“If there’s a flaw, it’s in the expectations that VMware sets for what you can do. Aero Glass and typical VM-friendly apps will work, but despite marketing speak we’d treat the extra graphics support as useful for compatibility alone, not as a redefinition of what you can do with virtual operating systems. Gamers will still want Boot Camp at the ready, and we’d recommend that serious VM users have as fast a system as possible if they want a transparent experience. The addition of quad-core iMacs couldn’t have come at a better time,” MacNN reports.
“Even with that performance overhead, we’d still say that Fusion 3 is easily the go-to app if you depend on Windows for testing or still need a connection to Windows before you move completely to the Mac universe. At $80 it’s inexpensive enough to be both a viable companion to a copy of Windows and a worthwhile upgrade from an earlier version of Fusion,” MacNN reports.
There’s much, much more in the full review – recommended – here.
How can they write a review like this without saying word one about Parallels?
VirtualBox
http://www.virtualbox.org
I use 3 virtual desktop products;
Fusion
Parallels
VirtualBox
Fusion is the most stable, Parallels is a little faster and VirtualBox- is really cool for an Open product. Actually- VirtualBox is quite stable as well. I use Fusion in my “prodution” environment mainly because I also administer ESX & ESXi enterprise products.
However; Fusion 3 is NOT ready yet- had to revert back to 206. Too many performance / stability issues. Oddly- the Beta version of Fusion3 seemed better than the released edition. Anyway- I’m sure VMWARE will get it right- but I’d wait.
Good luck
Because the review is about Fusion?
Bubbles, would you buy a virtualization program without checking out the alternatives? Websites like MacNN are supposed to doing a service for its readers, not just picking up checks from manufacturers for doing PR work. If there are any computer users who understand the importance of this, it should be Mac people!
Apple should offer an XP-based PC trade-in where you buy a Mac with VMWare/Parallels and the Genius will put your old PC on the Mac using Transporter for free or a small fee.
Dude: Calm. Down. Step away from the keyboard. Believe it or not, publications and Web sites write reviews on individual products all the time. And you have read many of them. It was not meant as a multi-product round-up. Because you are a fan of one product does not mean that it isn’t valid to write an individual review on another.
Get over yourself. Please.
Thanks for the heads-up! I was not planning on making the move to Snow Leopard until at least 10.6.2 (by habit, I always wait for at least the second update of any OS left-dot release), and thought I’d wait a month or two before upgrading to VMware Fusion 3. I have a hunch that it will be nice, once some bugs get squashed. This is a big jump for VMware Fusion (and likely a similarly big jump for its competitors). So being a bit patient will likely make my Mac/Windows experience much better in a work environment.
Thanks again for sharing your experiences!
VirtualBox cannot (as of last I visited the website) import existing VM’s.
That’s the show-stopper for me.
@Uh, Paul
Yes, and “cooling the mark out” by coolly trying to justify the unjustifiable on the basis of an claim that “everyone does it” is also a rhetorical strategy. The point is that a “review” is supposed to hold a product up to some kind of commercial standard. The implicit standard of this “review” is whether VMware Fusion 3 is better than Boot Camp. Duh! If you look at cellphone and computer reviews you notice that the Droid gets compared to the iPhone, or the Mac gets compared to the PC. While the criteria may be imperfect, those reviews at least attempt some basis for comparison.
The internet media are just beginning to develop as a source of critical product information, replacing magazines and newspapers. In a recession, there is a temptation for the media to hit the lowest common denominator of journalistic performance because the only ones writing checks are the advertiser/producers. Consumers should demand quality, which is what MacDailyNews is all about.
Is it still easy to turn off Unity and Shared Applications? I’m one of those who do NOT want the guest OS integrated with Mac OS X. I want to sandbox the virtual machine as much as possible.
Thank in advance.
I’ve had Parallels since before VMWare had shipped a Mac product. A friend of mine switched to Mac several months ago (on my recommendation) and he bought Fusion with his MacBook Pro so that he could run AutoCAD. He had numerous problems with it, so I told him about Parallels. I use it for AutoCAD, and, although it’s not perfect, it does the job well. He switched to Parallels, and it’s working much better for him than Fusion did.
I agree with Paul Johnson, although I personally don’t always care for comparisons if they’re subjective or forced. Comparing benchmarks is one thing, comparing things by “feel” is not necessarily better than nothing at all.
@pastrychef
“I’m one of those who do NOT want the guest OS integrated with Mac OS X. I want to sandbox the virtual machine as much as possible.”
Amen to that. A-freaking-men.
I too agree with Paul Johnson in this case. Parallels should have been part of the mix here. I found iLuvMyMacs comments more helpful.
I use VMware Fusion, and the 3.0 version is working well for me. It has a built-in feature to import an existing Windows PC installation over a network connection, into a Virtual Machine. It also has a feature to import a previous Microsoft (Connectix) Virtual PC virtual machine.
My old copy of of Virtual PC (4.0 I believe) came with Windows Me (yes – very old). I later purchased a copy of Virtual PC after Microsoft owned it, with no OS. I managed to move my Windows Me installation over to the new version of Virtual PC. Then I used a retail Windows XP upgrade, to upgrade that Virtual PC VM to XP. Then I imported that XP VM into a VMware Fusion VM. So my Windows license has been on a long journey, and WMware Fusion allowed me to keep using what I already had, instead of needing to buy a new copy of Windows.
It also works very well with Ubuntu Linux, and I even installed a VM for Sun Solaris, just for kicks.
Review is on the money and presents some good points skipped by other reviews. I used Parallels 4 and Fusion 2 previously. I switched to Fusion 3 because of native 64 bit support on OSX 10.6. Apps can access more memory and simply run faster in 64 bit mode. The new interface for fusion 3 is solid and fully comparable with Parallels 4.0 , and I was able to install 64 bit windows 7 from scratch in 15 minutes and run multiple linux and Windows VM’s side by side on my MacBook pro with 6 gigs of ram, without any performance hitches.
This review was the only one I found that is accurate in terms of 3D and graphics performance. Fusion 3 will not run any modern games well (use bootcamp for that). One other notable difference between Parallels 4.0 and Fusion 3.0 is that parallels seems to use VM memory dynamically while Fusion 3 allocates the entire chunk. If you have allocated 1gig of memory on parallels it might only use 400 megs until that VM requests more memory, fusion allocates the entire 1 gig. In low memory situations with multiple VM’s you will see better but less predicable performance on parallels. This said, I still prefer Fusion as I encountered several situations with parallels where dynamic memory ran out of memory and left my VM’s inoperable. If you have OS 10.6 (Snow Leopard) then Fusion 3.0 is a no brainer until Parallels 5.0 comes out with their 64 bit answer.