This is a review of the new VMware Fusion 1.0 for Mac. The article takes an in-depth look at the new virtualization software from VMware and compares it to Parallels Desktop 3.0.
Review: VMware Fusion 1.0
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
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Google cache doesn’t have it either. Did anyone grab it?
“Google cache doesn’t have it either. Did anyone grab it?”
The osnews editors probably deleted it.
looks like VMware did everything right. Has anyone actualy tried running Solaris as they say you can. if apple eventualy does go full ZFS dual booting and sharring files between Solaris and OSX would be great. all the powerfull admin tool of solaris and the “damn that looks good” of OSX
Running Solaris in the VM is superb, fast and fault free, i cannot find enough good words to describe it, im amazed at how good it actually is .. Zfs using multiple virtual drives is the coolest thing on the planet .. and all that virtual dtrace love is worth a great big smile 😀 Go on fusion …
I found the review quite biased. For instance, I read “With Fusion’s Unity view mode OS X’s expose function worked perfectly with the Windows application – something not available in Parallels 3.0.”.
The thing is, it is not totally true: if two Windows window are overlapped, the result is quite funny with Exposé and it can be difficult to find the good window because its picture is mixed with another windows.
It is also a shame they did not totally implemented the access to the taskbar with Unity: it becomes quite difficult to use applications like Messenger (I know, there is a trick to make it appears, but it is less flexible than with Parallels’ Coherence).
The good surprise is the CPU consumption, it takes clearly less resources than Parallels. I love when my Macbook does not launch its fans 🙂
There are pros and cons in both products. Parallels seems more polished, but Fusion seems more robust.
My conclusion is I think the Parallels/Fusion apparition will create great competitions and will push both teams to implement innovative ideas, correct bugs…
But I fear there will be only one winner…
In the meanwhile, I love my macbook: without efforts, I have the attractive GUI of Mac OS X, I can use all my Windows applications, and I can easily interact with unix systems.
Hurrah for Fusion and Parallels!
For me, the Windows taskbar NOT being visible in Unity was one of the major selling points. I find the way it appears in Parallels to be incredibly ugly and intrusive.
Yay for having a better approach!
I did not speak about uglyness, but rather about usefulness.
The windows systray is a part of Windows functionalities. If it is masked, so it becomes difficult to use some Windows features.
Ok, it would be nice to get rid of the task bar, but let’s face it: it is an important component of Windows and it cannot be totally ignored.
With parallels, I set the taskbar to the left part of the screen (so not the bottom or the top), and reduced it to the minimum. So it is not intrusive, and it is possible to easily access applications that uses the systray a lot.
I tried to do the same thing with Fusion, but windows are thus deformed (strange bug by the way).
Maybe my use cases are different than yours, but nothing I run in Fusion+Unity is worse for the lack of a visible taskbar.
So, at least for my uses (a few productivity apps, a couple of non-taxing games), which I don’t think is an unrepresentative sample, the taskbar is completely irrelevant.
I just turn it off in Parallels and have things show up in the dock in Coherence mode.
…I expect VMware Fusion to be a lot better than Parallels.
VMware has plenty more experience.
I haven’t tried Fusion yet, but I have found all sorts of annoying bugs and shortcomings in Paralles. Besides I can hardly play any game: and that is going to be the main point, IMO: which one of the two will allow you to play Windows games decently.
I need to test VMFusion again, I do love Parallels on my Macbook Pro, runs great, VMWare Fusion didn’t run quite as well in the betas, but that’s beta, so I’ll need to test that.
I typically not fussed on VMWare to begin with, and on 64bit Vista I find it horrible to be honest, I really want Parallels to come out and support the install on 64bit Vista.
At least people are getting the choice of what to use, and they can decide themselves.
Personally, I think I’ll stick with Parallels.
Is there a way to connect a PC to my Mac and import my hard drive using Fusion? There is with Parallels.
Is there a way to connect a PC to my Mac and import my hard drive using Fusion? There is with Parallels.
You can use VMware Convertor Starter Edition (free download from VMWare) to do this. It creates a VM from your Windows PC which you can then run on Fusion (or ESX, or VMware Server 1.0). I’ve used it on Windows 2000 Pro, XP, and 2003 Server.
Fusion is a cheap attempt to steal the mind share Parallels has received on the Mac desktop. VMware Workstation on other platforms is a tired, formulated product that has seen very little innovation in the last decade.
