The release of consumer-focused virtualization software for OS X has become a yearly event, with offerings from Parallels and VMware hitting the market each fall. With this relatively rapid. Parallels Desktop 13 for Mac will be available today. Although VMware Fusion 10 for Mac and Workstation 14 for Windows and Linux are being announced today, the VMware upgrades will be available.
Ever since Apple made the move from PowerPC processors to processors made by Intel, the possibility of running Windows on Mac hardware has loomed large. There is, of course, the dual-boot option using Boot Camp, but most of the buzz has been around two virtualization packages: Parallels Desktop for Mac and VMware Fusion.
Question: Q: Parallels vs. BootCamp Lately I have been wanting to change things up a bit and load on Windows onto my Mac. I have been looking mainly at said programs in the title, and wanted to get you guy's professional opinions beforehand.
[ ParallelsDesktop 3.0 was selected for an InfoWorld Technology of the Year award. See the slideshow to view all the winners in the platforms category. ]
The first question anyone asks me when I tell them about Parallels or Fusion is, 'Does it really work?' The answer is an unconditional yes. Both packages do what they promise, and they are solid performers. I wrote this review in Windows-native Office 2007 on my MacBook Pro -- sometimes using Parallels and sometimes using Fusion. I've used both packages extensively for real work over the course of many months, and I don't hesitate to recommend either one.
The value proposition
Virtualization won't necessarily save you on software costs, but the ultimate benefit is being able to run OS X and Windows (not to mention other operating systems) without having to buy two computers. Thus, Parallels and Fusion can help take the sting out of the premium price of a Mac.
Naturally, to run Windows in either Parallels or Fusion, you'll need to buy not only the virtualization software but Windows itself. Keep in mind that some Windows editions are not licensed to run in a virtual machine -- notably Vista Home Edition -- so you may need to buy a more expensive edition than you otherwise would.
Of course, if you already own the Windows software you want to run, then it's even easier to become a Mac bigot. For example, the organization I work for has an enterprise license for Office on Windows, but not on OS X, so I can load Windows and Office using the enterprise license and get an Intel-native version of Word that runs on my Mac for a fraction of the cost of Word for OS X.
Similarly, if you're switching from Windows to a Mac, buying a copy of QuickBooks for OS X will cost you $200 even though you already own a perfectly good copy for Windows. For the cost of Parallels or Fusion (both $79) you can run your Windows copy on your Mac.
Vmware Versus Parallels
Making Windows easy
The stated goal of Parallels as well as Fusion is to make life easy for people who want to run Windows on their Mac. Can you run Linux, Solaris, or even FreeBSD? Sure, but you're not in the target demographic. Switchers who love the Mac experience but have 'that one Windows' application they can't live without are the sweet spot.
Making Windows easy is mostly about installing the OS. Most people have never installed Windows. Creating a new Windows virtual machine is dead simple in either package. They ask for a few parameters, including the product key, and then take over from there. Having recently installed Windows XP on bare metal, I can tell you that using a virtual machine makes installation easier.
One of the unavoidable facts of virtualization -- no matter which system you use -- is that virtual machines need 'guest OS tools' installed to cooperate with the host OS. This cooperation includes things as important as proper cut-and-paste behavior and file sharing.
One last note about installation: Make sure you turn off the screensaver in your guests. They use the CPU and don't do you any good.
Coherence and Unity
Both Parallels and Fusion have optional modes for fully integrating Windows applications into the OS X experience. Called Coherence in Parallels and Unity in Fusion, the integration hides the Windows desktop and displays Windows application windows side-by-side with those of OS X applications. In short, Windows apps weave into the OS X desktop as if they were native Mac applications.
Users who like the OS X experience and who plan to run multiple Windows applications will prefer Coherence or Fusion to the old way, which drops the entire Windows desktop into a single OS X window. In any case, switching between the two modes is easy.
Both Coherence and Unity work well with oddly shaped windows, and they display drop shadows on windows to mimic the OS X look and feel as closely as possible. Both Parallels and Fusion support OS X's Exposé feature, so the VM windows will appear in Exposé tile and thumbnail displays, and you can dock Windows applications for launching and minimization.
Parallels' Coherence hides the Windows desktop, but keeps the Windows task bar for a familiar interface to the Start menu. Fusion's Unity gets rid of the Windows task bar and substitutes its own 'launcher' window for the Start menu. I prefer the Parallels approach, finding it more natural. One thing to note: Coherence and Fusion don't work with Linux or any other operating system but Windows.
