Virtualization Switchers: switch from Parallels to VMware Fusion, feedback needed

[petekazanjy]

(apologies for the repost--the forum software appears to have tweaked the title of my first post, making it hard to see what it was about at first glance)

Hi all,

Quick poll. Did you switch from Parallels Desktop to VMware Fusion as

your virtualization solution for Intel-based Macs (as opposed to VMware

Fusion being your first Mac virtualization app, for example.)?

And if you did switch from Parallels to VMware Fusion, what was the

major driver for the swtich? Don't spare the details. Very curious

regarding where VMware Fusion is relieving serious pain.

Thanks!

[BP9906]

(Following suit...)

I'm sortof a switcher to Fusion. I never actually purchased Parallels but tested it and followed it from the beginning to about 3.0 release. After using Parallels in VMs and being an active member in the forums (I'm sure you can see how active I am here), I kept being disappointed more and more with the Parallels product. From an engineering standpoint, I feel like their product was never developed the "right way". They never fully implemented ACPI and their 3D implementation overwrites many windows drivers. I noticed that with all the mods they made to Windows, my Windows was to the point that it didnt run as stable as I'd like it. This also made it more difficult to install Linux distros.

Aside from using VMware Player/Server in the past, I watched this product from the beginning and noticed it has been way more stable. You seem to be using fast development cycles (perhaps Agile?) and putting out product releases every 1-2 months (which is indicitive of Agile). VMware has better support than Parallels, which is yet another reason for the product and having a well known company to back the product.

Granted Parallels has a more advanced product now, I see VMware being able to surpass that with suitable feature enhancements. Unity is growing and now includes other Start Menu options and hopefully will have some sort of taskbar indication in the future also. I usually just run Full screen now because of Unity's not so intuitive approach, but I'm fine by that. The product is stable and is keeping up with machine specifications so that just adds to the speed and usefulness of the product. I cant wait for DX10 support. Being able to mount VMDKs as a drive image would be useful too, similar to Parallels explorer product.

Anyway, just some thoughts from an engineer and Fusion user. Hope this give you some feedback from a technical user standpoint.

[jstock]

I switched. The only reason I used Parallels was because I had need of virtualization before VMware was even available as a beta. I had used VMware in the past under Linux and had it been available, it would have been my first choice.

I switched for a few reasons, 64-bit support being one, but I was annoyed by Parallels seeming lack of adequate testing/quality control. It seemed like they were more interested in adding new features to try and grab market share and wow people, rather than testing new features to make sure they were stable. It felt like being in a perpetual beta even with their released versions.

I was also not too impressed with all their focus on integration between OS X and Windows VMs. I don't want Windows to have enough access to launch OS X apps. The fact that it was initially introduced with no way to disable it, showed me they didn't really get it.

I do miss two things that many others have already mentioned multiple snapshots (this is the most crucial to me) and OpenGL support. I'm pretty confident that VMware will address multiple snapshots eventually and I'm willing to wait for that.

I would comment on Unity as it was a bit lacking for me, but I no longer care as I now run Windows fullscreen in its own space under Leopard.

Message was edited by: jstock

[AbortRetryFail]

I was an early and committed Parallels beta user. I had evaluated Fusion betas, also. I chose Parallels initially for the following reasons:

1. Parallels seemed lighter and faster than Fusion betas (which were weighed down by debug code)

2. Parallels was first in its production release (I don't use betas for mission-critical systems)

I switched to Fusion after Parallels' disastrous 3.0 release. I now prefer Fusion due to the following reasons:

1. Lower CPU/RAM footprint

2. Better performance

3. Greater stability

4. More polished product

One thing I miss about Parallels: it allows the creation of VMs from Microsoft O/S upgrade disks and non-bootable MSDN images. Fusion seems stricter in its requirements, making it less flexible in this aspect (I might be missing something obvious).

Regards,

Steven

[davidb2]

. . . but I was annoyed by Parallels seeming lack of adequate testing/quality control. It seemed like they were more interested in adding new features to try and grab market share and wow people, rather than testing new features to make sure they were stable. It felt like being in a perpetual beta even with their released versions.

I was also not too impressed with all their focus on integration between OS X and Windows VMs. I don't want Windows to have enough access to launch OS X apps. The fact that it was initially introduced with no way to disable it, showed me they didn't really get it.

I started with Parallels and have recently switched to Fusion, although I am still running both for the time being. Unless there are dramatic changes at Parallels, however, I will eventually drop them altogether, for exactly the same reasons as above, plus these:

1) Better VMWare support--the documentation and especially the forums are miles ahead of Parallels. Also, with Parallels, ordinary administrative procedures (getting an activation key, etc.) can be aggravating.

