I have used the trial Workstation 6 version and I must say that it's far behind the competition. Parallels Workstation 6 is not what Parallels is focused on. That's what I understand from the lack of Updates. There are several updates for Mac's Parallels Desktop, but no Parallels Workstation updates. I am using Virtualbox, VMWare Player, and have used a trial Parallels Workstation 6. Parallels Workstation simply can't compete: 1) No 3D Acceleration. Just the lack of this feature alone is enough for many customers to prefer other products. There are tons of games and apps that require this to Work. VMWare and Virtual Box do provide 3D acceleration. In VMWare you can even play the most demanding 3D games almost perfectly. Virtual Box can also handle 3D applications. Parallels Desktop for Mac provides DirectX/ 3D acceleration support. This should be the case with Parallels Workstation. Workstation Extreme is not an option for the every day virtualization user since it's strictly limited to very certain host hardware specifications. 2) Buggy/lame support for Legacy OSes Windows 9x (Windows 95, 98SE, Millenium) guests. All of them are supported by VMWare and Virtualbox. VMWare supports them officialy, Virtualbox unofficialy but that's not a problem since the lack of VM tools in Virtualbox can be fixed with third party uitilities. In both platforms they work fine just if it were your actual OS. Non 3D Games and apps run perfectly. Even Windows 3.1x and DOS can be configured to run solid enough. Parallels provides poor support for Windows 9x, especially Windows 95. Soundblaster emulation or other older sound Platforms are not supported. A Windows 98 setup can be made but still there are problems like video artifacts, conflicts etc. If Virtualization makes sence then this is mostly the case when we talk about old OSes and that is the whole group of Windows 9x. 3) Not optimised for Windows 8, no updates for a long time. If there's going to be an Update then what it should add/fix is: 1) Proper support for all Windows 9x Versions (guest). 2) Soundblaster emulation, USB 1.1. support 3) 3D acceleration for Windows 2000,XP,Vista,7, 8 Guests. 4) Official support and optimization for Windows 8 host systems. 5) General bug fixes like lockups, garbled screens etc. If these features will be added/fixed Parallels Workstation, at this Price, is going to be the best virtualization choice.
I totally agree! We also need support for newer Linux desktops such as Ubuntu and Suse. This is sad, and it appears that Parallels Desktop is the only desktop software that is prioritized
Let's hope that soon Parallels will make a major update for Parallels Workstation which provides serious Windows and Linux virtualisation.It's no wonder that here 95% of the users are Mac users.That's because Workstation for Windows and Linux looks as if it were an abandoned project.
