Parallels 5 Claims to be Much Faster than Fusion

[lugesm2]

I hope this is not true, but the commentary on the Internet suggests the new Parallels is much faster than Fusion.

Not trying to create a firestorm here, but I sure hope that Fusion can be made faster.

I should add . . . I tried Parallels 3 when I first bought my iMac. Very disappointed. That's when I bought my first copy of Fusion (Version 1.1) and was much more impressed. I have been a loyal

Fusion fan since that day, and I am currently running Fusion 3 with Windows 7 on my 24" aluminum 2.4Ghz iMac with 4GB RAM running OSX 10.6.1.

I am disappointed in the speed, but I can't honestly say if the problem is Win7 or Fusion3 . . . or a combination thereof.

[arbi]

Wow. Is this a stealth release? I have never even heard of any buzz about them releasing a new version until you just posted this and then I googled.

[surfnmtns]

I have been a VMware Fusion customer/user for a year or two now and have been irritated by some of the issues. I hoped with the recent Fusion 3 release things would get better but again I am disappointed. I installed the trial but cannot upgrade the VMware tools. tried to get support but since I have no recent purchase there is no support for me. So, I can't even try the new version. Parallels is looking very attractive at this point unless I want to waste my time fiddling with Fusion. Nothing but frustration with VMWare at this point...

[ewestby]

I have a feeling it's as with any software "arms race": specific claims can be made and partially backed up, but what it ultimately comes down to is the mix of features, stability, support, and price. My last experience with Parallels was their version 3, and I found the interface amateurish and their support policies unprofessional. For me, speed was only a tangential consideration.

We can all agree, though, that competition is great in this market.

[SvenGus]

While I think that Fusion 3 is still better (at least IMO), I tried the new Parallels 5 (quite interesting release) today, and in particular I installed Windows 7 and Vista: well, for Windows 7 there was only a minor difference, but for Vista Aero Glass, etc. worked perfectly right out of the box - with absolutely no artifacts or slowdowns, as if it were in native Boot Camp - also on my "old" Mac mini with an Intel GMA 950 graphics chipset.

So VMware should really be able to eventually achieve this also in Fusion 3!

[surfnmtns]

Ewestby, interesting to hear your experience with Parallels support... If Parallels works out of the box it is a no brainer and I wouldn't need support. Since I can't get support for VMWare without paying per incident to fix an issue that should be straight forward I wonder if I would be in the same boat with Parallels?

[Jay_Levitt]

Likewise; I had Parallels 3, and switched to Fusion because Parallels was so buggy and they had no support to speak of. They had one guy answering forum posts, usually at the "Have you tried rebooting?" level. (I offered to pay per incident, and they claimed they'd hook me up with one of their second-tier reps, but IIRC they never even responded to my support e-mails.)

I used to have kernel panics daily; I haven't seen them once with Fusion. The kicker was some bug that forced Office 2007 apps to lag for half a second every time they tried to draw tooltips (this is on a 16GB 8-core Mac Pro). Fusion "just worked", and I never looked back.

Parallels 5 sounds interesting, and if Fusion 3 doesn't kick itself into shape soon, I might check it out, but I'm pretty wary of Parallels after my experiences. Fusion 3 has bugs, but I have more faith in VMWare's ability to fix them than in Parallels's ability to change its culture.

[MaLaun]

Had the same experience and same conclusion.

So VMware should really be able to eventually achieve this also in Fusion 3!

[ewestby]

Yup, Jay's experience sounds similar to mine. The Parallels kernel extensions were never entirely stable for me. For me though, as a hobbyist developer, the kicker was when I saw the downright bizarre way Parallels handled bridging the host Mac's Internet connection: creating new network services in the host Mac's Network preferences pane, completely outside the application. Minor Mac OS X updates broke my VM's Internet connectivity several times until Parallels released a subsequent update. I'm sorry, but that's just not a well-thought-out solution.

[ahsilver]

I had just bought Parallels 3 a while ago and felt it was terribly slow. Parallels 4 came out and claimed a huge speed boost. For me, it was just as slow on my late 2008 Macbook Pro with 4GB RAM. I used Parallels mainly for Outlook 2007 on Exchange. I have to drag photos from my mac to Outlook, and it would usually take forever for just the smallest jpegs. I switched to Fusion 3, and it's worked beautifully. It's very fast and responsive.

