[geeks] Whats the verdict - vmware fusion or parallels?

[Jonathan C. Patschke]

On Wed, 15 Aug 2007, Jonathan Groll wrote:

> Its interesting that you don't mention bootcamp.

The applications I run under Windows (Visual Studio and Internet
Explorer) don't require direct hardware access, and rebooting is pretty
inconvenient for me.  The majority of my VMs run FreeBSD and Solaris
these days (along with a little Linux, some OS/2, and some DOS).

The primary reason I have Windows in a VM is to test web applications
under Internet Explorer 6 vs Internet Explorer 7.  There are tools for
XP that let you run both side-by-side, but I feel more confident that
I'm seeing what a client will see if I have two completely isolated
Windows instances, one of which has never been upgraded to IE 7.  In
this regard, Bootcamp would be a step backwards for me.

Nearly everything else I do in another OS, anyway.

> The only reason I require 'real' windows is for brain dead support
> staff at $WORK/$CLIENTS, who refuse to touch os x, so I can't get rid
> of it,

I have a slightly different arrangement with my employer and consulting
clients, but I can't imagine that virtualized Windows differs from
Windows on the bare metal, aside from interfacing with hardware.

> but currently I waste 30GiB for a bootcamp partition, and 22GiB for a
> vmware image (=52GiB out of a 120GB laptop harddrive). Having good
> support to run the bootcamp partition in a VM is a great way to save
> some of that space.

Yes, in that instance, Parallels is a clear win.

I'm not saying Parallels is bad software (aside from support for the Mac
Pro being a little off-the-mark now and then, which results in kernel
panics).  I'm just saying that VMware is a lot more flexible and gets in
my way less.

> However, vmware fusion still bluescreens every time I try to boot my
> bootcamp partition, for me parallels has none of those problems.

I believe a coworker of mine had this particular setup working on a Mini
(he did a similar thing on his Dell laptop with Windows, FreeBSD, and
VMware--he could boot FreeBSD from within Windows or on the bare metal).
Most likely, you have a couple of drivers that are fighting, and you
could probably get around that with multiple hardware profiles, which is
beyond what I remember about managing Win32.

-- 
Jonathan Patschke     )
Elgin, TX            (      "I detest logging filesystems."
USA                   )                    --Linus Torvalds