VMware Fusion

Rhisiart

Rhisiart

Registered
VMware Fusion 2 seems to use more memory that it's earlier version. So much so, that using full screen makes it not worth using (just too slow with only 1GB of RAM). However, it seems faster when not using the full screen. At the risk of asking a really stupid question, why would that make such a big difference?
 
Maybe because less pixels in windowed mode? ;)

I don't know, but I've been keeping track of the Fusion - Parallels war for some time now. I've used both, and it seems to me that Fusion is no faster than Parallels for the tasks I require... it's no more stable (not to call either of them unstable) than Parallels... and, I've found, it seems to use more resources than Parallels.

I do have to agree that trying to run Parallels or Fusion with only 1GB of RAM is just not going to please... even if Parallels/Fusion is the only application running. I would suggest a minimum of 2GB, and keeping your Windows virtual machine at a lowly 640 to 768MB of RAM.

With all that being said, here comes the shameless plug for the new virtualization software of my choice: VirtualBox from Sun. While it still has a ways to go in terms of feature-for-feature comparison with the other two, it rocks my world and seems to have a smaller memory and processor footprint than the others while still maintaining a level of performance that is above acceptable and on-par with both Parallels and Fusion. It doesn't, at the moment, support drag-and-drop between host and VM, "shared folders" are weird to use (you have to perform a "connect network drive" or access the shared folder as a network share), and its handling of using ISO images as mounted optical media is a bit clunky... but it works for me just fine, and best of all, it was MUCH kinder on my wallet (read: it's FREE!).
 
Did you upgrade VMware Tools of your VMs?
Tools out of date would be among the reasons why the memory usage seems less optimal.

It shouldn't be that much slower though, but I'd still recommend getting more RAM.
If it seems slow, look at that VMs logs to see what happens - it's inside ~/Documents/Virtual Machines/[whatever vm name you have] > right click "show package contents", inside that vmware.log would be the one to look at.
 
A few points to your helpful (and welcome) replies:

1. VMware Tools are up to date.

2. The logs didn't appear to show anything amiss.

3. Increasing dedicated RAM to 768 seemed to make things worse (have dropped it back to 512).

4. Lack of RAM? Most definitely yes. I should have chosen to pay an extra £100 when I bought my Mac Mini so that it came with maximum RAM (apparently you shouldn't install extra RAM into a Mac Mini yourself, so I have to drive into England to get this done, which is a bit of a fag).

5. The free virtual software is tempting, but having now forked out for VMware Fusion I feel obliged to stick with it.

Ho hum! :o
 
Installing the extra RAM on a Mac mini is easy, a light metallic kitchen tool (spatula or something similar) will do fine. 768 MB dedicated for the VM when you have 1 GB in total is not a good idea - Mac OS X 10.5 itself is rather RAM hungry, so I wouldn't recommend using that with anything less than 1 GB. And when of that 1 GB some amount goes to running the other OS. If your guest is XP, that should be fine, or at least worth trying with 256 MB to start with.
There will be a huge difference between that 1 GB and 2 GB - I most of the time run about 5 VMs on the same time on a MacBook at work, with 2 GB RAM.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top