Parallels Desktop 5 Compared to VMWare Fusion 3
It was just last week that VMWare release Fusion 3, and this week Parallels responds with the release of Desktop 5 for Mac. Like Fusion 3 Parallels made claims to several interesting claims along with many new and unique features such as:
- 300% Increase in performance of Parallels 4
- OpenGL 2.1 and DirectX 9.0E Support
- Multi-Touch Gesture Support on Trackpads
- New Utilities like Parallels Compressor
- New Mode of Operation – Crystal
- Support for up to 8 Virtual CPU’s
WIth such an impressive list of features I owed it to myself to look yet again at the new version and it ultimately lead me down the path of doing a feature comparison and some informal benchmarking. t It was thru these tests and comparing operation on both a MacBookPro and MacPro that has made me determine which Virtualization Software I will stick with.
The Screencast below will give you a brief comparison of VMWare Fusion 3 and Parallels 5, along with showing the different operating modes of Parallels. By the end of this screencast I discuss my experience and the performance I was able to achieve comparing Fusion 3 to Parallels 5. I think you may be surprised by the results.
Hello Skeeter,
I am from Parallels and I would like to hear more about your experience with Parallels Desktop. Could you please e-mail me detailing your experience? I look forward to hearing from you. Please e-mail me at sgibbons@parallels.com.
Cheers.
Thanks for providing a great webcast. I would be interested in knowing what the specs were for the MacPro in the Parallels 4 versus 5 comparison.
Hi Kyle!
I am glad you liked the webcast! So the comparison on the MacPro- it’s an early 2008 MacPro with QuadCore – 3Ghz Intel Chip with 10GB of Ram. WIth Parallels 4 configured for 4GB of memory and 4 CPU’s. The MacBookPro running Windows 7 was configured with the VM using 2 CPU’s and 2GB of memory.
Hope that answers your question – Skeeter
Thank you for the Comparison, I’m convinced to buy Parallels 5 now. I like the different views and the support of the trackpad.
Thanks for the very complete video, I’ve made some compilation bench between the 2 … conclusion is obvious:-) http://tmenguy.free.fr/TechBlog/?p=481
Hi Skeeter,
I really enjoyed your comparison – especially the high image quality of your video and the zooms and pans to highlight important details.
What screen recording application did you use?
Hi Simon,
Glad to hear you liked the comparison and to answer your question I looked at both Snapshot 2 and Camtasia, and ended up sticking with Camtasia which is relatively new.
and @Simon
Hi Skeeter,
While your other benchmarks provide useful information, the last one comparing Parallels 4 on your MacPro vs Parallels 5 on your MacBook Pro is not meaningful. They are being run on different hardware, and in your comment above, you mentioned the VMs are configured differently. It would be more helpful if you could run Parallels 4 and Parallels 5 on the same hardware, configured identically, to show a comparison of how much faster version 5 is.
Hey Jeff,
I really appreciate you stopping by and taking a look at the blog! To your comment your absolutely right the comparison between Parallels version 4 and 5 on two different hardware platforms is sort of pointless. My initial plan was to do some benchmarking on Parallels 4 & 5 on the MacPro, but when I installed version 5 it wiped version 4 automatically. I included it primarily because I thought it was interesting that Parallels 5 on the MBP booted into Windows 7 faster then on the MacPro.
I have been busy working on the next screencast which will be on virtualization and game play and will be posting that within the next day or so.
Best,
Skeeter
@Jeff
Parallels supports Gestures on Trackpads. Do you know if either Parallels 5 or Fusion 3 supports the finger swipe functions of a Magic Mouse?
Hi Brucet,
Thanks for your interest and taking time to read the blog on Virtualization. To your question – Parallels Desktop 5 supports the gestures built into track pads on the MacBookPro.
Best Wishes,
Skeeter
@Brucet
Best stuff out there on this, Skeeter. Way to get out in front of the technology for us!
Two questions:
Having used Parallels 5 for a bit now, how would you describe its stability compared to VM-Ware. The consensus seems to be that with VMWare you trade speed for stability. Has that been your experience?
