Should I virtualize Windows on Mac OS X using Parallels Desktop or VMware Fusion?

Solution 1:

The best advice. Trail both and then decide. I was a long time fan of VMWare, however recently moved to Parallels. Side by side, Parallels gave me a 5.1 experience index for Windows 7, and VMWare Fusion gave me a 4.9. Performance wise both are solid on my hardware, however I prefer the interface and coherence features of Parallels over Unity. This is however a personal preference. Full disclosure: I run a MacBook Pro i7, 8GB's of RAM and a 500GB 7200RPM HDD.

Both product does the job, and both work well. They are also in the same price bracket. You also can't compare features since both have the same functionality, just the method of implementation differs. The choice between the two is really up to you and how you use Windows virtualised. I game in Windows, and Parallels provided me a better experience. I also had issues running Expression Web, Silverlight and WPF in VMWare due to the graphics card, but this has apparently been resolved in the latest update.

My wife however prefers VMWare and finds it easier to use then Parallels. Moving machines between the two are fairly easy. Use one for the full trail, and then transfer your machine to the other and trial it. Do a comparison on which one works for you.

Solution 2:

I was in the exact situation as you 2 weeks ago. I have developer friends who have used Parallels in the past for their Windows development VMs, and they had since moved to VMware Fusion 3.

I started off with a trial of Parallels Desktop 6; in a nutshell, I had issues virtualizing some of my physical machines, but overall it ran my VMs well. However, I did find the Coherence mode a little cumbersome in the UI. There were too many shortcuts created for my various VMs and the start menu used to launch Windows apps felt clunky.

So...I moved on to a trial of VMware Fusion 3. Despite all the performance reviews that say Parallels kills Fusion, running a VM in Fusion feels smooth and polished and starting, suspending and resuming a virtual machine are all very fast operations thanks to the SSD of the Macbook Air. The product overall is high quality and requires very little resources - I run 1 to 2 VMs for several hours at once during development. On my 4GB Macbook Air I only ever use half of that memory, including the operating system. (I have set my development VMs to use 1GB of RAM each).

And those problems I had virtualizing my physical hardware with Parallels? Gone with VMware. All my hardware was virtualized on the first attempt, and VMware even flawlessly imported the Parallels VMs I had been working with.

So, I licensed VMware Fusion 3 and you can even get a rebate on it like I did. That was the clincher for me.

I'm happily using VMware Fusion 3 every day to run my Windows 7 development box with Visual Studio 2010, Oracle 10g Express, SQL Server 2008 Express, and other tools installed.