Fusion versus Parallels

I have been playing with Fusion and Parallels in order to run other operating systems on my Mac OS. In my case, I have been running Windows XP mostly due to the nature of the development work that I am doing at the moment. I will not claim to be an expert in knowing the differences of Fusion and Parallels but I can say that I like Fusion a lot more and ended up buying a copy. Here are a few reasons why I choose Fusion over Parallels:

1. One File - Fusion saves all VM data to one file that ends in a .vmwarevm extension. This makes management of my various VMs easy. I ended up creating what I call a “fresh” VM that is Windows XP SP2 with all the latest updates installed and configured the way I like it. This file is roughly 3GB in size. It is from this file that I make duplicates to use for home, work, etc. Easy to duplicate and destroy at will.
2. Dual Processor Support - I can configure Fusion to use both cores of my processor. Parallels doesn’t do this.
3. DirectX 9.0 - Supports the latest 3D graphics (well almost, as DirectX 10 is out now). Parallels uses a version older than 9.0.
4. Java Swing - Some aspects of Java Swing like the rendering of windows, panels, etc did not work properly when using Parallels but worked fine in Fusion.
5. Stability - While Fusion has some bugs I found it to be more stable than Parallels in terms of not crashing and locking up. In fact I had more problems with Parallels in this regard and have maybe only froze my Fusion image once (and I use Fusion almost every day).

While I do like Fusion, my only gripe is that Fusion does not release system memory once it has been shut down (or so I seems). Annoying but something I can deal with for the time being.

Tags: VMWare Fusion

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