Adam

[rcork77]

I tried Parallels 5 today and can also confirm it is MUCH faster at drawing the screen in what they call Unity mode. I didn't get the lag or see the blue desktop background behind the windows as i moved them around. I hope VMware can speed things up to match because i do feel Fusion is a much more stable product.

[miceblue425]

Yup, I had the same experience today. I've been using Parallels 5.0 beta for the past week or so and I have to say...the performance of Windows 7 64-bit on Parallels seems to be much more polished and smooth than VMWare Fusion. Coherence mode's redraw rates are much faster than Fusion 3, making Expose usable by just glancing at the windows rather than having to read which window is which. I've also gotten a much higher WEI rating on Parallels 5.0 than Fusion 3, Fusion 3 being 3.5 for me, 4.1 for Paralells 5. However, despite having a higher WEI rating, Windows Media Player skipped a lot in Parallels while trying to play the sample video in the "My Videos" folder while Fusion 3's ran without any problems. So I guess I'll wait for official speed/product reviews of the 2 virtualization softwares to decide which one to buy...

BTW I'm running all of my tests on a 13.3 Unibody (late 2008) Macbook with a 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo processor, NVIDIA 9400M, and 4GB of RAM.

[MNSteve]

I have an idea we'll continue to see this hopscotching behavior where Parallels woks better until Fusion releases a new release, at which point they have the advantage for a while. Competition is a wonderful thing. But I find the current release of Fusion unusable due to problems rendering the screen, so I think I may give Parallels a try.

[wtonwton]

I was hoping that Fusion 3 Unity mode would be as good as Parallels Coherence mode, but PD5 has really stepped up their game. Hopefully V3 will be able to catch up eventually.

[PHXHoward]

Aparently Apple update 10.6.2 will have fixes for VMWare in it.

http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/09/11/04/apples_latest_10_6_2_beta_packs_fixes_for_vmware_imacs...

[Pbryanw]

In reply to the original poster, all the commentary I've seen about speed comparisons, is based on one report commissioned by Parallels.

I'm going to wait for an independent report, before I draw any conclusions.

[admin]

I used Parallell 1.x before Fusion was released, and it worked pretty well with one exception. That was that when I suspended my MBP, if the VM was still open, it would hang up opon resume. If I susp[end the VM before the MBP, then I could wake the MP and resume the VM later without issue. It was a slightl annoyance, but I figured out my workaround and was ok with that for the time being as I had no other options. The only issue with the workaround was that I had to keep a close eye on battery level to ensure it didn't auto-suspend with the VM open.

When Fusion 1.0 came out, I iimediately grabbed it and tried it. My first reaction was that it was slow, but it didn't have the hange problem and so I made the switch. It was certainly nice to be able to slap shut the laptop without a care. I soon found out that Fusion is NOT at feayure parity with Worksation. I miss all the hardware support. I use physical serial ports and a floppy dive, but usion can't comprehend those. I would like to use a SB16 in soe VMs, but VMware decided that was too habd to maintain and so I have no sound in some instances.

Now that VMware Fusion 3 is here and its about as buggy as Parallels might have been, I think its time to go give Parallel 5 a try and see where they got over the ywars. I hear they have OpenGL in Linux.... that would be a big step up from Fusion which can't even handle the damn VESA framebuffer without crapping out after some arbitrary number of lines have scrolled by, requiring a guest reboot to get a screen refresh more than once every 5 seconds. It would be nice not to have my XP VMs BSOD during boot half the time. Fusion 3 has gone as far as to panic the host kernel if I dare run it which I have VirtualBox open (the only way to run OS/2 at the moment since that's just toooo hard for VMware, the ONLY virtalization vendor that doesn't suppport it).

So, has anyone taken the plunge on Parallels 5? If so, please share your eperience, not just whether that suspend/resume bug has gotten fixed in 4 major versions, but the real story. I'll do the same when I have a chance and report back, though it may be some time since my job is to get stuff done, not play with virtualization environments that MIGHT let me get something done.

[gilroykilroy]

How well does Parallels handle multiple monitor setups? Last time I paid any attention to it I heard it didn't.

How well does it handle Ubuntu 8.10? This is my main use for VMWare (90%) with XP taking the other 10%.

After reading about all the VMWare 3.0 issues I have decided to hold off on upgrading all our copies.

[Jay_Levitt]

I haven't tried any Linux guests, but with Windows XP guest, Leopard host, it seems to deal with multiple monitors fine. I have two Coherence windows open, one on each monitor. They even work in Expose - and even if they're overlapping, they separate cleanly.