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by vosper 5015 days ago
The other thing you get with Fusion (and Parallels, but not Virtual Box) is decent performance; in my office we're all running Ubuntu in Fusion on OSX - we were running Virtual Box until we realised our unit tests ran in half the time under Fusion.

But that's pretty much what I'd expect from two companies in the business of virtualisation, versus one behemoth who really doesn't care - particularly if they're not making a significant slice of revenue (or any?) from it.
2 comments
caycep 5015 days ago
Hm - is this just for Mac OS X or is this true for the windows version of virtualbox as well?

I was trying to find the difference between virtualbox and vmware player on the windows side.

Can't really decide between parallels and fusion though...I need to run some opengl stuff which isn't too complicated, but I'd rather it be solid. But I do like to use virtualbox to test some python/django/nginx builds so better ubuntu and networking support would be nice.

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webjprgm 5015 days ago
> Can't really decide between parallels and fusion though

In case you haven't seen it, MacObserver did a comparison of Parallels to Fusion to VirtualBox recently (on the Mac):

http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/benchmarking-parallel...

Their conclusion is that Parallels 8 is a bit faster than VMWare Fusion 5 and both are much faster than VirtualBox. VirtualBox doesn't have nearly the 3D support of the others, so depending on what OpenGL stuff you try to run it might not work.

> Hm - is this just for Mac OS X or is this true for the windows version of virtualbox as well?

You mean is Parallels and Fusion more performant than VirtualBox? I'd be willing to bet that the commercial products in this arena are easily faster.

As for me, I have no real need for Windows, I just like to keep the ability to run Windows apps on rare occasion, so I've stopped paying for VMWare Fusion updates and plan to just use VirtualBox since I don't need the speed. It was Steam on the Mac that put an end to my need for really good Windows virtualization.

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chmars 5015 days ago
Parallels Desktop ist more polished than VMware Fusion but more expensive due to a higher number of paid upgrades – those are about the essential differences in my opinion.
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caycep 5015 days ago
ah ok. I was expecting VMWare to be miles ahead since they are the 800 lb virtualization gorilla, but parallels imported my virtualbox windows box more or less seamelessly (save an automated microsoft phone re-registration) and some sales guy got in touch with me 12 hours after I downloaded the trial. Go figure...
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caf 5015 days ago
Moving from VMWare Server to VirtualBox on Windows I found VirtualBox to be significantly faster.
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thejosh 5015 days ago
I'm getting mass tearing with my work iMac and VMWare Fusion, Parallels locks you in at 60.

I also found Parallels 8 to have a bug where when using it with Ubuntu 12.04 XFCE, it would skip tabs in Chrome. Downgraded back to 7 - 8 was a free upgrade for me anyway.

Have you locked your framerate to 60 with fusion? I'd be interested in using fusion 5 if it has good performance compared to Parallels, especially now that 8 is buggy for me.

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