Re: [Fed-Talk] Fusion vs. Parallels
Re: [Fed-Talk] Fusion vs. Parallels
- Subject: Re: [Fed-Talk] Fusion vs. Parallels
- From: Amanda Walker <email@hidden>
- Date: Sun, 23 Dec 2007 12:36:27 -0500
This seems a bit wild-eyed, but I'll throw in some of my experiences
as a user of both products since they each went into beta.
On Dec 22, 2007, at 6:24 PM, email@hidden wrote:
1. Parallels is actually based and coded in Russia. Much of the code
used was taken from various other projects that are questionable
legally.
They've been quite up front about having a Russia-based development
team, but unless you're prepared to give specifics, I'd be careful
about describing it as illegal. This is a very serious charge to make
about a competitor (or in this case, ex-competitor).
2. Parallels is a qt-app, meaning it's not a true Cocoa application.
In that sense it's a really, really poor port and not native, clean
Mac application.
This depends on how you look at it. As a programmer, I personally
dislike Qt, but neither Parallels nor Fusion has a very complex Mac
UI, so I'm not sure how much this hurts the product. Besides, both
have to go beyond the bounds of the normal UI to implement features
like Unity / Coherence, so I imagine that there's a fair amount of
home-grown code (outside of either Qt or Cocoa) in both.
3. It's full of hacks and bugs because of the qt-app status. It
doesn't use apple's proper libraries and doesn't take proper
advantage of multiple processors.
Being a Qt application doesn't necessarily mean it's "full of hacks
and bugs" (at least from a user standpoint--from a programmer
standpoint, no argument on the "requires effort if you want to
integrate well with the native UI" front :-)). I'm also not sure what
Qt has to do with multiple processors--the emulation engine and the UI
are separate pieces (in Fusion, as I recall, they even run as separate
UNIX processes, correct?).
4. When running windows or other OSes it actually Modifies the
virtual disk, so that your window serial or registration doesn't
think it's now on another machine. If you were to shut down or crash
there is a good chance you can corrupt the entire virtual disk file.
This is just bad practice, but it's the only way they can do it
because of their "hacked" virtualization.
Both products play games to allow the same Windows installation to
think it's activated in the virtual machine. One could argue that
Fusion's is a better approach technically (and I agree it is), but
without specifics, this comes across as fear mongering. I've crashed
both my Mac and Parallels dozens of times with Parallels running and
haven't had it mess up windows activation. I did get used to the
CHKDSK screen, but that's a hazard of running Windows.
5. VMware Fusion was written from the ground up using modern Apple
tools.
No, it was not. The UI may have been, but the core of Fusion is quite
clearly based directly on VMWare Workstation (something I view as a
feature, by the way).
The team is small, inside of a large company "the next google" that
does nothing but virtualization. The team consists of ex-apple
employees and people who have extreme mac experience.
The VMWare Fusion team is indeed quite impressive (as is the overall
VMWare team). I'd be skeptical of Wall Street claims about them being
"the next Google", but then again I get bemused by Wall Street's
predictions about the current Google :-) (disclaimer: I work for
Google). VMWare is certainly a shining star of the software industry
right now, however, and has done a great job with Fusion.
6. VMware's virtual disc format is open-source, and has been around
for a long period of time. It's been tried and proven, and there are
products for all platforms.
Agreed. I was also really, really pleased when they also open-sourced
the guest utilities. I really like it that Fusion offers a similar
degree of UI integration (mouse handling, shared folders, etc.) for
Linux, FreeBSD, and other non-Windows guest OSes. This is a little
detail, but makes the product much more pleasant to use.
7. Consider the fact that the IT Director? for the Marines is
planning to use VMware virtualization for all their military systems
starting next year.
8. Many, many government agencies are already using VMware because
it's been security hardened and VMware works hard to improve based
on feedback.
9. Some of those agencies that I know of: DoD, NSA, CIA, Army, Navy,
Airforce, Marines, and lots of Federal agencies that aren't just
intelligence or military.
Might be useful to cite specific procurements or contracts here so
that people can look up details and talk to their peers about how well
these projects are going.
10. VMware Fusion for mac will be much more stable as it's a native
cocoa application, works properly with 64bit, AND DOES NOT write
INTO your virtual disk for registration like Parallels does. This to
me would be a huge concern for business.
11. VMware uses SMP, supports 64bit and so much more, and VMware
will work closely with federal agencies.
12. I can probably hook you up with some demo licenses or put you in
contact with someone to give detailed hands on showing of the
features between Parallels and Fusion.
Demo licenses are also free for the asking from the vmware.com web
site, as I recall.
So, as a personal testimonial, I've bought a copy of Fusion for every
Intel Mac I own, for the following *technical* reasons:
- Supports dual-core operation of the guest operating system
(particularly nice on quad-core Mac Pro and XServe hardware, though it
only currently supports 2 cores for the guest). Good for CPU-
intensive tasks.
- Better UI integration for non-Windows guest operation systems
- Longer corporate track record with virtualization (I've been a
vmware workstation user since version 2)
- Ability to run vmware appliances
- Better graphics performance
- Unity integrates a little better with the Mac desktop experience
than Coherence, though neither is quite perfect.
And for one marketing reason:
- Parallels wasn't being very reliable for me before the 3.0 upgrade,
and I was a little cranky about it being a paid upgrade.
My personal recommendation is definitely for Fusion, though as with
all such decisions, It's always good to give all alternatives a try,
side by side, and see which works better in your particular environment.
--Amanda
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