VMware vs Parallels vs VirtualBox

Which one is best and WHY

  • VMware Fusion

  • Parallels

  • VirtualBox

  • other (explain)


Results are only viewable after voting.

chevy

Marvelous Da Vinci
Staff member
Mod
Which one is best, or better, what are the advantages and drawbacks of each one ?
 
I'm using Fusion fropm some time now, but the free VirtualBox could be an option for small budgets.
 
I am sticking with VMware for the simple reason is it looks like they will be around for a long time and is in the vast majority of IT shops. This will guaranty that in the future they will not "go out of business". As you can tell I have been burning with other services badly and this is a big advantage to me.
 
I'd have to vote for Fusion and VMware too.
If you ever need to work with any other VMware product (vCenter, ESX, Server, etc etc) the products are pretty much all cross compatible. Take a Workstation virtual machine and make it work with Fusion and vice versa (with Converter or without), just change the VMware Tools to suit the product in question. I always ended up using the same VMs in different products, so a VM first in ESX might next be in Workstation, then in Fusion and so on. Faster than creating them from scratch. And that's just one of the reasons, a few other reasons I won't be able to tell here. :)
 
Since I'm not in an environment where those things count, but rather a consumer-centric world, I vote for Parallels. They have the edge on graphics performance and have pushed the idea of integrating other operating systems with the consumer's desktop very far in a very short time. If it hadn't been for Parallels Desktop on the Mac, VMware would probably still be much like VirtualBox a couple of versions ago: A(n almost) non-connected sandbox that feels very, very technical.

On the _other_ hand: Whenever I replace my main Mac computer, I end up installing Parallels and Windows, only to find that the main task I use it for is to keep Windows within it up to date and safe. I personally simply don't have that much of an incentive to actually have Windows running. All the things I really work on can be done better on the Mac. Checking what a site looks like on IE/Windows has become more and more irrelevant.
 
Vmware is excellent I have both the Windows host version (7) and Fusion for the MacBook Pro. The integration on the Mac is very nice. I click on a .wmv file for example and the Mac calls on Fusion to run my XP client, passes the wmv. to XP AND IT PLAYS in XP using Windows Media Player.

Connect a USB device and Fusion asks if the device should attach to the Fusion client to the OSX host system.

A huge benefit is the ease of using a virtual machine created in the Windows version by copying the directory to a Mac directory and just open the virtual machine.

I also run Ubuntu 10.1 on my MacBookd Pro inside Fusion.
 
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