VMWare Fusion Beta 3 out

wesley · Apr 8, 2007

n9yty said:
This is because Fusion is able to provide this great performance (for me it is quite acceptable!) WITHOUT having to stall at startup while creating a HUGE .mem file on your hard drive. On my machine, with 2GB of RAM, Paralells insists on creating a 1.5GB .mem file when I start it up. A horrible waste of time and disk space just to get the VM running, and Fusion doesn't require it. Let the people rejoice!

I personally want to know what the heck is going on with the huge .mem file as well. I set my VM to grab 512MB of memory, yet Parallels created a 1.46GB .mem file in the VM's folder. Google leads me to this thread:

http://forum.parallels.com/showthread.php?t=7180

...but of course there is no conclusive answer.

Meanwhile, I'm with the 'Coherence is an essential feature' camp. I cannot justify having to see a whole separate desktop while running a couple of Windows app when it is clearly possible to do away with it (the Windows desktop, that is). It's great to have Internet Explorer running in VM and Firefox on the OS X running right next to each other, for example.

websyndicate · Apr 9, 2007

tim-e said:
I use Coherence functionality almost daily. There's nothing more annoying than having all of Windows XP up on my desktop just to use SANtricity.

My issue with coherence is basically do you want to sacrifice performance to get a little happiness?

solgae · Apr 9, 2007

I don't see what performance sacrifice - I have never seen any. But then, I have 2GB of RAM.

Maybe you might want to consider how much memory you allocate? I used 384MB and it ran XP just fine, while leaving OS X enough memory to deal with other things. And that's when I had a gig of RAM.

lithe951 · Apr 9, 2007

Coherence is a definite performance hit and as a result, I don't use it every day. I also have 2Gb and have tried allocations of 256, 512, 768 and 1024 to the VM. In windowed mode 256 and 512 provide decent performance but fall somewhat in number-crunching spreadsheets. 1024 seems to lag as well, while 768 looks like the best performance for working with large spreadsheets. In coherence mode, ALL of them suck, dragging and sometimes locking up Excel. I only use coherence with basic apps - IE, Outlook and some tools. If I need to use Excel I toggle back to windowed mode. Coherence is very cool and I like it, but it's a big performance hit.

drval · Apr 9, 2007

lithe951 said:
Coherence is a definite performance hit and as a result, I don't use it every day. I also have 2Gb and have tried allocations of 256, 512, 768 and 1024 to the VM. In windowed mode 256 and 512 provide decent performance but fall somewhat in number-crunching spreadsheets. 1024 seems to lag as well, while 768 looks like the best performance for working with large spreadsheets. In coherence mode, ALL of them suck, dragging and sometimes locking up Excel. I only use coherence with basic apps - IE, Outlook and some tools. If I need to use Excel I toggle back to windowed mode. Coherence is very cool and I like it, but it's a big performance hit.

I have simply NOT see this kind of hit and I use Excel both in the Mac and Windows versions, as well as LabVIEW, Visual Studio, and I'm running Norton SystemWorks as well.

austinso · Apr 9, 2007

update on "excessive" windowing?

I was just wondering if anyone heard back about the "excessive" windowing (?) in Parallels...I have no problem with performance per se, but that is mainly because I rarely run apps in OSX and XP at the same time (I don't like having the fan cum hair-blower on all the freaking time)

Simply turning Parallels on hogs about 2.1 gigs of virtual memory, with 153 megs hard-wired. This is in contrast to what I've been seeing with VM fusion, which leaves nowhere near the memory "footprint" (25 megs hard-wired, 437 megs virtual...hmm 5-fold greater?).

Are they simply throwing memory at Parallels to make it more responsive?

BTW...I have 756 megs allocated to Parallels of my 2 gigs on my Blackbook.

Austin

Stevamundo · Apr 9, 2007

drval said:
For some of us Coherence is not "eye candy" but it is essential functionality.

How would you feel if some of us called your favorite functions/abilities something like "function candy"?

