Parallels For Mac Vs Vmware Fusion

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I recently needed to decide which virtualization software to use on my new MacMini. I see three main competitors for Desktop Virtualization on the Mac: • Paralles Desktop for Mac (~ 80 €) • VMWare Fusion (~ 70 €, now 40 € introduction price) • Virtualbox (OpenSource / with Extension pack usage under their ) Parallels and VMWare are commercial products while Virtualbox (at least the main part) is now OpenSource and if you use their Oracle Expansion Pack is at least free for personal use under their ). It proved to be hard to find some serious comparison of the three at a recent version.

So I decided to make my own. Fortunately VMWare and Parallels provide time-limited demos of their software for evaluation purposes. I took that offer. Installed the three and made some testing and benchmarks. The tests were conducted on a MacMini 2011 with 2,3 GHz Core i5 Processor and 8 GB RAM and the Stock 500GB Toshiba MK5065GSFX HardDrive.

Mac

Parallels Desktop 11 For Mac Vs Vmware Fusion 8

I installed each of the three on a fresh installation of Mac OS X (10.7.2), rebooted between startup tests and bechmarks to avoid caching effects. And waited at min 1 Minute after Startup to ensure all system services and startup items were done. Free antivirus software for mac reviews. How to download x plane 11 for free mac. No additional software was installed on the machine, just bare Mac OS + one of the virtualization software products. Tested product versions were: Virtualbox 4.1.6, VMWare Fusion 4.1.1 and Parallels 7.0.15052. Each virtual machine was installed with standard options, given 2GB of RAM and 20 GB of dynamically expanding harddisk.

Running the current generations of these two virtualization programs—Parallels 8 Desktop for Mac () and VMware Fusion 5 ()—on one of today’s ultrafast Macs, only the most hardcore Windows. I opened the Vmware Fusion image in Parallels Desktop 14, and it went through the conversion process. It took under five minutes for my 44 GB image. Once it was done, I booted right into Windows 10.

Parallels Or Fusion

Windows startup performance was measured with a stopwatch, taken 7 times, best and worst time were thrown away and the other times averaged for each product. Taken was the time from pressing the 'Start VM' button until the Desktop background first appeared, this means these times include startup and initialization of the VMs and it's bios. Results Parallels Virtualbox VMWare Fusion Windows 7 Startup 36 44 39 Crystal Disk Mark 4k Write 0,94 MB/s 0,91 MB/s 1,38 MB/s Geekbench 3960 3919 3926 PCMark 7 – Overall Score 2007 778 2042 PCMark 7 – Video playback 13,77 fps 7,69 fps 13.76 fps PCMark 7 – DirectX 9 9,96 fps 1 fps 11,19 fps PCMark 7 – Data decrypting 12,68 MB/s 10,85 MB/s 17,77 MB/s PCMark 7 – Video transcoding downscaling 706,35 kB/s 543,93 kB/s 679,09 kB/s PCMark 7 – Image Manipulation 7,07 Mpx/s 6,93 Mpx/s 7,05 Mpx/s Analysis and remarks: In Windows 7 Startup performance the clear winner in my tests was Parallels Desktop. However I assume they use some startup optimization by modifying the windows boot process. Well Virtualbox and VMWare show the normal boot screen just like a regular PC for Windows 7 ( the three moving colory things), while Parallels shows some Vista style progress bar. Hence I assume they somehow change and enhance the bootup process to get this clear advantage.