http://www.engadget.com/2010/03/16/mac-virtualization-face-off-vmware-fusion-3-vs-parallels-deskt/ Engadget Comments for http://www.engadget.com/media/feedlogo.gif http://www.engadget.com en-us Copyright 2012 Weblogs, Inc. The contents of this feed are available for non-commercial use only. Blogsmith http://www.blogsmith.com/http://www.engadget.com/2010/03/16/mac-virtualization-face-off-vmware-fusion-3-vs-parallels-deskt/http://www.engadget.com/2010/03/16/mac-virtualization-face-off-vmware-fusion-3-vs-parallels-deskt/Mar 16th 2010 9:13AMhttp://www.engadget.com/2010/03/16/mac-virtualization-face-off-vmware-fusion-3-vs-parallels-deskt/http://www.engadget.com/2010/03/16/mac-virtualization-face-off-vmware-fusion-3-vs-parallels-deskt/Mar 16th 2010 9:26AMhttp://www.engadget.com/2010/03/16/mac-virtualization-face-off-vmware-fusion-3-vs-parallels-deskt/http://www.engadget.com/2010/03/16/mac-virtualization-face-off-vmware-fusion-3-vs-parallels-deskt/Mar 16th 2010 9:30AMhttp://www.engadget.com/2010/03/16/mac-virtualization-face-off-vmware-fusion-3-vs-parallels-deskt/http://www.engadget.com/2010/03/16/mac-virtualization-face-off-vmware-fusion-3-vs-parallels-deskt/Mar 16th 2010 10:32AMhttp://www.engadget.com/2010/03/16/mac-virtualization-face-off-vmware-fusion-3-vs-parallels-deskt/http://www.engadget.com/2010/03/16/mac-virtualization-face-off-vmware-fusion-3-vs-parallels-deskt/I just like replying to you.]]>Mar 16th 2010 11:14AMhttp://www.engadget.com/2010/03/16/mac-virtualization-face-off-vmware-fusion-3-vs-parallels-deskt/http://www.engadget.com/2010/03/16/mac-virtualization-face-off-vmware-fusion-3-vs-parallels-deskt/win]]>Mar 16th 2010 11:15AMhttp://www.engadget.com/2010/03/16/mac-virtualization-face-off-vmware-fusion-3-vs-parallels-deskt/http://www.engadget.com/2010/03/16/mac-virtualization-face-off-vmware-fusion-3-vs-parallels-deskt/Mar 16th 2010 11:18AMhttp://www.engadget.com/2010/03/16/mac-virtualization-face-off-vmware-fusion-3-vs-parallels-deskt/http://www.engadget.com/2010/03/16/mac-virtualization-face-off-vmware-fusion-3-vs-parallels-deskt/
are we sure this test didn't miss any configuration on fusion setup? I mean, I like parallels, but I don't believe vmware is all that bad..
]]>Mar 16th 2010 11:36AMhttp://www.engadget.com/2010/03/16/mac-virtualization-face-off-vmware-fusion-3-vs-parallels-deskt/http://www.engadget.com/2010/03/16/mac-virtualization-face-off-vmware-fusion-3-vs-parallels-deskt/Mar 16th 2010 12:48PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2010/03/16/mac-virtualization-face-off-vmware-fusion-3-vs-parallels-deskt/http://www.engadget.com/2010/03/16/mac-virtualization-face-off-vmware-fusion-3-vs-parallels-deskt/Mar 16th 2010 12:49PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2010/03/16/mac-virtualization-face-off-vmware-fusion-3-vs-parallels-deskt/http://www.engadget.com/2010/03/16/mac-virtualization-face-off-vmware-fusion-3-vs-parallels-deskt/Mar 16th 2010 7:28PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2010/03/16/mac-virtualization-face-off-vmware-fusion-3-vs-parallels-deskt/http://www.engadget.com/2010/03/16/mac-virtualization-face-off-vmware-fusion-3-vs-parallels-deskt/great name...
