Seat of pants comparison between Parallels Desktop and VMWare Fusion

Niche-y content warning: if you don’t instantly recognize these software titles, you probably won’t be interested in this. If you don’t know, Parallels Desktop and VMWare Fusion allow people who use Macs to run Windows. That’s it. This is not meant to be a comprehensive review, real reviews are already out there, written by people who are far more thorough and qualified (and interested) than I am. It’s meant to be the visceral impressions of someone who has used one program intensively and has switched to using the other program intensively. Just one guy’s reaction. With a little unsolicited editorial opinion thrown in. Whee.

If you’re a Mac user, virtualization is a pretty neat way to run Windows; sure, Boot Camp is cool, it’s fast and free, but these programs here will allow you to run Windows in a, uh, window; just like launching Safari or Word or something. No restarting to switch between OSX and Windows, both available whenever. The software can be fussy to set up, although I’ve been lucky. If you’ve been holding off testing Windows-on-a-Mac because of your VirtualPC experiences “back in the day,” your time has arrived, it’s a whole different ballgame. Very little compromise. And, it makes the Mac a pretty safe bet for PC switchers – 10 years ago, Mac enthusiasts would wax enthusiastically about how everything is just like Windows, but easier, and the Windows user would get suckered in and be lost and switch back. MacOS may have once been easier to someone starting from absolute scratch, but changing OSes is not the same. I mean, I’m sure learning to drive on the left side of the street is just as easy as learning to drive on the right, but I’d be willing to be that it would require at least a little adjustment for someone with years of experience doing the opposite.

Anyway, if you’ve secretly wanted to take the Mac plunge but were worried about what you’d be giving up from Windows, worry no more. You can have it all. 

I was a Parallels user from August 2007 until this Christmas, almost to the day. Parallels was basically OK. When it works fine, it works fine. Every once in a while I’d have a hiccup or belch that would require hours of work to figure out, or more accurately, to fix without really figuring out. (You can replace a flat tire on a car without knowing why the tire went flat to begin with. Same kind of deal.)

Between the little things, weird slowdowns, subtle quirks, etc., and the big things, like increasingly frequent crashes that required more and more of my ‘free’ time, I started thinking about exploring other options. The Parallels Desktop 4.0 Update promised to right all the little wrongs. Honestly, version 3.0 wasn’t too bad, but the promise of a leap in speed and greater reliability was too much to resist, so I took the plunge. 

I installed the 4.0 upgrade after an unbelievably hassle-ridden purchase process. It took like 14 hours to actually get the software I’d purchased because everyone in the world wanted their update at the same time, and apparently Parallels was caught with their pants down, so to speak. The optimist in me figured that that was actually a good sign – so many people fighting download cues to get the software must mean it’s good. 

When I finally got it, I was very cautious, though. I backed up everything, read all the warnings, followed all the early adopter tips. Unlike some reported, I had a totally hassle free setup. The process of upgrading from version 3.0 to 4.0 redoes your disk image of Windows. It creates an alternate version, of course, so for a while, you have the option of going back. I used the new version for about 2 weeks and then tossed my old one once I was comfortable. It took up a huge amount of hard drive space, otherwise I would have kept it. Anyway, big mistake. Total commitment to the new version, and within hours, I had my first big crash.

Since it was a brand new version, there was very little support for the issues. Lots of people complaining about the same stuff on their support forums, and none of the answers worked for everyone. For myself, after randomly trying things like “uninstalling” and “reinstalling,” and that old Mac tech support trick, “restarting,” I got back up and running something like 7 hours later. As they say, failure was not an option – this is what I work on, so I had to keep at it until it was fixed. Not a great way to spend a Sunday, especially when you don’t know that there’s actually an end in sight. It’s one thing to start a task that you know is going to take 7 hours, it’s another thing to take on a task that you cannot quit until it’s done. It could have been 70 hours. 

Which it was, the day after Christmas. For the first 6 hours after the failure, I tried all the same stuff as I’d done before. I was not initially worried since I’d gone through the same thing 3 weeks earlier. Surely, there was some learning curve that would shave hours off of my fight this time, right? Nope. I spent about 11 hours wrestling with it the day after Christmas because I had work the next day. No dice, and luckily things were slow at work and I got away with the down time. But after 11 hours fighting with it, I thought, “It’s time to try something different.” I jumped through the hoops of converting my Parallels desktop disk image to one compatible with VMWare Fusion. That was its own set of hassles, and while the process actually worked pretty easily and hassle-free, it took something like 60 hours. (I distinctly remember the feeling of alarm when it estimated 58 hours remaining.) So from late Thursday to late Sunday, it was grinding away. I still had my Parallels image, VMWare created its own copy and left the original Parellels stuff intact. And, wise as I’ve gotten in the last 3 weeks, I’ve kept it, just in case.

During the last hour or so of conversion, I downloaded a trial version of VMWare and installed it. It was very easy. With any virtualization software, there’s a little learning curve so you can get keyboard shortcuts working just so, and share the right volumes and get the drivers right, but it was mostly very painless. As of 2 days ago, I got my final couple tweaks figured out, and it’s been great. 

