I ran some benchmarks myself to, when trying to decide which option to use and I ran into something interesting. When enabling in both the "hidden" native graphics option it means in VMWare Fusion you get DirectX but no OpenGL whereas Parallels gives you OpenGL, no clue about DirectX.
I tested it with a few programs I needed to use which all turned out to work one heck of a lot better with Parallels since those use OpenGL.
So that's something to take in account.
(tested with VMWare Fusion 1.1 and Paralles on Tiger)

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I have been using my MBP at work for 5 weeks, 4 weeks with VMWare and 1 week with Parallels. Here is what I can tell you from my "real world" tests:

1) I do Visual Studio 2005 (.NET) and SQL Server 2005 work all day long. The builds take the same amount of time under Parallels as they do under VMWare... which both equate to "too long" when compared with my Mac Pro at home.

2) All around usage feels snappier under Parallels than it does under VMWare.

3) VMWare takes MUCH longer to restore/suspend WinXP sessions than Parallels does. This means a lot to me when I'm ready to go home and VMWare shows me a progress meter for 5 minutes while Parallels is ready to go in 30 seconds.

4) Parallels plays much better with Spaces than VMWare does. I had to shut it off in VMWare because it was brutally flawed. Parallels is "jerky" when switching around to the different Windows apps, but still... it works.

5) Parallels has a nasty habit of grabbing my mouse when I connect it to the machine, which makes the mouse useless until I use my trackpad to tell it to let it go. Very aggravating.

Have a nice day,
Steven

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I find VMWare to be far quicker than Parallels. Parallels tends to be a memory hog for me (on a MBP and an iMac). I was unhappy with it's performance when v3 came out and I switched to Fusion. I've been far happier.

With Parallels, I always had to shut down the VM when I wasn't using it, to improve the rest of my system. With VMware, I leave it up constantly and all is well.

Both machines have 2G of ram and 512 dedicated to the VM.

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I second Damian's BS call. Here are some interesting stats I collected from my Leopard install yesterday:

VMware %CPU: .5-2% Threads: 5 Real Memory: 30.3MB Virtual Memory: 1.03GB

Parallels %CPU: 10-48% Threads: 22 Real Memory: 299.1MB Virtual Memory: 2.18GB


Which do you think feels faster? Yeah, NOT Parallels. It makes my MB kind of a dog. I feel so ashamed for having paid for this piece of yak...

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I used Parallels for about 6 months (last version was 3.x, but sure of exact build), then tried VMWare 1.0 on a whim. I found VMWare much, much, much faster. Parallels bogs down my entire MacBook like a black hole. But when I'm running VMWare, I notice no difference in system performance at all. Both Mac and Windows run very zippy.

And version 1.1 of VMWare is even zippier and stable as hell.

No question for me, my experience says VMWare all the way. YMMV.

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I have ran both for quite some time now and I can say Fusion is 100% better, I can let the machine run on 512 MB ram and have my Mac not slowed down at all while still running programs for work and microsoft outlook.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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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?

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I am calling BS on their measurements: 'Parallels is 17% faster than VMware Fusion when running Windows XP, and 1% faster than Boot Camp'

The virtual machine running two OS's is faster than the same machine running one OS natively (Boot Camp). Right.

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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.

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