Unity - VMWare Fusion blows away parallels

[murfle]

Unity - VMWare Fusion will blow away Coherance mode in Parallels

Well, after alot of research, I had decided I was going to get myself a copy of parallels for my new Mac Pro, but I decided to try it out first. It has a bug in the current version (3188) that has been around since build 19xx(or so). Its nothing major when considering the majority of users, but its a show stopper for me.

I then decided to give parallels a chance to respond to the bug report and fix it, even if its in version 3, whenever that comes out... VMWare Fusion did everything I wanted, but Coherence would be a nice "nice to have"...

Sorry Parallels, if you would have actually showed you care about your customers and support your product, I might have still considered it, but YOU LOSE!

 

[iSee]

So what was the bug and how did they respond to it?

 

[murfle]

The bug is that if you set up parallels to share a directory from your mac partition to your guest windows install, you can't transfer files if they have square brackets in them...

It works if you use the SMB share (native in OSX) or in VMWare...

Someone reported this back in September. I reported it a day or two ago. There has not been one response in that thread from staff members at all... And I've seen other posts by Parallels staff on their forums since then, so its not like they haven't seen it.

I don't expect an instantaneous answer, but how about a "I'll let you know what I can find out"... They fail.

 

[Bern]

I have Parallels and I find the support service to be less than inadequate. They do not reply to emails and they don't, as the OP mentions, respond to posts on their user forums. I'm particularly annoyed that I will have to pay for the 3.0 upgrade when it was mentioned that I would get free upgrades for a year. Parallels gets around it by posting a note on their forum that the free upgrade only related to point upgrades not major ones. No where was that made clear in the information that was given to me when I purchased it. They're playing with words and my guess is they realise they need to make the money so they're stiffing people on the free upgrade promise. It's on that basis that I will stick with Bootcamp and see what Apple has to offer when Leopard is released.

 

[OrlandoTragic]

On a completely unrelated note, but to avoid me making my 1000th VMWare topic on this board today...

Situation:

I have OS X and Vista running under Boot Camp.
I wanted to install VMWare and XP Pro under OS X.

Can I do so, or will VMWare just allow me to access my boot camp partition?

Thanks!

 

[xUKHCx]

On a completely unrelated note, but to avoid me making my 1000th VMWare topic on this board today...

Situation:

I have OS X and Vista running under Boot Camp.
I wanted to install VMWare and XP Pro under OS X.

Can I do so, or will VMWare just allow me to access my boot camp partition?

Thanks!

VMware like Parallels support multiple VMs as well as VM and bootcamp booting.

Meaning you can boot from your bootcamp partition and you can install and boot from a virtual machine, you can even boot from both at the same time if you wished.

VMware does have better support granted, however the product has a very large show stopper for me and many others at this point, it will not find my bootcamp partition. This is a known bug and is getting fixed in beta 4 scheduled for release soon. Both products have their bugs, VMware support is better, but end product I would have to give to parallels.

Just watched the VMware video, nothing new there really, can do all of that with Parallels.

 

[Nuc]

That looks sweet. I can't wait to get the version that will allow me to use unity. I don't like Parallels coherence... to tacky...

Anyone know when the next beta release is?

Nuc

 

[brkirch]

I have Parallels and I find the support service to be less than inadequate. They do not reply to emails and they don't, as the OP mentions, respond to posts on their user forums. I'm particularly annoyed that I will have to pay for the 3.0 upgrade when it was mentioned that I would get free upgrades for a year. Parallels gets around it by posting a note on their forum that the free upgrade only related to point upgrades not major ones. No where was that made clear in the information that was given to me when I purchased it. They're playing with words and my guess is they realise they need to make the money so they're stiffing people on the free upgrade promise. It's on that basis that I will stick with Bootcamp and see what Apple has to offer when Leopard is released.

Where does it say that the free upgrades for a year don't apply to this upgrade? From The Official Parallels Virtualization Blog:

2) My copy of Desktop for Mac came with maintenance. Do I have to buy a new copy or an upgrade?
Nope. The whole point of maintenance is that when you buy it, you're buying 1 year of free upgrades...and that includes major upgrades like this one. You'll get your upgrade key, for free, when we go live with the final version.

As for VMWare Fusion Unity, it looks nice, but it is sort of redundant to have all the windows in Exposé since they are already in the Dock anyway. And I'm not completely convinced that there isn't a significant performance penalty, after all even Classic didn't have the windows separate like that.

 

[xUKHCx]

That looks sweet. I can't wait to get the version that will allow me to use unity. I don't like Parallels coherence... to tacky...

Anyone know when the next beta release is?

Nuc

From an email I got from VMware dated 30.05.07

Hi Richard,

I just wanted to let you know that this bug regarding Bootcamp with FAT32
volumes has been fixed and will be addressed in the Beta 4 release which will
be released in the next couple weeks.

I will go ahead and close out this case.
Thank you again for bringing this to our attention.

Regards,

Michael Nakamura
Technical Support Engineer
VMware, Inc.

 

[iSee]

Dang, I just sent Parallels $39.99 for the upgrade to 3.0. I hope I don't need to contact support.

 

[murfle]

From an email I got from VMware dated 30.05.07

Hi Richard,

I just wanted to let you know that this bug regarding Bootcamp with FAT32
volumes has been fixed and will be addressed in the Beta 4 release which will
be released in the next couple weeks.

I will go ahead and close out this case.
Thank you again for bringing this to our attention.

Regards,

Michael Nakamura
Technical Support Engineer
VMware, Inc.

And it's support like this that gets my business

 

[AHDuke99]

i assume we'll see this at WWDC with the beta release. parallels may as well. if this also includes 3D graphics that support more than DX 8.1, then VMWARE will have taken this round over parallels. their "unity" is much more fluid than parallels, unless co 2.0 includes those improvements. it looks very promising. this is why i didnt buy the parallels upgrade .. i wanted to see what vmware has up their sleeve. after all, many think they have more experience in this area.

 

[Celeron]

There was never any doubt in my mind that VMware would easily pass Parallels in this arena. Vmware has been doing their thing with virtualization in Windows and Linux for YEARS. They are where its at when it comes to doing virtual machines.

I will be buying vmware fusion when its available.

 

[brkirch]

Dang, I just sent Parallels $39.99 for the upgrade to 3.0. I hope I don't need to contact support.

According to this post on the Parallels Support Forum Coherence will have similar functionality added in a future version of Parallels. And according to this post it will be a free update to Parallels 3.0.

 

[IscariotJ]

As for VMWare Fusion Unity, it looks nice, but it is sort of redundant to have all the windows in Exposé since they are already in the Dock anyway. And I'm not completely convinced that there isn't a significant performance penalty, after all even Classic didn't have the windows separate like that.

There is a thread on the VMware forums regarding Unity and the YouTube video; it was taken on an iMac with 2GB RAM. Judging by the speed of Exposé, OSX was still responsive.