I hope Mac owners will stay loyal to Parallels, and wait for the next version instead of buying Fusion.
VMware Workstation on other platforms is a tired, formulated product that has seen very little innovation in the last decade.
But the thing is, it works, and it works well. It may be boring, but it is awfully useful.
Now I admit, I am a VMware ESX partisan, and if you want to see real magic, that is the place to look, as well as the new-ish VMware Converter. If the server side seems more innovative, I guess the $6000 – $10000 they get per 2 socket server probably explains it
But despite this, I think VMware is admirably customer friendly; good examples being the free products and the open nature of the docs and product downloads.
Wow, you seem pretty set on worshiping parallels. Chill back man, it’s only a product. Hopefully Mac users will choose whatever suits them needs. But on the other hand, Apple’s target audience tends to be more responsive to the kind of groupthink demonstrated by your post.
VMWare was doing it’s thing before parallels was even a dream…
And lack of innovation? Well, that’s your opinion. Maybe it doesn’t have so many pretty gui things…But VMWare is more quite powerful and has it’s own strengths
The right tool for the job. Why do people refuse to open their minds once in a while? Does shrinking the world to an infinitesimally small size REALLY make them feel safer/more powerful?
Isn’t the name confusion considering Fusion is the name of the Mac Emulator also?
Has anyone compared the graphics performance in a VM between Fusion and Parallels? One of Fusion’s claims (if I recall) was that it could now virtualize certain GPUs now. Sure would like to see Fusion for Linux…
Fusion is crap when it comes to hardware Id:s.
If you install fusion it uses some background daemons that alters your hardware id in your mac. That means that if you have serialnumbers/protections that depends on your hardware id, then they will not work if fusion is installed.
I am not talking about the hardware id for the virtual machine, i am talking about the hardware id for the mac that fusion is running on.
This is not the case with parallels desktop.
What will this break? I mean, have you had it break specific software? I’m just curious what to watch out for.
Yes it broke the liceense for an pretty expensive workflow software that i have installed on my machine (i am an technician and have it for demo and testing purposes). Because the license is connected to the hardware ifd for my mac, it suddenly stopped working. I then saw that there were several background daemons running that had to do with Fusion. I uninstalled fusion and after that all worked as normal again.
I can sure understand that every virtual machine has it´s own hardware id, but it sure is a pin in the ass that it changes the hw id for the host (the mac).
I now run Parallels desktop again and it works as it should.
I’d love to see a comparison with VirtualBox, I couldn’t find anyone who had used both on OS X yet.
Just to be clear, the article states that VMware supported the BSD platform when they do not. BSD users have petitioned VMware to port their Linux product to BSD but never did.
I don’t believe you’re entirely correct. According to the the VMware Fusion FAQ, FreeBSD is supported. How well it’s supported and support for other BSD flavors is unclear.
I haven’t tested it myself however. I plan to download the evaluation in the near future and test it out.
FreeBSD runs fine as a *guest* on ESX and VMware Server 1.0. I think that’s all that VMware claims.
(I work on the assumption that FreeBSD would work on Fusion, since I also assume that Fusion is more or less a port of Server/Workstation to Mac, with extra features.)
…that I ended up going with Parallels (because I needed a stable VM before VMWare left beta)… but it seems to work alright too. But if VMWare really is easier on the resources it would be preferable.
I *did* use VMWare in early beta for mac os x. It was pretty impressive even then.
On the other hand, with some changes at work I don’t use XP locally as much as I used to…
I bought Parallels 2.0 because it was the only parallization on the Mac available at the time. I switched to VMware Fusion after the second beta because it was more efficient than Parallels. I bought VMware Fusion instead of upgrading to Parallels 3.0 because it works better. The best example is that with an idle Linux guest, Parallels will run the fan on my MacBook and VMware will not.
The VMware control of guest devices is much better. The shared folders works with Linux. I use VMware on Linux so I like the ability to copy the VMs. There are a few annoyances: it doesn’t play nice with VirtueDestop and the resolution switching with games can be weird.
…apps.
Now when parallels have competition (the same goes for fusion), both applications will be better and better and they will trigger each others to make better apps.
Great.
why they dont release fusion for linux aswell..
why they dont release fusion for linux aswell..
Um, because they have VMware Server and VMware Workstation for Linux? Granted, there nifty features that Fusion has, but nothing earth shattering.
Seems that VMware Fusion is not all that great:
http://bleepsoft.com/tyler/media/1/kernel_panic_at_the_disco.mp4