Performance with VMWare and Parallels
 

I've been running some variant of Windows inside VMWare for a while now and have recently been made aware of Parallels, something originally for the Mac OS, but now available under Linux. My search for some sort of review between VMWare and Parallels under Linux has come up with only reviews of the two under the Mac OS, with Parallels taking the lead. Has anyone out there put these two through their paces to give a descriptive review of the two?

I have only used VirtualBox. However, I have found it to be quite a capable virtualiser. I found a comparison between the three here: http://forums.macnn.com/104/alternat...allels-vmware/
Is there any particular reason that you don't have VirtualBox listed? If not, I recommend it based on experience and comparisons found online.

I'm using VMWare Workstation 7 to host Windows 7 Professional, Win XP Pro, and Win 2k virtual machines, hosted in my Mandriva 2010 distro running on a Quad Core Phenom-II system with 4 Gigs and an nVidia GT-240 graphics card with 1 Gig of memory. The hardware is 64 bit but all my OS support is 32 bit.

Because of how my configuration is (Win-7 is gradually taking over from an earlier Win2K installation) I need to have a Win2K virtual machine running at the same time as Win-7 in order to provide all the facilities that I need in my Win-7 system. So, at pretty much all times in this box, I have three or more operating systems running: Mandriva 2010 with a full-up and very heavy KDE4/Compiz environment, Win2K, and Win 7. I also sometimes fire up another Win2K or a Win XP Pro environment, depending on what I need, in addition to the basic three I always run.

The Win 7 is far and away the most demanding installation to virtualize, but I can play movies with sound in full screen mode using WMP in Win 7, and still have enough resources left over to do things on the Linux side. If I load the system enough, sound in the Win 7 system gets choppy.

I have full Aero support and, in full screen mode, you wouldn't know that this wasn't a Win-7 box. It handles USB quite nicely.

I haven't tried Parallels and I haven't done much with Virtualbox. VMWare Workstation ain't free, but it works very well and I'm more interested in having it work so I can work, rather than save money by using one of the others...particularly since I have a working environment in VMWare that stretches back to VMWare 2.

Thanks for the replies and the link to the comparison. I chose VMWare because that's what I had originally and Parallels was recommended to me by a friend as "the best". I see now that I will have to check out Parallels along with VirtualBox to see how they handle things in comparison to VMWare.

Now may be the best time for me to discover some findings as I am not running on a system that has more than 2GB of RAM and is actually a Pentium Mobile CPU.

Hi there
Playing Movies in a Virtual Machine is OK if you are using something like a VIDEO internet stream -- but if you try to play TV using a TV card / USB tuner or actual DVD's from inside a Virtual machine you will be disappointed.

IMO VMWARE workstation is better than Virtual Box as it does have support for 3D and Full AERO on the Windows Virtual Machine -- on the other hand it DOES cost money whereas Virtual BOX is FREE.

I believe if you don't actually need full 3D support you can use VMWARE's VIRTUAL SERVER - this costs nothing too.

Cheers
-K