2) In Parallels, unlike Fusion, if you have "Enable access for assistive devices" checked in OS X System Preferences (to be able to run, for example, Typinator), you can't use Command + Tab to switch from Parallels to other Mac applications--you have to click outside of Parallels first. Parallels does not seem to recognize this as a problem. This was the immediate reason I decided to switch.

David

[ronmarcusps]

Hi:

I am in the process of deciding whether to switch from Parallels to Fusion. I got a 30 day evaluation program, and so far, it has been a big hassle trying to get going in Fusion. I attempted to convert my parallels VM running Windows XP and after taking several hours, the VM didn't work at all well. I am now setting up a brand new VM (clean install of Windows) and this seems to be going much better. The reason I'm trying out Fusion is that when I upgraded to Parallels 3.0, my machine was suddenly very unstable, with all sorts of strange error messages. I contacted their (very poor) support, and was told to try various things, none of which worked, and then they finally agreed that they also were able to duplicate the error messages I had been receiving, and they were "working on it" and would have an update fix "soon." That was over 6 weeks ago, and still no new update. I also read various reviews stating that Fusion seems to be more stable and faster, but that still remains to be seen. . .

[VTMac]

I used and purchased parallels from the 1st public beta up until version 2.5. I switched because:

1. Fusion was more stable

2. Fusion consumed less system resources - specifically RAM & CPU

3. Fusion USB support was much more reliable.

4. VMWare seem to focus on quality over features. Parallels the opposite

5. Quality of VMWare forums. VMWare communicate clearly and definitively to support questions on these forums. In addition there seem to be a higher ratio of experienced to beginner users on VMWare forums than on Parallels forums further increasing the value of the forum content.

6. Once I experienced Fusion and Parallels continued to ignore the pleas of their paying customers for increased quality, it became clear it was only a matter of time for VMWare to surpass them in terms of marketshare. I still believe that will be the case 12-18 months. Mac customers in particular expect it to "just work". That most definitely does not describe the Parallels experience and unless and until they take quality seriously, it will only get worse. They are literally building a house of cards over there.

Take it for what it's worth, but I'm a guy with 15 years SWD experience and Parallels have all the signs of being too marketing driven at the expense of quality.

[Cass67]

I tested the beta's of Parallels and found the usb imlimentation to suck, my Garmin etrex legend C would not work no matter what i tried .. I tried Fusion and it worked first time .. The VMware team seem to have put a lot more work in to supporting usb properly, it's still not perfect but hey what is .. Thats what got them my $$$

[ShadowOfGed]

First: I did switch from Parallels.

For starters, I've always heard VMware's name in relation to virtualization solutions, and never Parallels. Clearly they have had products around for a while, but not with the brand recognition and reputation of VMware. This is what initially influenced me to investigate VMware Fusion when the 1.0 release candidate and, eventually, final versions were available.

My biggest reason for switching: VMware's 3D support. I do not use the 3D support on any kind of regular basis. However, I know Parallels shoehorned their support in using WINE, which screams "hack" to me. My understanding is that Fusion does something more "proper," giving it more universal compatibility, and with fewer modifications to the guest operating system (mostly speculation, though). Though I have no need for this feature, it spoke volumes to me about the engineering philosophies behind each product. As a software and electrical engineer myself, that drove me to VMware's "do it right" versus Parallels' "do it fast, so enough works."

Secondly, and equally important, VMware's interface is an infinitely better "Mac citizen" than Parallels. They don't appear to have used Cocoa to draw their UI from what I could tell—or, if they did, they had lots of non-standard custom controls that just felt… awkward. Like above, I prefer VMware's emphasis on quality, doing it "right," and doing it "the Mac way." I was on Parallels because I needed Windows for school before Fusion was released.

Thirdly, Parallels' networking support was nothing short of a nightmare. Their virtual network interfaces appeared in the Network preference pane (and were configurable!). That seems like a gross oversight, and it caused me no end of trouble trying to configure it in their early days. VMware's networking stack has worked without a hitch from day one (minus the spinning it caused with Airport prior to 1.1b1), and I've never seen it anywhere I wouldn't expect. You guys did a fantastic job with the UI and the configuration dialogs in particular, and that makes a very, VERY good impression compared with Parallels.

There is precisely one thing that I liked about Parallels over Fusion, and that was the guest-host file sharing. Their implementation "correctly" (this is debatable) follows symlinks when browsing from Windows, whereas Fusion does not. I know there are feature requests out for this, it has security implications, and some people may want symlinks to bleed through in guest systems other than Windows. I'm guessing Parallels used Samba in some form, and I'm guessing Fusion talks to the kernel's VFS layer directly. That would mesh with your tendency to engineer things the "better" way. It's something I liked, but I can live with Fusion's implementation if it's better-engineered. Besides, I trust that Fusion will eventually incorporate such changes/features if enough people want it.

