ExpanDrive

I’m a proud owner of Parallels Desktop for OS X. It has served me admirably, but it’s time to move on.

A while back, when Parallels announced they could finally boot my BootCamp partition directly, I was in love. I had visions of Visual Studio and XCode existing side by side. Working on the SftpDrive Windows and OS X clients at the same time. Wouldn’t that be grand?

Then I tried it out, and was distinctly less enamored. It was SLOW. It worked, but I didn’t just buy a brand new MacBook Pro so I could have a slow, often painful, primary work environment that lacked any graphics acceleration. I’d love for it to have worked, but I switched back to plain old BootCamp. What can I say, I need my speed.

SWSoft is adding features to Parallels at a rapid pace, which I appreciate. However, their “core” virtualization experience really isn’t that good. Especially compared to VMWare Workstation, which I spend a huge amount of time using. I hate to do this, but let’s go over some of the major offenses:

1. 20% CPU usage while the VM is completely idle, on a fresh install. No need to explain this further, not acceptable. For references – VMWare gives me about 2-4% usage.

2. It only supports one processor. That sucks.

3. Disk usage: Parallels Virtual Disk access is WAAAY slower, especially in BootCamp. I get around a 75% performance hit using the disk in BootCamp mode. That’s a made up number, but it feels SLOW. Copying around a 1GB file, painful. With VMWare I experience no such grief.

4. Memory usage: Man, nothing makes my system, with 2GB RAM, go turbo like trying to run a VM in Parallels with over 512 megs of RAM then switch to another memory-heavy applications, like XCode.

Thanks, Parallels – you really lit a fire under VMWare’s ass. It has taken a while to get here, but VMWare Fusion is at RC1. It’s time you gave it a shot. They are using the same x86 virtualization technologies that they’ve fined tuned in other products for nearly 10 years. It’s really good – you’ll notice the difference. It’s still free, so why not? VMWare is quickly approaching feature parity with Parallels, and it blows down the doors with the performance.