Always remember, one person's garbage is another person's treasure.

akac · Apr 9, 2007

Well I tried VM Fusion. Ran quite nicely. I loved how fast it started up and how it didn't hit my OS X system. Note, I am using a BootCamp based VM.

That said, a few issues:

1) I couldn't get folder sharing or D&D between environments to work at all.
2) When I tried navigating to \\.home\Shared\\akac - the entire system froze my UI. I was getting windows popping up and I could move my mouse, but it was like I was in a glass box. Nothing I did would actually work. I could not actually select OK or the dock or switch apps or ANYTHING. I was forced to hard quit my machine and on startup, all my networking was dead and frozen including the airport menu and the network system prefs. I had to startup in safe-mode, uninstall vmware fusion, and reboot. Then all worked fine.

While it was faster to startup, it felt slower than Parallels. Also I really dislike the toolbar at the top.

solgae · Apr 9, 2007

akac said:
Well I tried VM Fusion. Ran quite nicely. I loved how fast it started up and how it didn't hit my OS X system. Note, I am using a BootCamp based VM.

That said, a few issues:

1) I couldn't get folder sharing or D&D between environments to work at all.
2) When I tried navigating to \\.home\Shared\\akac - the entire system froze my UI. I was getting windows popping up and I could move my mouse, but it was like I was in a glass box. Nothing I did would actually work. I could not actually select OK or the dock or switch apps or ANYTHING. I was forced to hard quit my machine and on startup, all my networking was dead and frozen including the airport menu and the network system prefs. I had to startup in safe-mode, uninstall vmware fusion, and reboot. Then all worked fine.

While it was faster to startup, it felt slower than Parallels. Also I really dislike the toolbar at the top.

The toolbar can be hidden by View -> Hide Toolbar.

I found a few bugs as of now, but I think it's a better solution than Parallels as long as you are willing to give up Coherence support and you need rudimentary 3D support. VMware doesn't seem to be willing to implement the function similar to Coherence.

I also like the fact that VMware DOES allows you to standby the boot camp VM. Quite handy.

akac · Apr 9, 2007

Yes, but it does not stick. Everytime I started up, the toolbar was back.

sidssp · Apr 9, 2007

akac said:
Yes, but it does not stick. Everytime I started up, the toolbar was back.

This is Parallels support forum not VMWare support forum. I think we should keep VMWare support discussions to minimum.

dailo · Apr 9, 2007

Can anyone comment on the performance of Vista in VMware compared to Parallels? I'm trying to figure out is the performance slowing down because of processor saturation or is it because parallels doesn't have the graphics support all there compared to VMware. Thanks!

ehurtley · Apr 9, 2007

Unfortunately, because of VMWare's license terms, they prohibit the posting of benchmarks of Fusion anywhere other than their own forums. You can search their forums, though.

akac · Apr 9, 2007

sidssp said:
This is Parallels support forum not VMWare support forum. I think we should keep VMWare support discussions to minimum.

Who asked for support? I didn't. Read my post. I was telling people that I tried Fusion, and stuck with Parallels and why. Somebody mentioned something in regards to what I wrote so I explained myself further.

I mean sheesh - who made you forum admin?

wingdo · Apr 10, 2007

sidssp said:
This is Parallels support forum not VMWare support forum. I think we should keep VMWare support discussions to minimum.

Correct, and what better way to talk about Parallels than to compare them to their direct competitor? This is a discussion forum people should be free to discuss Parallels and what people want to see in it, including what others have already implemented and or things Parallels does better.

People are also on the VmWare forums requesting features like Coherence. You cannot expect these forums to exist in a vacuum and pretend there are not alternatives. Nor should you.

sidssp · Apr 10, 2007

akac said:
Who asked for support? I didn't. Read my post. I was telling people that I tried Fusion, and stuck with Parallels and why. Somebody mentioned something in regards to what I wrote so I explained myself further.

I mean sheesh - who made you forum admin?

No admin here, just some friendly suggestions. If I had offended you in any way, please accept my apology.