Feature Articles

VMware Fusion - A Virtualization Trip

By Vincent Chang - 27 Aug 2007

Our Impressions

Our Impressions

Both VMware Fusion and Parallels Desktop have their guest OS within a windowed environment by default. You can enter full screen mode easily by clicking a button and a special keyboard shortcut is used by both software to toggle the keyboard and mouse focus from inside the guest OS back to the host OS.

Booting into our Boot Camp partition using VMware Fusion. Booting into the Boot Camp partition with Parallels Desktop.

After our experience with Boot Camp, using both virtualization software was not something we'll recommend to the impatient user. It felt like walking underwater - there was a lot of delay when it came to opening applications and this led to the usual problems of clicking more times than required and hence opening up multiple instances of the same program. Menu items like the Start button on Windows rendered slower than usual and we had to wait for the items to appear a second or two later. Full screen mode seemed to tax our system slightly more though that could just be relative to Boot Camp. For notebooks like our MacBook, VMware has added a useful battery level indicator that shows up in the Windows task bar during full screen mode. Both Parallels and Fusion connected us to the network using wireless LAN without much work on our part besides the initial network settings.

One of the advantages that Parallels Desktop holds over Fusion is that Parallels support multiple snapshots through a Snapshot Manager, which basically means you can save the state of your virtual machine many times and restore the version you like. While Fusion has a similar function, it is only limited to one snapshot and hence you can only revert to the last backup. Obviously, VMware has experience with such a feature as it can be found in its other products so we expect such a feature to be included in later versions of Fusion. Also not present for both virtualization software is the snapshot feature for the Boot Camp partition.

VMware Fusion will also install itself into your boot camp partition on first boot up. One key difference between the boot camp partition and a true VM is that the suspend and revert snapshot options, which backups the complete data state of the VM are not supported, since this partition can be changed by anyone booting into it via the usual Boot Camp process, thereby making such snapshots redundant.

Although VMware Fusion is supposed to use both processors in our MacBook for the guest OS, it sure didn't feel like any faster compared to Parallels. A faster machine than our MacBook (and more physical memory) will definitely give better performance here but the overall initial impression we had was - Boot Camp is worth the hassle of dual booting if you intend to use Windows applications for an extended period of time.

Unity Vs Coherence

One of the biggest features for both software lies in its integration of the guest OS with the host Mac OS X. Already, you can share files and folders between the guest and the host, simply by dragging files directly from the windowed guest environment to the Mac OS X desktop. There is a slight delay as the files are actually copied from the virtual machine files to the Mac OS X and vice versus but barring that, it is easy to use. Keyboard shortcuts are also 'translated' across both operating systems with the Mac equivalents working in the virtual machine.

For Parallels Desktop in Coherence mode, it's not the most elegant of solutions with the Windows taskbar on top of the Dock but it does work nevertheless.

As you can see here with VMware Fusion, we have the Windows game, Minesweeper open and this is reflected in the Dock when Unity mode is enabled. It looks seamless and small details like the Windows applications having drop shadows at the edges help them blend into the Mac environment. Of course, the blue edges of the windows instantly identify them as Windows applications.

But the main attraction is VMware Fusion's Unity mode, where your Windows applications appear to be integrated such that they are side by side in the Mac's Dock. Meanwhile, Coherence lacks this 'unification' as it places the Windows taskbar on top of the Dock. Although both approaches are functionally similar, there's no guessing which one wows the crowd more.

Expose is another Mac feature that works flawlessly with Unity, as you can see here despite having a mixture of Windows and Mac applications.

Spotlight works too, in a limited fashion. In this case, Fusion has a quick launch for all the Windows applications in the Start menu and we could search for our applications using Spotlight.

How About Games?

One of the biggest grouses about the Mac platform has been the sad state of games. Most PC games do not get ported over to the Mac and those that do, appear months after the games have debuted on the PC. The quality of the graphics hardware on the Mac is also not the most advanced as higher end graphics cards are typically not found on the Mac, or like the games, only after a long delay. It all makes for a rather dour gaming scene, which is a weakness that Apple doesn't seem too keen to improve at the moment.

Hence, the idea of playing games on a Mac, albeit using a virtual machine, sounded like great news. We were initially quite excited about the experimental support for DirectX 8.1 in Fusion but the constraints of the onboard graphics on our MacBook made us leery of trying it on our system. Together with the sluggishness that we experienced even with normal Windows applications, we are quite doubtful that our MacBook can handle 3D graphics adequately, especially since 3D acceleration is not fully supported for our system as relayed by Fusion.

In any case, we found that Fusion translates DirectX instructions to the OpenGL ones understood by the Mac OS in order to run DirectX games and naturally, such an approach will lead to diminished performance. Having a decent graphics card that has full 3D acceleration supported by Fusion should alleviate part of the issue here, but translation will always incur some performance overhead. Weirdly though, Fusion currently has no OpenGL support. Parallels meanwhile seems to be an edge here, as it boasts both OpenGL and DirectX support while its website has a list of supported games, such as Unreal Tournament 2004 and Quake 4. While we have seen Max Payne 2 running on Fusion, Quake 4 will not work on Fusion, due to its OpenGL nature.

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