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

[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.