CNET Labs benchmarks Parallels and Fusion virtualization products

Crossover is great for those who just need to run 1 or 2 Windows apps for work (non-graphics intensive). It even runs Office pretty well.

It even runs Starsiege Tribes very well. I know that's not saying much in terms of graphics, but it's still a fun game with lots of players.

In my Vista Ultimate BootCamp Parallels 3.0, I use Office 2007 for all business activity (Outlook to corporate Exchange, XL and Word, Access with ODBC... all of that) with very good performance results on my MacBook Pro 2.16 with 2GB. It is of course not as speedy as BootCamp native, but performs very well -- I don't have any complaints.

And I echo -- seriously -- who has one of those?

I too am surprised that the supposed "serious reviewers" at CNET just blatantly forgot the free Virtualbox :-(

Love VMWare.. they've been around the block. On the other hand, props to Parallels for beating the big guy to the market and stepping up to the competition.

Anyway, a free, albeit considerably less featured, alternative can be found at http://www.virtualbox.org/ - I've used this and it works pretty well.

Still, I jumped on the early adopter price of VMWare and never looked back.

To begin with I'll echo what others have said: the latest Ubuntu installs just fine under Parallels since version 3.

My issue with the article from CNet was that it was pretty useless. Not only did they not test general Office performance (I'm not crazy enough to expect virtualised Windows to offer better performance for games or multimedia) but their test system was an 8-core Mac Pro. Seriously, who has one of those? Most Macs are dual-core only so why didn't they test performance using one of these? Absolutely useless in helping me see whether Fusion is faster than Parallels.

My experience with Fusion contradict these findings, though my needs are somewhat specialized. I've been using parallels, for roughly 3 months. I've been happy with parallels, but thought I'd give Fusion a whirl. I have a need to virtualize window for one application... It's the element management system for a carrier grade class 5 VoIP Softswitch (MetaSwitch EMS). In parallels this application runs flawlessly at a negligible performance difference from a native wintel box.

Under fusion I noticed a very annoying lag from when I typed on the keypad till text displayed on the screen. There were also display issues... sometimes when I backspaced or deleted characters fragments or partial characters would still display. Additionally if I tried to run my EMS application in the "Unity" mode things would get pretty F*@K'd up. The mouse would register clicks half way across the screen from the cursor. There were whole regions of the screen I couldn't click on.

Other than these couple issues I liked the look of fusion it's interface, options... etc.

For the record I was using a Macbook pro, 2 gig ram (768mb allocated), WinXP SP2.

Not only can VMWare Fusion run DirectX 8.x (essentially they mean they support mapping the 8.x featureset to your 3D hardware, you can run 9.0c just fine) but it supports 3D and Convergence/Unity in Windows XP & Windows 2000. (Though its not officially supported for 2K) I was doing this up through the final release candidate.

I was able to install ubuntu feisty in Parallels 3.0 as ubuntu linux (no solaris trick necessary) with no issues.

I also am running a Vista Ultimate Boot Camp partition in Parallels with no issues at all.

I am anxious to see about Fusion, but Parallels has done the job well for me.

Now, let's see about getting compiz-fusion or Aero to work... get on it guys.

You can run Windows in both Fusion and BootCamp from the same partition. Not sure about Parallels.

Awesome, I have been waiting for this.