just...
great.]]>Mar 17th 2010 10:33PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2010/03/16/mac-virtualization-face-off-vmware-fusion-3-vs-parallels-deskt/http://www.engadget.com/2010/03/16/mac-virtualization-face-off-vmware-fusion-3-vs-parallels-deskt/Mar 16th 2010 9:15AMhttp://www.engadget.com/2010/03/16/mac-virtualization-face-off-vmware-fusion-3-vs-parallels-deskt/http://www.engadget.com/2010/03/16/mac-virtualization-face-off-vmware-fusion-3-vs-parallels-deskt/
Only a bloody fool uses a VM to play games, or run CAD software. This stupid review shouldn't even exist. VMWare is meant for other things.]]>Mar 16th 2010 11:20AMhttp://www.engadget.com/2010/03/16/mac-virtualization-face-off-vmware-fusion-3-vs-parallels-deskt/http://www.engadget.com/2010/03/16/mac-virtualization-face-off-vmware-fusion-3-vs-parallels-deskt/
BUT:

It's also russian roulette for me. Sometimes as soon as I start my Bootcamp partition with Parallels, the whole system becomes INCREDIBLY slow, like the hard drive got throttled to 1-2mb/s. Anyone else experienced that problem (slow down starts while booting!)? Nothing like this with VMWare.]]>Mar 16th 2010 9:19AMhttp://www.engadget.com/2010/03/16/mac-virtualization-face-off-vmware-fusion-3-vs-parallels-deskt/http://www.engadget.com/2010/03/16/mac-virtualization-face-off-vmware-fusion-3-vs-parallels-deskt/Mar 16th 2010 9:53AMhttp://www.engadget.com/2010/03/16/mac-virtualization-face-off-vmware-fusion-3-vs-parallels-deskt/http://www.engadget.com/2010/03/16/mac-virtualization-face-off-vmware-fusion-3-vs-parallels-deskt/
Check Activity Monitor. If you run out of RAM, OS X will start paging stuff out to the disk and everything will become painfully slow until it's done. Look at Free RAM, Page Outs, and Swap Used. To correct the situation you can either give the VM less RAM or buy more RAM for your computer. Many MBPs can unofficially support 6GB of RAM, and the newer ones support 8GB (though it's still expensive). I still get page-outs with 6gb sometimes, though, since 10.6.2 seems to have a memory leak (after I quit all my programs I might only have a couple GB free).]]>Mar 16th 2010 1:04PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2010/03/16/mac-virtualization-face-off-vmware-fusion-3-vs-parallels-deskt/http://www.engadget.com/2010/03/16/mac-virtualization-face-off-vmware-fusion-3-vs-parallels-deskt/I already checked with activity monitor, only thing I could spot was that the hard drive was not working as it should, VERY low read/write speed and very few HD accesses/s; the numbers SORED up after i shut down the Win7 BootcampVM and quit Parallels (which takes forever, 5-10 minutes to boot up, another 5 mins to shut down, like i have a 10mhz computer)]]>Mar 16th 2010 1:09PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2010/03/16/mac-virtualization-face-off-vmware-fusion-3-vs-parallels-deskt/http://www.engadget.com/2010/03/16/mac-virtualization-face-off-vmware-fusion-3-vs-parallels-deskt/
sorry dude but that is the problem. you have to remember that the 2gb leftover will be distributed in various ways. Parallels is a layer, and with use its own ram as well, the kernel takes it own ram and all those little apps we install that can work in the background. Sounds like your hard drive is definitely getting paged, or something is writing to the drive and saturating your throughput. when apps also are sitting on claimed ram space, it generally will nto open up as you woudl want it to. anytime your machine gets to around 100mb ram left, its goign to go down hill with any heavy operation you have goign on.

