hey mac nerds! virtualization?

[rmd]

Is either parallels or vmware fusion worth the $$ over free solutions like virtualbox? I don't *think* I'm going to want particularly graphics=heavy things like games, and it looks like graphics is the thing that parallels excels at, so I don't think I need parallels. VMWare fusion looks slicker than virtualbox, but I don't know if it's $60 slicker.

Comments

[johnromkey.livejournal.com]

What do you need it for?

If you just want to run a text-heavy Linux VM, Virtual Box is probably fine.

My sense is that VMWare is studlier - something tech people might relate to better and may be a bit more bulletproof.

Historically, Parallels has been better at graphics and better with Windows integration and USB support though I think VMWare may be catching up there.

[rmd.livejournal.com]

not precisely sure, although i suspect that my macbook pro could run a vm of a windows box more powerful than my current windows box. So there's that. :)

[dfjdejulio.livejournal.com]

The last time I checked (which admittedly was years ago), VirtualBox didn't support direct use of a Boot Camp partition. VMWare and Parallels do.

This means I can install Windows once, on a Boot Camp partition, and then point VMWare at that install, and I can choose how to access it. If I need the full performance of running directly against the bare metal, reboot to the Boot Camp partition. If I can live with the lower performance of virtualization, fire up VMWare.

(I picked VMWare over Parallels because that's what we use for servers at work, so it makes it slightly easier to reuse VMs and templates, plus it's cross-platform, so I can slightly more easily move a guest to a non-MacOS host if needed. I'm told that if pure performance is your top factor, Parallels is often slightly better.)

For *me*, that flexibility was worth the price of the paid product.

[dfjdejulio.livejournal.com]

The main downside of this method that I can see is, if you use a purely virtual machine instead of a partition, you can do "sparse allocation" of the disk. You can over-allocate, and it'll only actually *use* disk space when the guest OS fills it up. With a partition, you must obviously allocate all the space ahead of time.

(You may reasonably not like overallocating scarce resources anyway. It can lead to problems down the line, sure.)

Another downside is that you can't really migrate the VM from host to host, which I do sometimes with other VMs.

[mjosephb.livejournal.com]

I use VirtualBox on my personal Window's laptop to emulate OS/X. It works so/so. I use VMWave on my personal MacBook Air to emulate XP/7. It works better.

[alanj]

I recently switched from a very old version of Fusion, no longer compatible with recent OS X releases, to the latest version of Parallels. Both have worked quite well. I haven't used Virtualbox; graphics are important to me, and also the comparative reviews I've seen have suggested VirtualBox can be glitchy, and it takes very few glitches for it to be worth $60 for me to avoid them.

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/10/the-latest-virtualization-showdown-parallels-desktop-9-vs-vmware-fusion-6/4/ was my main source; scroll down a couple of pages for the VirtualBox discussion, and why he didn't even include it in his Fusion/Parallels comparison.

[whitebird.livejournal.com]

I don't think that VirtualBox does a "unity" form of view, in which Windows windows are just yet another window style for Mac OS X windows to look like. I vastly prefer a unified experience like that to either an in-window virtual machine or a full-screen virtual machine experience.

I'd definitely look at the Ars Technica article jnala referenced. They know their stuff, and I'm not up on the most recent versions of either.

[annathepiper]

I've used Windows 7 via Parallels on my older Macbook with 4G of RAM in it, and honestly I find it pokey. If I want to run Win 7 on the Mac, I'll just BootCamp it and run the OS right off the hardware.

I use Parallels more for Linux, but the thing about that is, Parallels support for Linux is ass. I've had headaches trying to make new VMs off of recent Ubuntu builds, and the last stable version of Ubuntu I've gotten a clean VM from is 12.04, the last long-term support release.

When I went with Parallels originally I found the price more reasonable than VMWare as I recall, and I couldn't find suitable confirmation that any freeware options would work.

And for what it's worth, yeah, Parallels IS much stronger in Windows support than in Linux. If your box is a workhorse and can handle the performance hit of running Win 7, a Parallels VM would be fine. I'll probably eventually use it to make a Win 8 VM on my current Macbook.

[whitebird.livejournal.com]

You may want more RAM in your Macbook if it will take it. Your performance will likely improve if you do that.

[annathepiper]

I've maxed out the RAM that laptop will take, unfortunately. That one's a 2007-era Macbook and it won't take anything above 4G.

But that's actually fine, since I've upgraded since then and my current Macbook has 8G in it. I just haven't bothered to get rid of the older laptop yet, and it's kind of useful to keep around for assorted work-related reasons. :)

[charleshaynes.livejournal.com]

I regularly use VirtualBox (often via Vagrant) in anger in my day job. I have not yet found a situation where I needed Parallels or VMWare.

"The last time I checked (which admittedly was years ago), VirtualBox didn't support direct use of a Boot Camp partition."

I have a BootCamp partition on my MacBook Air for playing games. I have a VirtualBox set up so that I can boot that boot partition in a virtual environment when I need Windows but am not playing a game. It took a fair amount of Googling and fiddling to get to work, but it works.

[totient]

I've just spent a bunch of time installing both VirtualBox and Parallels on my new 13" Macbook Pro (2.4GHz dual core, 16GB), installing Windows 7 and XP guest images, and migrating those images back and forth.

Parallels is a lot slicker. Put a CD in an external drive and the Windows autorun window pops up. Filesystems from the host OS are a single click to mount in the guest OS. Connect a USB device to a guest OS and shut that OS down and you'll get a popup asking where to move the USB device.

But Parallels also uses more memory and CPU for itself, apart from what it's using for the guest OS. And VirtualBox does work just fine for the things I'm using it for (including having a unity view), without costing $80 or whatever. For that money I can stand to type a mount command at the command line once or twice every time I set up a new guest.