Also, they supported multiple and/or custom Boot Camp partitions (if you edited the config manually), but that's an irrelevant nitpick for 99% of users, and I don't use it enough for it to be crucial.

I always had the feeling that Parallel's littered my system with files, extensions, libraries, and other items in places an application shouldn't touch. I've never gotten that feeling from VMware, and I've dug around a bit in its internals (to disable vmnet-bridge prior to 1.1b1). From my vantage point as an engineer, Fusion just seemed like the better-designed choice, and thus seemed the better choice looking forward. Competition seems to have been a good thing for Mac virtualization, but it looks like VMware (and thus Fusion) has the tendency to do things "right," if not first. That's the overarching reason I switched.

(Thanks for asking!)

[bgausden]

64bit support. Our algo engine (www.orcsoftware.com) is 64bit and I need to have it running on my MBP for demos/training/support.

[mykmelez]

I got Parallels in August 2006 and used it for about a year, switching my Linux VM to Fusion in June 2007 and my Windows VM to Fusion in August 2007.

I switched for numerous reasons, but the biggest one was that Parallels focuses on Windows, and I spend most of my time in my Linux VM. In fact, I rarely use the host OS (I only own a Mac so I can test the software I develop on all three primary platforms), so Linux has to work perfectly for me. But it didn't work well in Parallels.

First, I couldn't set the VM's memory to more than 560MB of RAM without the VM refusing to boot. Then at some point I managed to get it to boot when set to 1GB of RAM, except after a hard-shutdown, after which I had to reboot it twice to get it to boot properly.

Parallels also didn't provide any tools to improve the experience in Linux (until June, after promising them since before I started using it, but by then I had already decided to switch to Fusion). In particular, there was no support for syncing the VM clock, so I had to resort to booting with a special flag to reduce drift and then running a command to reset the clock every time I unsuspended my laptop.

At some point virtual consoles also broke, displaying graphical garbage when I switched to them. I could still log in and run commands, I just couldn't see what I was doing, which made the consoles less than useful.

I had to jump through a few other hoops as well, but I don't remember what they were now. It got to a point where I didn't dare to change my VM for fear I would break something. In particular, I didn't upgrade from Ubuntu 6.10 to 7.04.

Then where was Parallels' USB 2.0 support, which caused Parallels use a bunch of CPU time, even when you weren't using any USB 2.0 devices, and thus drain your battery twice as fast. You could work around the problem by turning off the support, but then you didn't have USB 2.0.

And then there were a variety of little nits, including on Windows, like not being able to use Parallels' shared folder support to build a software project residing on the host OS's VM, because the build system required a mapped drive, and I couldn't map a drive to the shared folder (eventually I set up SMB on the host OS and shared the folder that way, but that was slow and error prone). Parallels tools for Windows also regularly told me it was out-of-date, even though it wasn't and though I'd upgraded it repeatedly trying to get that annoying warning to go away.

I'm now all Fusion, including one Linux VM, one Windows VM, and one Solaris VM. I'm much happier with Fusion, although I still have my share of complaints and nits. Besides much better Linux support, the key differentiator between Parallels and VMWare for me is the support. Although communication between VMWare and its customers isn't perfectin particular, I really miss the open bug tracking systems I'm used to from my work on open source softwareit's still much better than the communication between Parallels and its customers.

VMWare employees regularly participate in the community forums. They help solve problems, they file bugs in the internal bug tracker when appropriate, and they follow up on threads regarding unresolved problems, even after months of thread dormancy. And VMWare customers are also very helpful. In general, it seems like I'm much more likely to find solutions for my problems in the VMWare forums than I was in the Parallels forums (although this could be because there weren't actually solutions for many Linux problems in Parallels at the time).

Finally, I'll second what someone else said in this thread: Parallels has seemed more focused on features than quality. Of course, if you're someone who benefits from Coherence, you might prefer that, but since I like to keep my VMs contained in their own (usually full-screen) windows, Coherence was just that thing that Parallels did instead of fixing Linux for me. Maybe VMWare did that too when they focused resources on Unity in response to Coherence, but Linux already worked great in Fusion by then, so I don't mind. And Fusion has continued to improve for me in 1.1, with several important fixes to problems I was experiencing.

Life has been much better since I switched from Parallels to Fusion. I'm a happy camper.

[petekazanjy]

People have talked about resource utilization a bit, but no one's yet mentioned what I've seen on the blog comments out there about "Parallels Paralysis" where the VM or host just freeze up and the beach ball twirls and twirls till you hard reset. Has anyone on here seen this behavior?

[CarlinSmith]

I used Parallels fairly successfully until Fusion 1.0 was available.

