VMware Fusion. Lost amongst all this iPhone hype is what looks like a cool new product from VMware offering virtualization on Mac OS X. boo ya! I talked with the lead developer from VMware at a dinner party a few months back, who told me that they were doing some pretty exciting stuff with the Mac. So I’d been waiting to play with it. I’ve been a fan of Parallels, which I have written about previously, so interested in seeing how the VMware product compares.
Virtualization, or virtual machines, allows you to run what is equilvalent to an entire operating systems within another, meaning I can run Windows XP (or Linux, or Solaris) in a window on my Mac.
Installation
Installation of VMware Fusion was pretty straight forward, setting up the virtual machine was easy and installing Windows, well is installing Windows. It auto-detected mouse, network, drives, everything no problem. Be sure to install the VMware Tools for improved performance and to be able to move your mouse directly in and out of the VM window with out needing a keyboard shortcut.
The biggest problem I had was my Mac didn’t want to eject the Windows disk. Right when I was getting really frustrated and about to jam a paper clip into the CD slot, thinking it was a mechanical issue, I finally did a search and found that you can use the Disk Utility to eject stubborn disks. A very weird software issue especially since the noises it was making sounded like the disk was stuck.
Performance
VMware Fusion seems to be a bit slower than Parallels, but still very usable. Fusion has an option to utilize both processors, which I couldn’t quite tell if it helped performance. It didn’t seem to take more resources, VMware uses less CPU and memory than Parallels, but maybe it could use more to get faster.
Testing: I started up Parallels, ran IE for a little while, Activity Monitor results:
Testing: I started up VMware Fusion, ran IE for a little while, Activity Monitor results:
Summary
Overall, I really like the VMware product, for a beta of version 1.0 it is solid. It matches Parallels in every feature that I could see. Plus Fusion has a couple of bonus ones, drag-and-drop files into and out of the virtual machine. nice! Also it seems it can connect to the built-in iSight camera.
Note: All run on my MacBook Pro, 2ghz Intel dual-core, 2gb RAM.
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