Parallels offers a feature called SmartSelect that lets you assign file types from either operating system to the application (Windows or Mac) you want to use. For example, you can set Word documents to be always opened by Office 2007 in Windows so that double-clicking a Word file, even in Finder, launches Word in Windows. Similarly, you could set it up so that clicking a hyperlink anywhere, even in a Windows application, opened the Web site in Safari on the Mac.
Both Parallels and Fusion mount the host file system in Windows. Parallels also makes the Windows file system available as a disk in Finder and provides an offline file system browser for getting files from a Windows disk image when the guest OS isn't fired up.
Regardless of which package you use, one thing the virtual environment can't do is make Windows programs look like Mac programs. One example: Windowing operations in OS X are controlled with the standard OS X traffic light buttons, while those in Windows use the red X box.
The big undo command
Snapshots allow you to save a particular state of the VM, and then revert to it later. Think of it as an OS-level undo command. Snapshots are useful for backing out of an update gone badly, or for testing an application before committing to it. I use snapshots regularly when using virtual machines and have started to wish this feature were available on my standard OS. Snapshots are one of the most useful features of virtualization.
Snapshots are also where Fusion and Parallels diverge in a significant way. Fusion's snapshot facility is fairly simple, allowing you to set a single snapshot, then return to or discard it. Parallels has a sophisticated snapshot manager that lets you keep multiple snapshots simultaneously. You can return to any of these former states and run them -- while keeping any changes you've made to the system in a new snapshot. Further, you can fork multiple changes from a single snapshot, resulting in a hierarchy of machine states that can be revisited at will.
Taking a snapshot on Fusion happens so fast I wonder if anything's happened. Parallels can take 10 seconds or so to create a snapshot. Still, that's a small penalty to pay for the piece of mind that snapshots give.
Resource requirements
One of the more important questions for anyone considering virtualization is resource consumption. Both Parallels and Fusion allow you to easily constrain the resources that a given VM uses. My recommendation is to accept the recommended defaults unless you have a good reason not to. In any case, you can always change these settings later.
Running virtual machines isn't for skimpy hardware. The two resources that matter most are memory and disk space. There's no way to get around the fact that virtualization requires substantial amounts of both. I ran my tests of Parallels and Fusion on a MacBook Pro with 4GB of memory and 200GB of disk.
Each running guest takes a substantial amount of RAM, as much as several hundred megabytes. The amount of RAM in your machine will limit which other programs you can run alongside the virtual environment, what you can do on the guest, and how many guests you can run simultaneously.
Parallels For Mac Review
Most users will have one or two guest images -- power users may have dozens. A virtual machine image consists of configuration information, a memory image, and a disk image. The disk image is the largest of these files, typically starting at a 2GB to 4GB for Windows and increasing as you install applications and add files. Both Fusion and Parallels support sparse disk images that use only as much physical space as necessary.
When you first start using virtual machines, it's interesting and helpful to keep an eye on OS X's Activity Monitor (Applications > Utilities > Activity Monitor) to monitor resource usage with different workloads. For example, I found that Parallels and Fusion both consumed 5 to 10 percent of the CPU when running Windows XP, even when the VM was idle. With Word loaded, you will see CPU usage run as high as 20 percent, even when you're not using the application.
Managing VM images
Moving a virtual machine image from one location on the disk to another is easy. Because machine images are just directories, you can move them to a different location on the same disk without breaking anything. Beyond that, however, doing things with machine images requires some management tools.
When copying an image, some configuration settings need to be changed before the virtual machine will run. Parallels provides basic image management tools, built into the GUI, including options for cloning an image. Fusion lets you just copy the directory, and then when you start up the image asks if this is a copy and fixes it up. While I've never had a cloned image fail in Parallels, copied images occasionally haven't worked in Fusion.
A more sophisticated operation is the compression of images. Compression removes unnecessary space in the disk image, so it takes up less room on the host disk. Parallel's compressor is built into the GUI. Fusion ships with a command-line tool. You probably won't see much benefit when compressing newly created images, but virtual machines that have been in use for some time are good candidates for compression.
Perhaps the most taxing of all management tasks is converting a physical machine to a virtual image: a P2V conversion. Parallels and Fusion offer tools for doing this; the tool is included with Parallels but is a separate download for Fusion. Both converters work well with Windows images. Linux support is spotty. My advice is to avoid P2V conversion if possible. Instead, create a new guest, install the OS and applications, and then use a network connection to move data files to the new machine.
