Andrew Gormley

As a long-time VMware Fusion user and proponent, part of me finds it difficult to accept that there may be any alternatives out there for running virtual machines on my Mac.  Another part of me, after bitch slapping the fanboy first part of me, wants to have the best tools for the job  It’s also this second part that puts Parallels Desktop through it’s paces every time a version comes out.  Here are the results of my (not so) extensive testing.

My Rig and Performance

Now my computer is by no means a dinosaur, but it should be noted that it’s not the top of the line by any means.  My specs are as follows:

• 24″ Early 2007 iMac
• 2.16 Ghz Core 2 Duo Processor
• 3GB of RAM (stupid hardware limitations!)

In terms of overall performance, both programs ran my copy of Windows at speeds I’m used to on PCs.  Windows apps opened up almost instantly and maintained consistently good performance using the default virtual machine settings (which vary slightly between VMware and Parallels).  Granted, I don’t run anything too intensive, but for general use in web development it works great.  Both companies assert that you can even play games in your virtual machine.  I don’t have many Windows games to test that, but it seems reasonable to me that if you allotted a bit more memory to the virtual machine (circa 1GB), you’d be able to play games from roughly a year ago and back at halfway decent settings.

Setting Them Up

Being a long-time VMware user means that I don’t need to install the virtual machine.  My install speeds wouldn’t be very helpful anyway, since I’m installing from a slipstreamed disk image of Windows XP SP3 to reduce headaches.  Regardless, I thought I would take the opportunity to try both a fresh install and import my VMware Virtual Machine via the Parallels Transporter bundled software.

The fresh install allows you to use physical media or disk images exactly like VMware, which is nice for both the casual Windows user who just made the switch to Mac AND the ubernerds that have multiple distributions of Linux in ISO format.  From start to finish, installing from my disk image to booting up took less than 10 minutes and detected all of my settings for me. Sweet.

Parallels Transporter was not such a pleasant experience.  It detected my VMware install and worked it’s magic during what I can only assume is a conversion process, then rebooted after about 5 minutes.  “That was faster!” I exclaimed in my mind, but was disappointed to find that the conversion process was not finished.  I sat through a progress bar that told me to “Please wait while the virtual machine is being upgraded…”  My guess is this process removes VMware Tools and installs Parallels Tools on the Virtual Machine.  Overall the Transporter method took about 23 minutes start to finish, about the install time of XP when booting from a CD/DVD.  Go with the fresh install whenever possible.

Can’t We All Just Get Along?  Coherence vs. Unity

Both of these programs have excellent integration into Leopard.  Parallels has Coherence, which lets you run Windows apps side-by-side with your Mac OS X apps.  VMware has Unity, which performs a similar function and allows for all the dragging and minimizing of apps your heart desires.

The one default setting I don’t like about Parallels is that it insists on placing Windows’ Task Bar above my OS X dock.  You can turn it off, but it seems pointless to have on by default since the Parallels dock icon new becomes a clickable Start Menu, which is pretty damn snazzy in my opinion.

I don’t know if I’m the only person who experienced this, but resizing and moving application windows in Parallels looks pretty bad.  I didn’t fiddle around with the graphics settings so this might be an isolated issue, but I know that in VMware, regardless of whether 3D Acceleration is turned on, resizing and moving app windows is smooth as silk. Moving on…

Interfaces and Key Features

With this release of Parallels, there isn’t much that’s decidedly different between the two contenders.  Both have very Mac-like interfaces, that is to say very clean and simple.  One problem I had with previous iterations of Parallels were the shiny, colorful buttons that ran along the side of each virtual machine when operating within Windowed Mode; my problem being that they looked awful.  Parallels took a page from the VMware play book to remedy this by moving the important things like Suspend, Shut Down, and Configure buttons to the top left, and the view modes on the top right.  The bottom right area now has a few sets of indicators for things like drive activity, network activity, printing, etc.

Both programs allow you to take Snapshots of your installation as well, which is great if you install a lot of temporary software or are a magnet for viruses.  Connecting USB devices is a snap and I didn’t notice much of a slow down when transferring files from a USB hard drive into the guest OS.

In Conclusion

I can now say that both of these apps are equally matched in their ability to bring you a Windows virtualization experience.  Previously I would argue against the interface of Parallels being strangely alien to the OS X environment, but both apps now have thoroughly refined (and almost identical) interface.  As for me, I’m going to continue using VMware because, in addition to already having purchased a license, I’m pleased with it’s OS X integration and continued stability.