[Heil_68]

I have fusion installed with Vista Business and it runs great. My question is how do you get all of the other O/S's installed? My Fusion ONLY shows BootCamp in its virtual machine management window. any help and/or links would be appreciated. Thanks!

[Olu]

This is my set up. MBP 2.33ghz, 3gb ram. Windows on virtual disks for both. I'm sorry but Fusion is still playing catch up with Parallels. I have a license for both and for some odd reason I just want to like VMWare's product...but I don't. Benchmarks in the past show Parallels to be faster with XP and it still is. I realize this is beta, but it brought my machine to a crawl. I usually can't tell if Parallels is running.
Unity is yet to catch up to Coherence. Command-tab is inconsistent when switching apps. At least expose is working, but this has worked in Coherence forever.
I hide my start menu to the side, with Fusion it always comes up showing the windows desktop background. I need to mouse over it to reveal the start menu and icons.
With Coherence you can drag a document onto the corresponding windows application and it will launch (even with moderate security settings), no such luck with Unity.
I'll keep updating my Fusion application in hopes that one day it will surpass Parallels, but that day is not today.

[realtime]

I would like to see VMWare put functionality to share the user profile(s) between your Mac user folders and the Windows VM user directories automatically. Similar to Parallels Shared Profiles. Although it may seem like a tiny feature, it is really useful for blending both environments and making a seamless workflow between the a host and guest OS.
Related to that would be functionality to launch OSX host apps from a guest OS VM shortcut. It is really great to launch native OSX Excel from the Windows VM desktop.

[Olu]

Personally I give my windows virtual machine read only privileges except for a few folders (for security reasons). But you're right, Parallels has such better and seamless integration like using your user's folders as the corresponding folders in Windows. Also the ability to right click documents and open them in either environment really puts Parallels over the top.

[realtime]

Yeah, I find that the Shared Profiles feature in Parallels appeals quite strongly to so many users who really want the seamless desktop. It is much easier for them to conceptualize what is happening and to roll it into their workflow. Interestingly, I found myself in an interesting discussion with one of our network specialist staff today where I was trying to persuade him of the value of Fusion. The viewpoint he kept going back to was that Parallels was easier for people to use. He isn't fluent with either but was basing this on the Shared Profiles feature that he had heard of from others.. Thus, none of the other features of Fusion quite mattered enough to persuade him to give Fusion a try to evaluate for some of our machines..

[whitedog]

One area where I've found Fusion to be superior to Parallels is in network speed. Viewing a Watch Now movie on Netflix (no Mac compatibility) in XP runs smoothly in Fusion; in Parallels the playback is invariably choppy.
Another issue is RAM allocation. For some time I thought Parallels severely limited the amount of RAM I could specify, even though I have 8 GB on my Mac Pro. While rummaging through Parallels' preferences I discovered you can raise the RAM allocation in the VM settings if you raise it first in the Parallels preferences. Since you can do this in one step in Fusion, the Parallels solution seems unnecessarily obscure and complex. In addition, Fusion allows a choice between one and two CPUs. While this may seem prosaic on an 8 core Mac Pro, on most other Macs two CPUs is all there is anyway.
On the day (May 7) this article came out, I got a notice from Parallels that version 3 of Parallels Desktop (not a beta) was available. So it seems Fusion and Parallels continue to leap frog over each other. Parallels did come out with a final release somewhat before Fusion so it's not surprising it should be upgraded first. Unlike Fusion, however, the Parallels 2 and 3 upgrades, though discounted to existing license holders, have not been free.
There are no interface changes in Parallels 3 comparable to the improved VM management in Fusion 2 beta. This gives Fusion a more Mac-like interface, even though it's a version behind Parallels desktop.
The upshot appears to be that competition has kept both companies hustling to add value and functionality to their products. The biggest difference between the two may be that VMWare is bigger and better capitalized and so can afford to offer better upgrade bargains in an effort to expand their market share. Frankly, it's nice to have them competing for our business on the Mac. This was not always the case, as when Virtual PC's competitors fell by the wayside a decade ago and development on VPC all but ceased as a result. Score one for open markets and free enterprise.

[griffman]

{quote:title=AllanMarcus wrote:}Don;'t count out the newcomer to the Mac VM race: Sun! Take a look at VirtualBox: http://www.virtualbox.org/{quote}While I won't count them out, they're clearly not quite in the same league yet. From the Read Me on the latest release:{quote:}Currently, we are aware of the following restrictions:
? No support for Host Interface Networking
? No support for Internal Networking
? No support for audio input
? No support for VT-x/AMD-V (rarely required)
? No support for raw disk access
? The numlock emulation isn't implemented yet
? The VirtualBox kernel extension is currently accessible from all user accounts{quote}They do state they plan on addressing all these issues, but a virtualization solution with the above limitations is really not very usable in its current state. I am keeping an eye on their progress, and we'll be covering it at some point in the future, I'm sure.

-rob.

[rlockhart]

Like another post in this forum, I too have licenses for both Parallels and Fusion. Since I work in an IT department of a large company and familiar with VMWare as a company in our data center, I too want to be able to like Fusion over Parallels. Until this beta, I wasn't able to do so. Now, I'm running Fusion 2, beta 1, and think it's superior. Here's are few reasons.
1. USB devices are faster in Fusion than Parallels--much closer to true USB 2 speed
2. While this next statement is anecdotal, it sure appears that Fusion 2 is using fewer resources than Fusion 1 or Parallels. I usually don't even know it's on, even when Outlook and Rhapsody are booted and Rhapsody is streaming.
3. I like the new settings interface. Much more Mac-like and intuitive.
Unlike other users, I only run a vm to overcome the shortcomings of a few Mac apps. I really think Entourage 2008 is an embarrassment to MS (my reasons are at rlockhart.blogspot.com) and prefer using Outlook 2007. The Mac MS Messenger client doesn't work with our current version of Microsoft Office Communicator (2005) so I still need to use Windows for interoffice communications. Lastly, I am a big fan of Rhapsody and use UPnP to stream to my stereo. There is no Mac version of Rhapsody that will do this.
For the record, I have found Unity in beta 1 to be unstable. I'm running 10.5.3 on a current release version BlackMac with 4 gb, 2 gb allocated to Fusion. I've actually stopped using Parallels for the last month and think I can finally settle on Fusion as my vm client. I'll be excited to see what happens in the coming months. Competition IS good!