Parallels Desktop 6 - Fusion's future

[soren0]

With Parallels Desktop 6 coming September 14th, I was wondering what's in store for Fusion. Is a new version coming out to compete with Parallels Desktop 6?

[Kenneth868]

I'd argue that 3.1 could have been called 4.0, given the amount of internal replumbing. Best guess is that we won't see 4 until Q1 next year, after the discounted purchase program expires.

With all troubles and issues within the release of version 3.0, I would rather say 3.1 is what 3.0 was supposed to be.

But this experience gave me a good lesson to lower my confidence for VMware products.

[Herojig]

If PD 6 is fusion's future, we are all scroomed. I just tried it, and it won't open a VM no way no how. Lots of folks with the same unresolved problem; the PD driver just won't start on some machines. The only help from PD support is an incomprehensioble KB system and a non-responsive email address. It took an overnight to convert a VMWare file to a PD file (40gigs), and then the VM would not open due to a lack of a driver. What a waste of time. So again, I hope this is NOT the future of VMWare, which despite it's slow performance, is rock solid otherwise.

[sellisd]

I have to say, I've has the same experience as noetus. When Parallels 6 came out I didn't want to upgrade because I thought the price was too high and I used Fusion before I used Parallels and I liked it a lot. I did the cross-grade to Fusion because it was only $10, but it has cost me a lot more. Fusion 3.1.1. has been completely unusable for me and I'm back on Parallel now with no problems. I'm using Parallels 6 and it's been a very good experience so far.

[SvenGus]

It is rarely said, but one thing where VMware Fusion is clearly superior to Parallels Desktop is on the localization front: in Fusion, we get all languages in a single package (which should be the "real" Mac OS X way, if one can say so, albeit at the cost of a larger download size), and thus, for example, every language is updated simultaneously; while in Desktop every language still has its own installer and release cycle (English of course having the priority, with other languages often lagging behind, even by weeks), which is less rational (at least, IMHO).

[noetus]

I will have to qualify my enthusiasm for Parallels somewhat. After upgrading to Parallels 6 I now have a permissions issue on the shared volume (for my data) that I never used to have. Some Mac applications have issues writing to the shared partition. Now that I am needing it, I can verify that support over at Parallels is not all that great. You need to pay for support, and the forums are nothing like over here where there are a lot of expert and helpful people ready to post. It's a significant issue.

[Herojig]

The support for PD is just crap, that's for sure. A moderated forum!?! where ur question never shows up?!? This forum is so much better. I hate to ask for PD help here, but I have one machine that the kexts never run at startup. There is an install error, so I guess they never get installed right, althought they are there in parallels service.app. PD4 put them where they are supposed to be (inmo) in System/Extensions or whatever that dir is where the rest of the kext is. So now I have one machine that's golden, and one that's just not working. Thank heaven for VMWare, or I'd be sunk on that one machine. I would not even switch if Unity = Coherence in the way that PD implemented. Cheers!

[aloshka]

I've gone and used parallels for a month since 6 came out. I'm coming back to fusion. I'm not sure why, just seems more professional without all the complicated bells and whistles that technically don't do anything (mac theme for win xp that takes up resources). I run 3-4 virtual machines and i just like fusion better. Also little things are better in fusion, settings are easier to find and the fact that we can do advanced settings by editing the vmx file. Better support too!

One wish that would make fusion 100% better, horizontal scrolling. Parallels supports this and does a fairly good job, but there is no way to recreate this in fusion. I miss it since i've gone back to fusion.

Oh and parallels 6 also has a "time machine" backup strategy that works very well!! Fusion really needs to do this as there is currently NO backup solution for fusion without corrupting the VMs.

[ColoradoMarmot]

Sure there is, shut down the VM (not suspend) and copy the file to another location. What parallels is probably doing is taking a snapshot behind the scenes and backing that up - that's a lot of overhead, and a lot of backup space.

[aloshka]

Doing a direct copy is a bit of a pain, especially if your images are 40-50gb a pop. Doing them every hour is not a solution (time machine) either. Parallels actually detects when time machine is running and does a background snapshot and sets the new one to not backup (so the one being written to is not backed up, thus not corrupted) and only backups the files since the last snapshot. This means only changes are timemachined and works very well.

