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Revisiting Virtualization on the Mac - Fusion vs. Parallels

By Vincent Chang - 29 Mar 2009

What's New in Parallels?

What's New in Parallels?

Parallels Desktop for Mac may have come under stiff competition from VMware but in a few areas, particularly its integration between OS X and Windows, it is still ahead of Fusion. Personal preferences come into play here when we talk about these features and effects but there's no doubt that Fusion has taken quite a few of these features right out of Parallels' book.

Compared to the major changes in Fusion, Parallels' list may seem embarrassingly short (relatively speaking). But that's probably since Parallels does not require as many improvements since it's already into version 4.0. So, we see some rather minor integration features like having Windows notifications appearing in the Apple menu bar and also being able to access the Start Menu in the Dock.

Adding the Windows Start Menu to the Dock is one of the new integration features that's now found in Coherence in Parallels 4.

Another feature that may or may not be welcomed is the addition of Windows notification on the Mac's Menu bar. Personally, we won't mind not seeing any more Windows Alerts popping up.

Even though we had both Fusion and Parallels installed, it was easy to tell it was Parallels due to the two red 'parallel' bars on the application icons.

Coherence continues to be a strength for Parallels as its integration is well thought out and nicely implemented, not to mention some cool transition effects between modes. However, Parallels 4.0 adds some interesting tidbits that are hit and miss in our opinion. First, there's another new mode besides Full Screen and Coherence - Modality. This mode reduces the size and translucency of the guest OS window into a small, almost thumbnail-like window that's at the same time showing a live view of what's happening in the guest OS.

One new feature is Modality mode, which shrinks the guest OS while keeping it to scale. Think of it as the thumbnail view that you get on Windows Vista. Users can get a glimpse of the activity in the guest OS while remaining in the Mac desktop.

To us, it's of limited use since we'll be either in full screen or Coherence mostly. Perhaps a long software installation that requires the user to keep watch over it will find some benefit from having Modality. Another feature that fails to convince is its supporting application for the iPhone (free download from the App Store), where users can resume and suspend their virtual machines through the iPhone. And nothing else.

That's about the scope of the UI and integration upgrades that Parallels 4.0 has over the previous version. Instead of pretty interface tweaks, Parallels has a more important task of fixing its hypervisor, especially after the buggy debut of Parallels 3.0, which by all accounts, was a big step backwards. Therefore, Parallels 4.0 has gone about optimizing its performance and all-round stability.

First up, the technical bar has been raised - and by quite a huge margin. Parallels 4.0 supports up to eight virtual processors, four more than Fusion 2.0 and a huge leap over the single core support on version 3.0. Though this is not an issue for most Mac users yet, those buying the latest Mac Pros will find that very convenient. Like Fusion, there's also experimental support for Mac OS X Leopard Server. In fact, this new Parallels is the first version to offer 64-bit guest OS support, which brings it level with Fusion.

Parallels has leapfrogged Fusion in its graphics support, with up to 256MB of video memory (128MB for Fusion) and besides similarly having DirectX 9 support, Parallels has maintained its OpenGL advantage over its competitor.

3D graphics is another area where the stakes have been increased. Parallels 4.0, besides its DirectX 9.0 and OpenGL 2.0 support, allows for up to 256MB of graphics memory to be used by the virtual machine. That's twice the amount that Fusion is capable of addressing and four times of version 3.0. Parallels 4.0 also supports Intel SSE4, which may improve its multimedia performance in applications built to take advantage of it.

All these technical specs will be supporting a new adaptive hypervisor that Parallels claims is able to optimize performance based on currently open applications. Performance is expected to be significantly better than the previous version and Parallels also throws in longer battery life of between 15 - 30% as an improvement over Parallels 3.0.

While we couldn't really tell in our testing whether Parallels 4.0 performance has improved over the older versions, it was about as smooth and usable on our MacBook Pro as Fusion 2.0. The only bump that we had was Parallels hanging on us on one occasion (and that was before we updated from build 3540 to the latest 3810), when resuming our Windows Vista VM took so long that we killed the process. Effectively, we didn't manage to resume it back then.

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