Parallels vs. VMWare: Benchmark results

I have a iMac running with boot camp just to be able to use AutoCad. Now I'm thinking to change it a virtual system...Do you thing it would work fine with the amount of graphic requirements I need?

Calling all techies: I am considering upgrading to Leopard with Bootcamp on my intel mac ONLY so I can run Window Landscape design programs (which aren't available for Macs as readily) and PRINT easily on my Canon MP530 printer. (Something I can't do currently running Parallels VM on my Tiger OS.)

Any advice?

Merry Christmas!

I can't even compare VM with Parallels - VM has much less features than I need.

How about running different winXP programs on different spaces (and I have 8)? Nope, VM can't do that.

How about opening all XP hyperlinks with my Safari or my Mail (and not the dumb IE) - no, again - VM can't do that.

How about just simply opening files from my desktop in MS Visio / Project? Again - VM can't do that.

So I'll take a look at the speed benchmarks when there will be something to review.
For now Parallels is the only one of a kind.

i have a macbook and i have 2 gigs memory and Parallels works like a champ, even better than my gateway PC. I dont know about Fusion cause i never tried it, if it isnt broken, why try to fix it, right?

Yeah I call BS on this too, Fusion from my experience is by far and away the faster more efficient application. I used Parallels when I 1st got my Mac Pro back in May 07 and it was an OK experience. I then got hold of the VMWare Fusion beta, when I used it for the 1st time it felt so much faster and stable than Parallels that I immediately uninstalled Parallels and have been using Fusion ever since. Not only does Fusion use multiple cores but it's UI is more polished IMO and easier to adapt to. Mactech has lost all its credibility from me, I smell something fishy.

Having installed Bootcamp, Parallels and Fusion (using the bootcamp partition), I am facing a big problem: everytime I change from a virtualization to another, windows XP asks me to reactivate the product (I have an officially bought licence of XP Pro). Then, I have to call Microsoft to get a new activation number and it takes a lot of time... I have done that ten times allready, and it never ends...

Am I the only one to face this problem?

Anyone has a solution to avoid this?

Other question: with Fusion, can you keep the windows system in a "sleeping" state when you quit Fusion, so that when you launch fusion again, you don't have to restart the whole windows system?

Any help appreciated! Thanks a lot.

Gabriel

One area that I find Parallels to be superior to Fusion is with networking flexibility. Parallels clearly shows you which physical port is mapped to the virtual ports. This isn't so much of an issue on my Mac Pros, but it is on my MBP, where I'll switch between wired and wireless Ethernet as well as my EvDO card throughout the day. If Fusion can do this, I don't know how.

Another area that disappoints me with Fusion is that you can't do things like shared SCSI for cluster testing. Parallels can't either, but it's a more glaring omission on the VMWare side since their Workstation products can handle it.

I used to sing the praises of VMware Fusion. That is, until it apparently hosed my Boot Camp partition awhile back, forcing me to reformat the XP partition and try again.

The partition was formatted as NTFS. I would sporadically receive the following errors:

"Operation on file "/dev/disk0s3" failed (input/output error).

followed by

"VMware Fusion cannot sync with disk before abort. Disk /dev/disk0s3 may be inconsistent."

I've posted about this on the VMware Fusion support forums and haven't gotten any concrete help.

Eventually, my Boot Camp partition became so corrupted that i couldn't boot separately into Windows.

So, I decide to repartition with Boot Camp (now under Leopard) and re-install XP. The install is fine, however, when I try to create the new virtual machine, VMware spits out:

"Cannot open the disk '/Users/stevetalkowski/Library/Application Support/VMware Fusion/Virtual Machines/Boot Camp/%2Fdev%2Fdisk0/Boot Camp partition.vmwarevm/Boot Camp partition.vmdk' or one of the snapshot disks it depends on. Reason: The file specified is not a virtual disk."

(The most verbose error message I'VE ever encounted! ;)

Another search on the forums had someone suggesting to remove the previous Boot Camp partition.vmdk and let VMware create a new one, which worked for them. I tried the same and my system churns for more than the stated "few moments" and eventually my OS X becomes sluggish and unresponsive to the point that I have to power off to restart. I'm running all of this on a 15" 2.16 GHz, 2GB MacBook Pro with OS X 10.5.1

Has anyone encountered either of my scenarios and recovered from them? I'd LOVE to get Fusion up and running again.

MacWorld did a benchmark,
CNET did a benchmark,
and they both found Fusion to be faster,
and lesser resources hungry.

And I second with what they found.
When you people who once use Parallels and are to try Fusion with your BootCamp Partition, you have to remove Parallels Tools and install VmWare tools so that it plays well with Fusion.

I purchased the first version of Parallels, which was unsupported in Leopard, and thus had to either purchase Parallels 3.0 or switch to VMWare. I switched since I felt like I was being ripped off having to buy the upgrade so soon.

Have been impressed with Fusion since it converted all my Parallels VMs without any issues, and accesses my Boot Camp partition without any hiccups either.