Having used both products, I can say that they both do some pretty nifty stuff, Parallels being first to the table, their product is more polished, and running without debug code makes it faster, VMWare's product has some interesting features and has a great deal of promise. One thing that pisses me off about both products is the inability to use a whole drive as your windows disk in virtualization mode. I have 4 Disks in my MacPro, 3 are Mac Disks, one is a windows disk. Often, I find myself needing to work in office, and I have to reboot my machine to do so because while Parallels will work peachily with a second partition on the main disk as its virtualization drive, it will totally kick me in the bollocks and ignore my entire drive as a startup device. This is a feature that would make both products appeal a great deal to the higher end users who, by the way, are more apt to be using virtualization a great deal anyway.

Flip4 mac is a utility that enables WMV files to be played by QT player. You must have meaned VirtueDesktop.

I haven't tried Fusion yet, but I can say that the latest available full release of Parallels (build 3188 released March 07) has superb support for running your bootcamp partition as a VM.

I use it on a daily basis (on my MBP Core 2 Duo) for running MS Visio and Project and happily switch between Bootcamp native and Parallels. The only issue I've seen is that sometimes windows needs two attempts to start under bootcamp. As far as I'm concerned, the ability to choose to run my XP SP2 image or natively or vm'd is a killer differentiator.

It's going to be interesting to see what Fusion brings to the table because Parallels already has USB 2.0, Vista, drag'n'drop dynamic desktop resizing, full screen mode, coherence (i.e. mac window mode), copy-paste, drag'n'drop, shared foldering, etc. Parallels also happily imports VMWare Virtual Machines so for individual usage I don't see see a motivator to change. If I was regularly moving VM's to non-parallels platforms that might matter but I don't.

[Disclaimer: I am in no way paid by or related to Parallels]

The VT Vanderpool hardware virtualization extensions that Intel started integrated in its CPUs since a couple of years ago and then AMD followed route... why is still practically not really used ?

All these software virtualization programs don't really work as true front ends/UIs for the hardware virtualization, otherwise there would be no real limits sharing resources since it's engineered at the hardware level to let the hardware work on multiple OSes at the same time... And if this VMWare Fusion application is making use of hardware virtualization then it's not in its native form.

It was supposed that Intel would have put some sort of OS (maybe realtime) running from the EFI Bios to let users make use of hardware virtualization.. years passed and still nothing, just VMware,Xen,VirtualPC,Parallels software virtualization products that claim to make use of hardware virtualization and yet obviously they have some hypervisors that let the users create VirtualMachines yes but with pretty limited features and/or quite slow performance because it's still a software based approach...

So right now the claimed to be hardware virtualization support to let a user switch between running OSes in realtime with the hardware doing the job it's just a promise and only software controlled hypervisors with VirtualMachines that have limitations (like DX8 only support and very slow emulation.. where is hardware there?) is available in various forms. Why is this ? Why Intel didn't put enough resources to have true hardware virtualization fully working in motherboard BIOSes ? The iMacs are using EFI BIOS already.. that's not the case for PC motherboards (desktop ones at least), yet .. and anyway none is including any sort of OS in the BIOS to let the user use hardware virtualization..

Does anyone know if and when is it going to change ? Will it finally change with the upcoming Intel Nehalem and point-to-point CSI bus on new Intel based motherboard later next year ? Or will true hardware virtualization keep remaining just a dream and/or marketing hype to let vendors of software virtualization programs keep selling their products ?

Just read your article. May I ask if you have used VMWare Workstation on Windows? You made a couple of comments that I have found to be exactly true to this product as well... one which has been in use for a couple of years now: The Direct X performance is not great and the CD Eject does not work from the Host OS when the VM is running.

The CD issue is understandable to some degree... the guest OS is potentially using the CD so the HOST OS is stopped from ejecting it. It should be easy enough to simply eject from the Guest OS... or detatch it from host OS (in VMWare Workstation, that is a single right-click and select disconnect.)

The thing you mentioned about "shared folders". If Fusion is like Workstattion (which it does seem to be), you have to create these shares manually, and would not seem to be an issue with the app, but maybe "as designed"?

Cheers,

David.