Parallels or Fusion?
Now that I've been running both platforms for some time, I generally choose Parallels when I want to work in Windows. I choose Fusion when I'm doing development work, when I'm running multicore guests, or when I need support for many different guest operating systems. I also choose Fusion when I need virtual machine images that I can share with others using VMware's free player for Windows and Linux.
Parallels is the clear winner for managing machine images and snapshots. I find myself choosing Parallels more often simply because of the snapshot manager. Similarly, Parallels' SmartSelect feature makes it easy to launch the right Windows application from within OS X. However, my use of Windows is only occasional, and it doesn't really push the machine. If my Windows work really taxed the CPU, I might opt for Fusion to run Windows as well.
Fusion is where I have all my Linux, FreeBSD, and Solaris images installed. Fusion is the only choice for SMP (symmetric multiprocessing) support or 64-bit guests. If you need to run CPU-intensive tasks in your virtual machine, Windows or Linux, Fusion's multicore support will give you better performance. Users who just want to run Outlook next to iPhoto probably won't notice a difference.
Overall, both products perform well and do what they promise. Running Windows applications alongside OS X applications is smooth on either platform. The differences between Parallels and Fusion are significant, but largely at the edge of the experience. Whichever you pick, you're sure to be impressed with virtualization on OS X.
| InfoWorld Scorecard | Features (20.0%) | Setup (20.0%) | Value (10.0%) | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Parallels Desktop 3.0 for Mac | 8.0 | 8.0 | 8.0 | 9.0 | 9.0 | 8.0 | 8.4 |
| VMware Fusion 1.0 | 7.0 | 8.0 | 9.0 | 9.0 | 8.0 | 8.0 | 8.2 |
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Virtual machines are the best way to accommodate different application needs in a datacenter environment. Whether you need to run your apps on a specific platform, or just need to meet scaling requirements, virtualization is the solution to a lot of IT manager's problems, thanks to fast and cheap memory.
But what about the desktop? As a technology writer, I use virtualization all the time, primarily to review new Linux distributions without taking up an entire machine's worth of data and resources. For everyday users, virtualization seems to be an unneeded luxury than anything else. Why would you need to run two operating systems at the same time?
I can think of three good reasons why virtualization on the desktop is a good idea.
Security. One of my favorite recommendations for all users is to install Linux as their primary desktop machine, saving their personal data on an external drive before they do. If they have Windows applications that they simply cannot part with, then they can use a virtual machine application to install Windows, and re-install just the needed apps. Then they're off, moving their saved data back onto either the native Linux system or the virtual Windows machine, as needed. This gets them the flexibility of the apps they need, while letting them connect to the Internet on a much more secure and stable platform.
Convenience. Sometimes, you need to have the option of running multiple operating systems. OS X Lion users, for instance, were unpleasantly surprised to learn that they could no longer run financial software Quicken 2007 on the new version of Apple's operating system, thanks to Apple's decision to drop support for Rosetta, which was the tech needed to run old PowerPC applications. Running a Windows instance on OS X, then, is one solution for this problem.
Cost. If you want to have two (or more) machines in your home or office setup, it's a lot less expensive to run a virtual machine than buy a whole new one. Even the cost of buying an additional hard drive and Windows OEM license is less than what you would spend on a whole new machine. Especially since some virtualization clients are free-of-charge.
In this article, we will explore three popular cross-platform virtualization clients and see how they stack up for personal use.
VMware
VMware is probably one of the most recognized names in the technology industry. Many people have heard of it, even if they don't quite know what the company does. VMware is, quite simply, one of the strongest virtualization software companies in the world, if not the strongest. Their software offerings are widely used in virtual datacenters and desktops in businesses all over the world.
It's a strength you can tap into as well, though at a cost.
VMware has two primary desktop offerings: VMware Workstation and VMware Player. Each virtual client can virtual machines flawlessly. But Workstation has more features, such as dual-monitor support, Unity interface integration, and (most importantly) the ability to create virtual machines. Player does just what it's name suggests: it plays virtual machines, like a DVR playback.
Parallels
This limits Player for personal use if you want to install an operating system on your own virtual image. With Player, you will have to acquire a virtual machine that's been prebuilt. With open source software, that's not too hard. But 'acquiring' such an image of a Windows or OS X instance will be illegal in most places on the planet, since using an operating system without paying the appropriate licensing fees is considered theft.
