Mac Pro @Home delivers...at work :( - Parallels or Fusion?

[udflyer]

On rare occasions I need windows for Vstudio development.

Anyone with a Mac Pro use / recommend Fusion or parallels here for Visual Studio development ?

Thanks (tick ... tick..... can't wait)

 

[h9826790]

Why not bootcamp? The most reliable way + best Windows performance.

Especially you only need it occasionally. Reboot the Mac Pro in Windows should not be too annoying for you. Why spend time and money to install some software to downgrade your Windows performance?

 

[Umbongo]

Just try it with virtual box first before you pay for a solution.

 

[jlsm511]

I'm an IT major and also had to use Visual Studio, while Boot Camp is the best solution and will give you the best performance, you could get by using a VM. I personally use Fusion and haven't had any problems with it, but like Umbongo said, try it via Virtual Box first before paying for either one of them.

 

[AidenShaw]

On rare occasions I need windows for Vstudio development.

Anyone with a Mac Pro use / recommend Fusion or parallels here for Visual Studio development ?

Thanks (tick ... tick..... can't wait)

I prefer VMware to Parallels in general - mainly due to better support experiences with VMware. (Long history with VMware - I was one of the Alpha testers for their first product.)

I do all of my Visual Studio work in VMware VMs (usually Win7 x64 guests running on Win7 x64 or ESX hosts). Several reasons:

• Complete isolation between different versions of Visual Studio and their runtimes if you install them in different VMs.
• Click "take snapshot" and you have a complete point-in-time backup of your projects in just seconds
• Get a new workstation? Install VMware Workstation, copy the VMs to the new system, and continue without any hiccups.
• Going on a trip or a holiday - copy the VMs to the laptop if it's a work trip or you want to spend some time working on work
• Performance - not better, but not noticeably worse.
• Not related to Visual Studio - but I have a "banking VM" for financial services. I never access a banking site from any system other than the "banking VM", and I never touch any site but financial services from the "banking VM".

I'm gradually adopting a strategy that few apps are installed on the hardware system - the box is just a host for the VMs that do the work. (...and I realize that the list isn't VMware specific)

Whatever you do, though, be sure to disable "EPT Virtualization" - there's a bug (AKA "erratum") in all Ivy Bridge Xeons with EPT virtualization that can cause frequent guest crashes. Until you see Apple release a BIOS update that has a workaround for the problem, just disable EPT-v.

See http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/mi...nguage=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=2073791 for details.

(That article is focused on several E5-26xx v2 processors and ESX. I was getting multiple guest crashes per day with an E5-1650 v2 (same hex that Apple sells) and VMware workstation on Win7 x64. They stopped when I followed the instructions to disable EPT virtualization. The link to Intel for the bug (excuse me, "erratum") references all Ivy Bridge Xeons.)

 

[Altemose]

On rare occasions I need windows for Vstudio development.

Anyone with a Mac Pro use / recommend Fusion or parallels here for Visual Studio development ?

Thanks (tick ... tick..... can't wait)

I would do Boot Camp that way you can boot fully into Windows when you need it and get the latest copy of Parallels. That way you can use Windows in OS X, but if you need the extra juice, you can boot all the way to Windows.

 

[Ryan0751]

I've been using VMware fusion for years now, and can recommend it highly. Parallels appears to be a nice product as well, but VMware... It's what they do!

I'm not a big boot camp fan. Partitioning your disk up, having to reboot and stop what your were doing, and then maintaining two environments. Unless you really need ultimate performance, or crazy graphics in windows, it's not really worth it.

VMware on a new machine runs so well you can't even tell it's a vm.

And all the benefits stated above are GREAT for development.

 

[nox-uk]

I would do Boot Camp that way you can boot fully into Windows when you need it and get the latest copy of Parallels. That way you can use Windows in OS X, but if you need the extra juice, you can boot all the way to Windows.

My suggestion too. It's sometimes very handy to able to boot up my boot camp partition without having to log out of OS X

Nox