CNET’s Crave blog beat me to the punch and published a comprehensive article comparing Parallels Desktop and VMware Fusion, virtualization software for OS X, as well as Boot Camp and plain OS X. As you might expect from reading my VMware Fusion launch post, Fusion performed considerably better than Parallels Desktop – performing close to 4 times better than Parallels in a Quicktime video/iTunes audio encoding benchmark (which took advantage of Fusion’s support for multiple cores).
If you were trying to decide which one to buy, I think your decision has just been made.
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And VMware was selling Fusion for half off before final release and I passed it up….. :\
I’ve been playing with Fusion and it seems more responsive than Parallels- although I can’t get 3D acceleration to work for love nor money.
Still not had time to try it running Adobe Audition, (which was the whole point of installing Fusion), but just playing around with it I would recommend Fusion over Parallels- the install process is way more straight forward too.
I’m all for Fusion over Parallels. Overall, the performance has been flawless and crash free. I can’t remember what article I read but there was something about running multiple OS’s via Fusion was far more stable than doing the same with Parallels due to the way memory was allocated.
Have been looking at vmFudion over the last week. Like you was (am) reviewing it. Agree totally that it is way better than Parallels overall.
I am very pleased with VMware Fusion. Got it when it was in beta at $39 price tag, so for me it beat Parallels in price, too.
Have had zero problems with it. Running the XP Pro that is on my BootCamp partition. Haven’t tried Ubuntu with it yet, but from what I hear it is easy to set it up as well.
So what would the specs look like if you assigned a single core to the VM and benched both software packages? Would Fusion still be superior?
I’m in full agreement with others. Fusion is just significantly more responsive than Parallels.
Good stuff and well worth the money.
Great post, thanks for the heads-up!
And VMware is portable! I can run the exact same VM on Mac, Windows, and Linux host machines.
Too bad VMware didn’t release their Workstation product on the Mac, though. It’s only available on Windows and Linux hosts, and the multiple and branching snapshots are far superior to Fusion’s single snapshot.
I’ve bought Parallels and I’ve bought Fusion for half the price because I wasn’t satisfied with Parallels performance and stability.
Fusion is more responsive, more stable and takes less CPU when idle.
Great product.
Peace
-stephan
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Stephan Schmidt :: stephan@reposita.org
Reposita Open Source – Monitor your software development
http://www.reposita.org
Blog at http://stephan.reposita.org – No signal. No noise.
These benchmarks are flawed in the first place — Parallels has outperformed Fusion based on the benchmarks I trust. If you are interested please refer to this link: http://www.mactech.com:16080/articles/mactech/Vol.24/24.02/VirtualizationBenchmark/