Im an activity monitor junkie and i approve of this message.]]>Mar 16th 2010 4:51PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2010/03/16/mac-virtualization-face-off-vmware-fusion-3-vs-parallels-deskt/http://www.engadget.com/2010/03/16/mac-virtualization-face-off-vmware-fusion-3-vs-parallels-deskt/
Additionally Activity Monitor doesn't tell me that my ram is full and it's writing to the pagefile! There is little to no interaction with the hard drive going on, thats the problem, it's like as soon as I let it boot with Parallels, the hard drive becomes restricted to not deliver more than 2-3MB/s throughput! It's really weird and I have yet to find someone with a similar problem (or I am just too stupid to use google).]]>Mar 16th 2010 4:55PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2010/03/16/mac-virtualization-face-off-vmware-fusion-3-vs-parallels-deskt/http://www.engadget.com/2010/03/16/mac-virtualization-face-off-vmware-fusion-3-vs-parallels-deskt/Fusion seems to work better than Parallels for your particular scenario so this is what matters most. One possible explanation for the problem would be that your Windows in Parallels got to its limit and started doing paging - OSX activity monitor will not be accurate in this case, it will put all the blame to Parallels because this is all it 'sees'.

I use Parallels and I can attest that it gets really slow when I push Windows to its limit, mostly because of paging. Perhaps Fusion has a better resource management and plays nicer with OSX.
]]>Mar 16th 2010 8:46PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2010/03/16/mac-virtualization-face-off-vmware-fusion-3-vs-parallels-deskt/http://www.engadget.com/2010/03/16/mac-virtualization-face-off-vmware-fusion-3-vs-parallels-deskt/
the system starts to slow down BEFORE windows is even loaded, right from the second parallels starts to boot up the virtual machine (e.g. when the VM bios from parallels is loading in the VM window)]]>Mar 17th 2010 6:33AMhttp://www.engadget.com/2010/03/16/mac-virtualization-face-off-vmware-fusion-3-vs-parallels-deskt/http://www.engadget.com/2010/03/16/mac-virtualization-face-off-vmware-fusion-3-vs-parallels-deskt/Mar 16th 2010 9:27AMhttp://www.engadget.com/2010/03/16/mac-virtualization-face-off-vmware-fusion-3-vs-parallels-deskt/http://www.engadget.com/2010/03/16/mac-virtualization-face-off-vmware-fusion-3-vs-parallels-deskt/Mar 16th 2010 9:28AMhttp://www.engadget.com/2010/03/16/mac-virtualization-face-off-vmware-fusion-3-vs-parallels-deskt/http://www.engadget.com/2010/03/16/mac-virtualization-face-off-vmware-fusion-3-vs-parallels-deskt/Mar 16th 2010 9:29AMhttp://www.engadget.com/2010/03/16/mac-virtualization-face-off-vmware-fusion-3-vs-parallels-deskt/http://www.engadget.com/2010/03/16/mac-virtualization-face-off-vmware-fusion-3-vs-parallels-deskt/
yeah, i'd also like to see how either of these compare to virtualbox]]>Mar 16th 2010 9:39AMhttp://www.engadget.com/2010/03/16/mac-virtualization-face-off-vmware-fusion-3-vs-parallels-deskt/http://www.engadget.com/2010/03/16/mac-virtualization-face-off-vmware-fusion-3-vs-parallels-deskt/
As usual the free option just isn't good enough for Engadget.]]>Mar 16th 2010 9:54AMhttp://www.engadget.com/2010/03/16/mac-virtualization-face-off-vmware-fusion-3-vs-parallels-deskt/http://www.engadget.com/2010/03/16/mac-virtualization-face-off-vmware-fusion-3-vs-parallels-deskt/Mar 16th 2010 10:08AMhttp://www.engadget.com/2010/03/16/mac-virtualization-face-off-vmware-fusion-3-vs-parallels-deskt/http://www.engadget.com/2010/03/16/mac-virtualization-face-off-vmware-fusion-3-vs-parallels-deskt/
Wow, really? Engadget linked to some outside source's content. This is not Engadget's doing at all. Try not being a dick.]]>Mar 16th 2010 10:18AMhttp://www.engadget.com/2010/03/16/mac-virtualization-face-off-vmware-fusion-3-vs-parallels-deskt/http://www.engadget.com/2010/03/16/mac-virtualization-face-off-vmware-fusion-3-vs-parallels-deskt/
They just did the reprinting under their name like everything else.