For the functionality, I would really like to recommend VMware Workstation. I have used it on Windows and Linux machines, and have found it incredibly easy to use. The setup wizard is straightforward, and intuitive enough that most users with a little technical experience under their belts can understand what's going on. And, even for those who don't, the default settings are good enough that you can run any recognized operating system very efficiently.
The Unity view tries to incorporate elements of the virtual machine directly within the interface of the native operating system. So, icons and windows from a Windows VM would appear to run alongside those of a, say, Ubuntu operating system. For the most part, this worked during my tests, but it was slow enough that I preferred keeping the virtual machines I tested inside the single VMware client window.
There are two things holding me back from a full-on Workstation recommendation: first, (like Player) it's only available for Linux and Windows. Mac users who want to create virtual machines have to use VMware Fusion, which is currently selling for $49.99.
And price is definitely the second issue. Unlike Player, which is free, the list price for VMware Workstation is a whopping $199. That's a big chunk of change for a virtual client, no matter how many features it has. Not when there are comparably featured clients out there (including the Mac-only Fusion) with smaller (and no) price tags.
This is too bad, because VMware Workstation is a good, full-featured virtual client. If you have a virtual machine image already created, don't hesitate to pick up and run VMware Player for a free-to-use VM client.
Parallels
I had not really tried Parallels Desktop before this review, since I was more familiar with VMware and the other client in this review, VirtualBox. But having used it for the past week in an office environment on an OS X Lion machine, I have to say I came away impressed.
Parallels Desktop is a commercial-only client, which means that, after the 14-day trial, you're going to have to pay for it; there's no free 'mini' version as with VMware Player. At $79.99, it's not as sharp of a bite on the wallet as VMware Workstation, but that's still something to pay attention to.
Parallels, the company, seems focused on the Mac version of the Desktop product, though there are Windows and Linux versions of the Desktop client as well. But while Desktop for Mac is up at version 7, Desktop for Windows and Linux is all the way back at version 4. Interestingly, that $79.99 list price applies to all versions of the software -- something I found interesting because the Desktop 7 for Mac seemed to be loaded with better features.
The most important of these was Parallel's Coherence view. Like Unity in VMware, it integrates the windows and menus from the guest virtual machine into the native machine. It does a very good job, too, as I found when I ran Internet Explorer on my OS X desktop alongside Firefox 6.
Parallels is, in my opinion, the friendliest VM client to set up. It was simple to set up new virtual machines, and you can even purchase a Windows 7 license from within Parallels to use directly on the Desktop client.
One very cool feature is the ability to open up virtual machines that were created by VMware's products. I grabbed an old VMware Fedora test machine image I had lying around, and after a very fast conversion, the virtual image was running right where I left it a year ago.
Because of the lower price tag and its availability on all of the Big Three platforms, I have to give this one the nod over VMware Workstation on Windows and Linux -- and I'd even recommend it over the less expensive Fusion on OS X. The Coherence view was very compelling on the Mac version, much more so than VMware Fusion's Unity. If you have an OS X machine and want a seamless look and feel for your applications, I might advise you to plunk down the eighty bucks and pick up the Mac flavor just for that. Windows and Linux users, hold off. You can do better, for a lot less.
VirtualBox
Better for a lot less translates into the final client in this review, VirtualBox. Made by Oracle (acquired in its purchase of Sun Microsystems), this is a great VM client for Linux, Windows, and OS X.
Best of all, it's free of charge.
VirtualBox is, nominally, open source software, though you have to specifically download the ASE version to actually use the open source client. The proprietary one is not much different, so it's really a matter of your personal philosophy.
Setting up virtual machines with VirtualBox is a little less intuitive than in VMware or Parallels. It wasn't entirely clear at what point the process called for connecting to an existing ISO image to use for creating the new VM. It worked all right, but less-advanced users might have trouble parsing out the steps at first try.
One feature I missed: there's no interface integration tool in VirtualBox like Unity and Coherence. Everything runs inside one virtual window.
On the other hand, a feature I really liked was the capability to create VMs that could be used in other virtual clients. I walked through creating a Parallels virtual machine in VirtualBox, moved it to the Parallels test machine, and the VM opened without a hitch in Parallels.
Given its cost, and the fact that it is a true cross-platform client, overall I would recommend VirtualBox to anyone who needs virtual machines that set up and get moving quickly.
Read Brian Proffitt's Open for Discussion blog and follow the latest IT news at ITworld. Follow Brian on Twitter at @TheTechScribe. For the latest IT news, analysis and how-tos, follow ITworld on Twitter and Facebook.