A related second question, how much do you think your positive experience with these two is based on the quality of your hardware. I’m running the latest Macbook Air, which tops out at 2GHZ duo and 2GB Ram. I don’t plan on doing any graphics work besides basic maps (GIS) and Microsoft Office. I’d do boot camp, but the clunky file-sharing options with that seem prohibitive.
Any advice?
Don
Hi Don,
I’m thrilled that you found this information of value.
To your two questions:
1. Having used both products since they came out and switching back and forth, one of the things I always remembered was that whenever an update of Parallels came out, unless you rebooted the computer it would certainly hang your mac after the update was installed. That being said, I have found version 5 to not have the “problems with stability” that I have seen in the past. I have been using it daily since it came out and in fact uninstalled VMWare Fusion 3 and use Parallels exclusively. My sense and experience is that the product has reached a level of maturity that those issues are infrequent.
2. Certainly there is no question having high end hardware makes a difference, but remember I used both products so while you may not see the same speed I reported the experience comparing both on your MBA should be similar between them in terms of relative performance. That said my take would be to go with Parallels and with the applications you mentioned your running I would stick right with Virtualization and not go into BootCamp. From what applications you have listed there is nothing I see that direct access to the hardware from the OS is really going to buy you. The one thing to think about with BootCamp is remember then that every time you want to do something in Windows, its a complete reboot, and reload and wait to get the MBA up and running again. If you think about that time you spend every time you do this, a little slower performance by the VM may not be that big of a deal along with the enhanced transparency between the OS’s.
One thought that covers both points – Before buying the product download the 30 day trial install it as a VM with either WIndows 7 or Windows XP and test it out. This should give you a feel for both stability and speed, and if your someone who “likes to play” then try the boot camp option. I would recommend in any of these scenarios I mentioned about in this paragraph – do not activate windows until you know which direction your going to stick with.
Good Luck,
Skeeter
Is it possible to have a microsoft word launch icon right in the Mac dock?
I wasn’t quite able to see this from the video.
Thanks.
Yes – what you can do is launch MS Word from within Parallels and the MS Word icon will appear right on your dock just like an OSX app. Now with the MS Word running, go to the icon on the Mac OSX Dock, right click and select the option “Keep in Dock”. Once you have done this it will stay in place on the dock and then next time you click on the MS Word Icon it will launch Windows if not already running and then MS Word will start within Parallels.
Hope this helps! Skeeter
That’s great to know, thanks. I don’t think VMWare Fusion is able to do this.
Nice orbital-eye view of Parallels 5; no wonder Parallels are sending the link to the Twitterverse as a “You should check out Parallels” link.
However, it was less than useful for me – to the point where I only watched the first 4-1/2 minutes – because it doesn’t bring me any closer to answering my two crucial Parallels-or-VMWare questions:
1. How well does each hypervisor support non-Windows OSs? I regularly (under VMWare 2) fire up various Linuxes, NetBSD and FreeBSD, and OpenSolaris. I have Windows VMs (XPSP3 and Win7), but use them only for Web testing these days. I haven’t yet seen anybody that writes a review that isn’t “here’s how to run Windows on your Mac.”
2. How well do the two hypervisors perform (again, with a variety of VMs) on midrange hardware? I use an iMac (8.1, 3.06 GHz, 4GB RAM) and a 15″ MBP (5.3, 2.8GHz, 4 GB RAM) interchangeably and constantly. If I had Pro- or even newest-iMac-level resources, the hypervisor would have to be an absolute pig farm not to fly.
Quite frankly, I’m almost to the point of asking VMWare if they’d sell me another VMWare 2 license instead, to put on the new MBP. As a very old-school geek, that thought seriously annoys me.
@Jeff Dickey
Hi Jeff,
Thanks for your comments on my posts here. With regard to hypervisor support for non-windows OS’s – well I wish I could help but have not done any testing where I could give you performance on the OSs that you mentioned.
To your second point – I can tell you that I use PD5 daily on a 2.8Ghz MBP with 2GB ram allocated to Windows 7 , with performance tuned to VM and hypervisor turned on and performance is very good.
Best of luck on your quest for VM2
Skeeter