So, my first couple reactions:

Fusion has been dead reliable. Not a single hiccup or crash. I’ve experience Windows slowing down a little after hours of use, but nothing compared to the tragic slowdowns I’d predictably get in Parallels. And as with Parallels, if it gets too bad, a reboot of Windows takes care of it for a while. Advantage: Fusion. (This one is enough for me; give me reliability, or give me something else.)
 
Fusion still works after you shut down your Mac and turn it back on again. Parallels did not always do this. Having to uninstall and reinstall a program several times a month seems pretty unreasonable in the year 2008, now 2009. To be fair, this happened much less with Parallels 3.0. Advantage: Fusion. (If the 2 programs had been equally reliable, this would also be enough to make me switch.)

“SUSPEND” works in Fusion. You don’t have to totally shut down and restart Windows. Parallels had this feature as well, but it did terrible things when I tried to use it. 

If I “sleep” my Mac, Fusion doesn’t cause horrible system crashes. I had bad luck with this with Parallels, even in 3.0. It’s awfully handy to be able to sleep your mac instead of restarting, and it’s nice to let it take a break for the night rather than letting a screen saver spin all night.

Parallels 4.0 felt faster, and Fusion seems to actually be faster. Launching programs, screen redraws, resizing large files in Photoshop, gave the impression of greater speed in Parallels; the mouse was more responsive, etc., just the little things you feel when you’re used to a computer. In Fusion, you can actually feel the effort the machine is making when you’re pushing it with large files or lots of programs at once. But if something “feels” faster and actually takes longer, it’s sort of a wash. Bear in mind that this is pretty unscientific. My work has me doing the same tasks over and over, and I’ve done them for years, so I notice the difference between 5 and 10 seconds; it took me a little while to realize that Fusion was actually taking less time on some operations because it felt slower. Neither program is a dog, per se, they’re as fast as anything I ever need when they run right. Advantage: none – in a perfect world, the software would be fast AND feel fast.  

Features: Parallels seems to offer a lot more little goodies; I haven’t made a chart and counted them, but it definitely feels that way. I also never used any of them, so I don’t remember what they are. I’m sure there are people out there who have done great things with them and revolutionized their workflow, but all I really ever wanted or needed was a reliable platform that ran Windows XP fast enough for me to work on. Everything else is icing. So I’d probably give the icing advantage to Parallels. The cake advantage, not so much.

As far as the mundane day to day stuff they both have to do in order to do what they do, like sharing volumes between the Mac and the PC or sharing an internet connection with the Mac, they both did fine. They’ve both shared my printer just fine, although it took more steps in Parallels – Fusion worked right out of the box. They both see my Wacom tablet just fine, and they both politely try to figure out what to do if I plug in a camera or iPod, and they both remember what my preference is when I specify one. And with persistence, I eventually got both of them to support all my favorite keyboard shortcuts.

(Valuable tidbit for Fusion users: it may be common knowledge, but it took me a long time to sort out that turning off all the mouse-button options will allow your keyboard shortcuts to work in Photoshop, or for ctrl-clicking selected items from a list. I hated living without them, and Parallels didn’t remap CTRL-mouse out of the box so it was a new issue for me.)

I liked Parallels OK, and if it weren’t for the major time-suck it had become, I’d still use it. Software virtualization isn’t that sexy in the big scheme of things, so this isn’t a Porsche vs. Ferrari choice, it’s more like picking a new brand of milk because the old brand makes you break out. Fearing that you’re not going to be able to work, and not knowing how long it’ll take to get back to being able to work are deal breakers for me, I’ve got enough to worry about without dreading the next inevitable big software crash.

A casual perusal through the Parallels support forums has an embarassing number of “I asked for help on this 11 days ago, and I still can’t run Parallels” kinds of messages. Downtime with current, commercial software releases should not be measured in days; partly, it’s the software testing and QA and all that, partly it’s their support, and however you slice or dice it, downtime is not attractive, and downtime without an obvious path to remediation even less so. I am not a casual computer user, and keeping Parallels running had become larger than my interest in learning enough to do so. There are absolutely smarter, more experienced people than me all over the world, but in my opinion, you shouldn’t have to be one of them in order to purchase and use a piece of consumer software. That’s all I’m saying. 

If I had to guess without knowing anything about either company, VMWare seems to be the more cautious company; they seem to test their software more thoroughly and since they have far fewer devastating bugs, they have far fewer maintenance releases, and their marketing sheet probably has 30% fewer selling-point bullets as a result. Parallels takes risks, pushes the envelope, but in my own experience, represent bleeding-edge rather than cutting-edge progress. The result is jagged progress; additional features and claimed extra performance, but at the tragic expense of reliability. I mostly love using Windows in virtualization, it’s the best of all worlds when it works right, and I remain hopeful that both companies will continue to improve their products and advance the state of the art. But as someone who NEEDS the software to just work, Fusion’s my answer for now. Once you take reliability off the table, as Parallels has for many people, none of the other improvements matter. 

I’ve read of frustrated Fusion users who have switched happily to Parallels and found their bliss with exactly the opposite move as I’ve made, so your mileage may vary. All I can say is, thank goodness for options.

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