My biggest complaints about Parallels included:

1) Focus on OSX to Parallels integration features that were not important to me and some frankly IMO were of a security concern. The idea of having applications from windows launch OSX apps and vice versa I did not see as a feature. I had to spend time custom installing their tools to prevent much of this integration from occurring. Again, this may be important to others but not to me.

2) The actual virtual machine hardware was very limited - initially to 1.5GB of memory, single processor, 32-bit etc. I believe they are trying to address this but I felt the VMWare Fusion virtualized hardware was not only substantially more capable but more mature from the workstation products that have been tried and tested for a long period of time.

3) Poor memory management - routinely on my Mac Pro with 8GB of RAM I couldn't run more than 1 instance of a virtual machine. Enough said on that point.

4) Perceived poor support - never used it myself but was evident from forums and I say perceived because I never tried to utilize it.

5) I work for IBM and we have a substantial library of VMWare images in a repository. My ability to use these directly in Fusion was a major bonus.

6) Lastly, while not routine, I used to get occasional kernel panics with Parallels. Have not had a single one since un-installing and switching to Fusion.

I do hope that Fusion continues to mature and adopts multi-snapshots, etc from VMWare Workstation on Linux/Windows.

[DerekS]

Simple. I switched for speed, stability and security.

Parallels was slower, crashed at least once a day for me, and added (in my opinion) insane cross-OS program sharing that I did not want and could not turn off at the time.

[Sirreal]

I had enough of the random crashes, all without notice and subsequent dialog. Parallels would be running and then just disappear.

They only reason I delayed the switch to Fusion, was the conversion from Parallels seems very tricky and complicated. I finally bit the bullet and rebuilt my guest from scratch, which work amazing well. It has NEVER crashed in 2 months.

Only two snags with Fusion. One is not being able to use Command ZXCVAS in Fusion. I keep forgetting to use Control and then Command.

Other snag with Fusion. Opening host shared folders is initially very slow (2-3 seconds). This was much better on Parallels.

Other great thing about Fusion, as I have just found out, fantastic support on this forum!!

[connetic]

I switched from Parallels 2.x to vmware. I was mostly happy with Parallels although the software quality was definitely lower than what I would have liked. There were minor issues that never seemed to get fixed. Coherence was interesting, but really just frosting and not really anything I needed.

My primary reason for switching was compatibility with vms used at work where we run in a virtualized environment. I've generally been happier with vmware than parallels for stability, but I'm currently having problems after the Leopard upgrade.

The better question might be: What does Parallels do better?

> Works better with Microsoft Activation--fewer issues around keeping products activated in my experience. I don't really blame vm vendors for this problme, but it does need to be solved.

> Provides automated converter from vmware to parallels. This one is a no-brainer if you want people to switch, and something vmware hasn't bothered with.

> Marketing to the Mac community. Parallels has uptake in the Mac community not just becaue they were first, but because Macs are the most important market for them. With vmware, its quite clear that the Mac community is the least important market for them. Guess where people are going to go?

> vmware workstation and server users also notice the things lacking in Fusionfor example, I can use a bootcamp partition but why can't I map an arbitrary physical partition in vmware to a vmdk like I can in Windows? I understand the difference between GUID partitions and MBR partitionsI don't need a virtualization vendor holding my hand to the point where I can't get real work done.

[mykmelez]

> Provides automated converter from vmware to parallels. This one is a no-brainer if you want people to switch, and something vmware hasn't bothered with.

Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe it's harder for VMWare than Parallels because VMWare's VM format is open while Parallels' is proprietary.

-myk

[admin]

why can't I map an arbitrary physical partition in vmware to a vmdk like I can in Windows?

You can. Search for vmware-rawdiskCreator.

[aanhorn]

I've been with Fusion from the beginning, actually, I would not buy a virtualization product for my Macintel unless it had the VMware name on it.

[admin]

mykmelez wrote:

Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe it's harder for VMWare than Parallels because VMWare's VM format is open while Parallels' is proprietary.

To be fair to our competition, I don't think we can use that argument. VMware's VM format is not exactly open, in the sense of an open standard; it'd be fairer to describe it as "reasonably transparent and well-known." VMware has indeed published its virtual-disk specifications, which may have been helpful to competitors. They probably could have reverse-engineered it if such a document were not available.

There is actually a nascent open standard for virtual-machine files called OVF. This standard is just being born now; I am pretty sure Fusion lacks support for it. But VMware, Microsoft, and XenSource have all collaborated on it, as well as Dell, IBM, and HP. Not SWsoft/Parallels, oddly enough. Does our breath offend?

Anyway, VMware Converter is pretty easy and free of charge for this usage, although regrettably it does not do its work in an automated fashion like Parallels Importer does.

Message was edited by: brianriceca to add link to Converter