It is their fault if fault is due.]]>Mar 16th 2010 10:31AMhttp://www.engadget.com/2010/03/16/mac-virtualization-face-off-vmware-fusion-3-vs-parallels-deskt/http://www.engadget.com/2010/03/16/mac-virtualization-face-off-vmware-fusion-3-vs-parallels-deskt/Mar 16th 2010 11:16AMhttp://www.engadget.com/2010/03/16/mac-virtualization-face-off-vmware-fusion-3-vs-parallels-deskt/http://www.engadget.com/2010/03/16/mac-virtualization-face-off-vmware-fusion-3-vs-parallels-deskt/
They didn't review the free software?!

Someone call the WHAAAAAAMBULANCE!

Seriously though, what was Engadget supposed to do - go over to MacTech's offices and beat them until the also reviewed VirtualBox? Refuse to run the story? Grow up, no one is trying to keep you or your free software down just because it's not mentioned in every relevant article.]]>Mar 16th 2010 11:46AMhttp://www.engadget.com/2010/03/16/mac-virtualization-face-off-vmware-fusion-3-vs-parallels-deskt/http://www.engadget.com/2010/03/16/mac-virtualization-face-off-vmware-fusion-3-vs-parallels-deskt/
Also isn't Parallels 3d software just a hacked version of wined3d, similar to Virtualbox?

You are right, it should be reviewed in the future.]]>Mar 16th 2010 2:02PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2010/03/16/mac-virtualization-face-off-vmware-fusion-3-vs-parallels-deskt/http://www.engadget.com/2010/03/16/mac-virtualization-face-off-vmware-fusion-3-vs-parallels-deskt/I've tried VirtualBox some time ago and it worked just fine, except that it was a bit behind both Fusion and Parallels in terms of OSX integration. I haven't tried any games so I cannot comment on that, but I would assume that this is not a VirtualBox top priority.]]>Mar 16th 2010 8:54PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2010/03/16/mac-virtualization-face-off-vmware-fusion-3-vs-parallels-deskt/http://www.engadget.com/2010/03/16/mac-virtualization-face-off-vmware-fusion-3-vs-parallels-deskt/Mar 16th 2010 9:29AMhttp://www.engadget.com/2010/03/16/mac-virtualization-face-off-vmware-fusion-3-vs-parallels-deskt/http://www.engadget.com/2010/03/16/mac-virtualization-face-off-vmware-fusion-3-vs-parallels-deskt/Mar 16th 2010 5:08PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2010/03/16/mac-virtualization-face-off-vmware-fusion-3-vs-parallels-deskt/http://www.engadget.com/2010/03/16/mac-virtualization-face-off-vmware-fusion-3-vs-parallels-deskt/Mar 16th 2010 9:32AMhttp://www.engadget.com/2010/03/16/mac-virtualization-face-off-vmware-fusion-3-vs-parallels-deskt/http://www.engadget.com/2010/03/16/mac-virtualization-face-off-vmware-fusion-3-vs-parallels-deskt/Mar 16th 2010 9:38AMhttp://www.engadget.com/2010/03/16/mac-virtualization-face-off-vmware-fusion-3-vs-parallels-deskt/http://www.engadget.com/2010/03/16/mac-virtualization-face-off-vmware-fusion-3-vs-parallels-deskt/Good luck with C&C4 on anything other than the latest iMac, MBP or Mac Pro.]]>Mar 16th 2010 9:50AMhttp://www.engadget.com/2010/03/16/mac-virtualization-face-off-vmware-fusion-3-vs-parallels-deskt/http://www.engadget.com/2010/03/16/mac-virtualization-face-off-vmware-fusion-3-vs-parallels-deskt/have you considered CrossOver Games? i've only used it to play counter-strike, but i've heard good things about it.]]>Mar 16th 2010 10:06AMhttp://www.engadget.com/2010/03/16/mac-virtualization-face-off-vmware-fusion-3-vs-parallels-deskt/http://www.engadget.com/2010/03/16/mac-virtualization-face-off-vmware-fusion-3-vs-parallels-deskt/
My Macbook is stuck with Intel GFX so not much mac gaming going on here.