Fusion is my choice over Parallels for these reasons:

- 64 bit support for:

Solaris - 64bit, allowing me to run Oracle 64 bit for Solaris.

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WinXP 64 bit, which is Much Cheaper then Vista.

( Remember to Disable Networking before running windows,

giving you that much greater protection from being hacked. )

( Also: Run behind an Airport Firewall. )

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> Parallels already has USB 2.0, Vista, drag'n'drop dynamic desktop resizing, full screen mode, coherence (i.e. mac window mode), copy-paste, drag'n'drop.

Note: Fusion has all these.

Remember to Install VMWare Tools.

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Problems with Fusion?

- One Button Mouse support Still not there.

( i.e. In Windows or Solaris mode, would be nice to be able to press: Ctrl-Alt Mouse button to == Right Mouse click,

like Microsoft's Virtual PC for the Mac did.

- Would be nice to be able to window flip easily between Fusion and applications on the Mac like Word or FileMaker. But, this first requires a Mouse Click into the Mac OS to get out of Fusion.

- Character Set conversion:

This is a small issue but, writing SQL on a MAC Quotes are saved as "Left-Quote" and "Right-Quote" in some applications like FileMaker Pro. But, pasting this into SqlDeveloper, this sql won't work until you replace the quotes with Ansii-Quote char. But, that's more a SqlDeveloper issue.

Had this preview been released after the weekend, the author would have taken advantage of the new Beta release.

New features and feature improvements

* Greatly improved performance — By popular demand, you can now disable debugging code to experience the full power and performance that VMware Fusion offers for running your favorite PC applications.

* Support for Boot Camp — VMware Fusion automatically detects your Boot Camp partition, so you can now run a Windows XP virtual machine from your existing Boot Camp partition. You no longer have to choose Windows or Mac: you can now run Windows side-by-side with your favorite Mac applications. Note: For this Beta 3 release, Windows Vista is not supported; only Windows XP is supported.

* Windows Easy Install — You want to run Windows applications, but you don't want to become a guru just to install Windows. VMware Fusion has you covered; just answer a few simple questions, insert your Windows CD and let VMware Fusion take care of the rest and automatically create the optimal Windows virtual machine for your Mac, including the installation of VMware Tools.

* Virtual machine packages — Virtual machines are now encapsulated in a single, easy-to-manage package. Move your virtual machines to another hard drive or Mac simply by copying a file.

* Enhanced virtual machine creation — The entire virtual machine creation process has been streamlined, and the new Windows Easy Install feature makes creating a virtual machine even easier than before. The New Virtual Machine Assistant remembers the location you choose for future virtual machine creation.

* Enhanced virtual machine library — Managing multiple virtual machines is even easier with the Virtual Machine Library. Add new virtual machines by just dragging them into the Library, reorder virtual machines with drag and drop, and use the delete key on the Keyboard to remove virtual machines from the library. Open a Virtual Machine without powering it on, using the new Settings button, which opens a virtual machine directly to the Hardware Editor.

* Host-Only Networking — Host-Only networking creates a network that is completely contained within your Mac, with a network connection between the virtual machine and your Mac. Use host-only networking to set up an isolated virtual network.

* Improved suspend/shutdown state — When a virtual machine is suspended, VMware Fusion shows a screenshot of the last known state of the virtual machine and a friendly play button so you can get up and running again quickly.

* Improved hardware editor — Settings for virtual hardware are now complete: you can remove virtual hardware from the hardware editor when virtual machines are powered off.

* Improved international support — European and Japanese Apple keyboards now work properly in virtual machines.

Bugs Fixed in Beta 3

This Beta 3 release of VMware Fusion for Mac includes the following improvements and bug fixes:

* Improved networking performance — In some cases, networking in earlier beta versions was slow with single-processor virtual machines. VMware Fusion Beta 3 solves this problem and greatly improves performance in this case.

* Virtual networking no longer fills system logs — VMware Fusion Beta 2 wireless networking added many entries to the system log. This Beta 3 release resolves this issue.

In addition to the improvements listed above, this Beta 3 release fixes numerous bugs to greatly improve the stability and performance of VMware Fusion.