MAC OS X

My host OS was Mac OS X 10.5.5 and I used 32-bit Ubuntu 8.10 desktop as the test guest OS.

The machines were stored on an external hard drive attached via FireWire. My hardware was a Core 2 Duo MacBook at 1.83Ghz with 2GB of RAM. I have used both VMware on Linux and Parallels on Mac for some time and decided to put them to test on the same system using VMware Fusion and Parallels Desktop 4. Parallels recently released version 4 of their desktop virtualization software promising 50% better performance over the old version.

Parallels desktop vs vmware fusion