My Games PC is great but I can't see how running a game in VM isn't going to be a total loss of quality and power, just buy a console.]]>Mar 16th 2010 10:33AMhttp://www.engadget.com/2010/03/16/mac-virtualization-face-off-vmware-fusion-3-vs-parallels-deskt/http://www.engadget.com/2010/03/16/mac-virtualization-face-off-vmware-fusion-3-vs-parallels-deskt/
C&C3 and red alert3 runs pretty good in boot camp on my unibody macbook pro 2.4GHz 2GB DDR3.

I'm going to hazzard a guess that c&c4 will be about the same after turning off all the anti aliasing reducing shadow/shader quality. tbh i've never expected any more from any of my windows laptops in the past.]]>Mar 16th 2010 10:43AMhttp://www.engadget.com/2010/03/16/mac-virtualization-face-off-vmware-fusion-3-vs-parallels-deskt/http://www.engadget.com/2010/03/16/mac-virtualization-face-off-vmware-fusion-3-vs-parallels-deskt/
C & C 4 runs fine under fusion 3 for me, Although i have stopped playing it because it is a poor excuse for an RTS.]]>Mar 16th 2010 11:17AMhttp://www.engadget.com/2010/03/16/mac-virtualization-face-off-vmware-fusion-3-vs-parallels-deskt/http://www.engadget.com/2010/03/16/mac-virtualization-face-off-vmware-fusion-3-vs-parallels-deskt/Mar 16th 2010 4:16PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2010/03/16/mac-virtualization-face-off-vmware-fusion-3-vs-parallels-deskt/http://www.engadget.com/2010/03/16/mac-virtualization-face-off-vmware-fusion-3-vs-parallels-deskt/Mar 16th 2010 9:59AMhttp://www.engadget.com/2010/03/16/mac-virtualization-face-off-vmware-fusion-3-vs-parallels-deskt/http://www.engadget.com/2010/03/16/mac-virtualization-face-off-vmware-fusion-3-vs-parallels-deskt/Mar 16th 2010 10:05AMhttp://www.engadget.com/2010/03/16/mac-virtualization-face-off-vmware-fusion-3-vs-parallels-deskt/http://www.engadget.com/2010/03/16/mac-virtualization-face-off-vmware-fusion-3-vs-parallels-deskt/Mar 16th 2010 10:13AMhttp://www.engadget.com/2010/03/16/mac-virtualization-face-off-vmware-fusion-3-vs-parallels-deskt/http://www.engadget.com/2010/03/16/mac-virtualization-face-off-vmware-fusion-3-vs-parallels-deskt/Mar 16th 2010 10:13AMhttp://www.engadget.com/2010/03/16/mac-virtualization-face-off-vmware-fusion-3-vs-parallels-deskt/http://www.engadget.com/2010/03/16/mac-virtualization-face-off-vmware-fusion-3-vs-parallels-deskt/Mar 16th 2010 10:21AMhttp://www.engadget.com/2010/03/16/mac-virtualization-face-off-vmware-fusion-3-vs-parallels-deskt/http://www.engadget.com/2010/03/16/mac-virtualization-face-off-vmware-fusion-3-vs-parallels-deskt/
And my virtualization software of choice.]]>Mar 16th 2010 10:21AM