Technically you can recreate the same idea with fusion by setting autoprotect to do daily (so timemachine only attempts to backup the daily changes). but when you do a restore make sure you drop the last snapshot as it will be broken.

just nice not to manually have to do all that in parallels.

[ColoradoMarmot]

So you're manually excluding the actual virtual disk files (which are touched constantly during use), and only backing up the snapshot?

[aloshka]

When you create a snapshot all changes are now written to a new snapshot file that is small. The original large vmdk disks are no longer touched. So when timemachine goes through, the vmdk files haven't changed, so it doesn't attempt to back them up (since they were backed up initially). It only marks the snapshot file as being changed and backs it up (although it's corrupted). Parallels creates a new one one top of that so you can continue working on your VM and the new one that is being written to is not backed up, but the original is. Wow, that seems complicated in writing.

[ColoradoMarmot]

Hmmm...I still see the 'last modified date' changing on mine, which would trigger a TM backup of the whole thing (but maybe that's because I'm using 2GB split disks).

[aloshka]

When you create the snapshot yes, all those files will be tagged with a new modified date. After the snapshot is created, any changes you make should not affect the original vmdk files, only the new ones (there will be a huge series of them, but they will be small and are generally labeled s0001, s0002, or something like it). Those will change.

Infact this is how templates work, you can set the original files as read-only.

[ColoradoMarmot]

Something else must be touching the original files on my side then - I'll play around with it when I get a chance. I've only got one VM with snapshots (I lose too many other features, like shrink, to do it on all of them).

[oddstray]

I, persuaded by a friend and a good deal, decided to give VmWare a try. I was pleased with Parallels 3 and 4. Parallels 5 was pretty slow. Parallels 6 offers a money-back guarantee that it'll be faster than 5 (I may be taking them up on that).

In VmWare I am unable to import my Parallels 6 virtual machine. On one attempt, I was able to see a message that I had possibly not stopped the virtual machine properly, so I made sure that was done. I am still unable to import it, and I don't have the patience to wait for a couple of hours to see what error message, if any, VmWare will provide. Someone else in the forum provided log-file output ... I hunted on my Mac and was unable to find any log files, and searching online for information about them was also fruitless.

So I'm rebuilding my virtual machine in VmWare from scratch. Not the best introduction. 😕 The deciding point will be whether the virtual machine in VmWare actually runs faster than the one in Parallels 6.

[ColoradoMarmot]

Try installing the converter inside the VM and converting it as if it were a physical PC (rather than converting the built VM).

[JeffDickey]

Yes, PD6 looks nice, but I was burned by PD4 and 5. I don't need to run Windows nearly as often as I need to run various combinations of mainstream and decidedly-not versions of Linux, *BSD, OpenSolaris/Indiana, etc. Parallels has long been more heavily focused on the Windows desktop than has Fusion; I think probably all of us who've tried both can agree on that. However, they fall down quite badly when you do other things; PD4 choked on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and PD5 simply would not install either OpenSolaris or some developer builds of Debian. Fusion handled both. Now that I've just stumbled on the documentation for vmrun, that solves about half my outstanding questions wrt Fusion 3.

What would I like to see for Fusion 4?  I'd love to have good support for Automation. Better support for the BSDs and Indiana. Better performance in 64-bit VMs would be lovely. But the single best improvement I can think of is "more and better documentation, please!" I can't believe that I've been using Fusion for almost 3 years now and only just came across vmrun, for instance. There have always been some great development teams working on Fusion. Now it's time to have the less (visibly) technical groups step up to the same level.

[SvenGus]

As I also said in another disscussion, better audio support (directly in the VMware Tools, without the need for third party drivers) for OS X Server VMs would be a very good thing in Fusion 4...

[JeffDickey]

I wouldn't be surprised. I've long been of the opinion that there is more than ample room for improvement in Fusion. The fact that the competitors I've tried (mostly Parallels and VirtualBox) are even more spectacularly unready for prime time is the main reason I stay with this. Though I am learning what I generally can and can't get away with in each new release… Fusion 4 should be interesting.

[soren0]

I sent an email to VMware Support about this as well.

It's about a year later and Parallels Desktop is at version 7.0 and I don't want to see Fusion get left behind.

Any news on when VMWare Fusion 4 will be released.

Much appreciated.