Virtualization software for New Macbook Pro

[dyn]

@dyn Don't worry. The VMware Fusion layoff worries are "fake news" from someone who was angry that they were fired. ;-)

I very much doubt that as the reports were from several people of said team, not just 1. VMware has never denied it, they have been very transparant about this in their blog and on their forums. They did, however, deny that the firing was going to have an impact on the products and that they were committed to them as before.

BTW, we’ve had plenty of changes in the development teams over the years, so this isn’t new, it’s just the first time the press picked it up because a former employee wrote a blog about it, and it happened to coincide with other Dell/EMC merger news.

Aka damage control. It is nonsense because everyone knows EMC was trying to sell itself (they have been for quite some time) and it is very common to downsize in order to make the company far more attractive. Also Dell didn't make it a secret that they weren't interested in VMware. There was no coincidence. They are just trying to make it look like that because of the many concerns people were having and the current fierce competition in virtualisation. The restructuring doesn't necessarily mean a bad thing. VMware turned from a tech driven company into a management driven company during the EMC years. If the restructure means a return to being tech driven, I'm all for it. We'll have to see.

Question it all you like (and you’re right to keep us honest), in the mean time we’re going to keep shipping updates and new releases of Fusion and Workstation.

Everyone is hoping that they do and thus far they haven't let people down.

Ultimately we’re working towards feature parity with Workstation, but we can’t do everything at once, as much as we’d like to.

Meaning that their goal is that all Workstation features will one day be in Fusion.

That is no news at all. They've said that during the Fusion 1.0 betas. It's good to read that this is still their intent though. In the beginning they really did focus on getting exciting and useful features in the product (they even spoke about the technical side of the product on their website and there was proper support via Twitter) but after 2.0 it watered down and it turned into infrequent updates that only added hardware and OS compatibility (aka the Parallels model).
Most do agree that Fusion should never have existed in the first place. They should have ported Workstation and Player over from the start and used Player as a nice alternative for Mac users simply wanted to run Windows on their Mac.

They didn't want to keep leeching us like Parallels. ;-)

They simply don't have that luxury anymore with all the other virtualisation software. OS X has its own hypervisor, Windows has its own hypervisor, Linux has several own hypervisors, there are new tools like Docker, there is Virtualbox and all of them are free. So why would we still be buying VMware or Parallels products? VMware isn't doing all that well like they used to due to the amount of competitors. It is good to see that they are trying to act on it. Hopefully the industry can come to a state where we have great competition driving great products.

TL;DR: VMware seem to have woken up and trying to get their act back together. That's good a thing for VMware customers as well as the entire virtualisation world. So no, I'm definitely not worried, only excited to see the developments in the world of virtualisation.

 

[NotABigTruck]

Thanks for the responses. Any suggestion on partitioning out resources for the VMs? I know Linux (Kali in one case) probably wouldn't need that much dedicated RAM. What about windows 10? I have never run VMs on a workstation before so I apologize for the ignorance. I don't want to starve out any OS or oversubscribe the available RAM. This would be on a new 15" 500GB SSD with the discrete GPU and quad i7. Would there be any benefit to utilizing the USB-C ports as attached storage for additional VMs?

 

[maflynn]

Any suggestion on partitioning out resources for the VMs?

It depends on the OS as you stated. Linux can get by with less ram, but I'd look to see how Win10 does with 4 to 6GB of ram. It all depends on how you'll be using the systems. Set a value see who the performance is, whether there's lots of swapping and then adjust accordingly.

 

[ascender]

Thanks for this thread which has been a very timely find as I need to test some Windows software on my MBP and kind of lost patience with Parallels a while back due to their charging. Will give vmware fusion a go and see how W7 and W10 perform.

 

[Eduardboon]

Parallels is way more affordable than VMWARE though. And I think with version 12 Parallels got a bit better again.

I, as a student, can get parallels for 45 euro's, VMWARE is still over a hundred.

 

[chrfr]

Parallels is way more affordable than VMWARE though. And I think with version 12 Parallels got a bit better again.

I, as a student, can get parallels for 45 euro's, VMWARE is still over a hundred.

And yet, where I work, I can get VMWare for free but have to pay for Parallels.

 

[dyn]

Thanks for the responses. Any suggestion on partitioning out resources for the VMs?

Stick with the defaults and you'll be fine. Go tweaking when you really need to or because you like to do so (in that case, do experiment with the settings to see the effect).

Would there be any benefit to utilizing the USB-C ports as attached storage for additional VMs?

It would be the same as using external storage for the local OS (macOS). If you do go this route then be sure to unmount the disk when you close the vm or hibernate the Mac. Alternatively you could simply use local storage (store inside the vm or use a shared folder).

Parallels is way more affordable than VMWARE though. And I think with version 12 Parallels got a bit better again.

I, as a student, can get parallels for 45 euro's, VMWARE is still over a hundred.

If the buying price is all you look at then yes but the total cost of ownership is very different. In my case Parallels is very useless because it doesn't support non-Windows operating systems very well and vice versa (open-vm-tools are available to just about anything that is UNIX/Linux whereas the Parallels version is not; not to mention the guest OSs that are supported, VMware's list is just so much longer). In my case it is more Virtualbox vs Fusion.

 

[ascender]

Thanks for the advice, I now have Windows 10 up and running in a VMware session. Performance is really good on my 13" MBP with TB.

One question though.... Is there any way to get the UI scaled back to something approaching a traditoinal Windows 7 type interface?

 

[dyn]

Not by default in Windows, you need 3rd party software for that.

 

[chrfr]

Thanks for the advice, I now have Windows 10 up and running in a VMware session. Performance is really good on my 13" MBP with TB.

One question though.... Is there any way to get the UI scaled back to something approaching a traditoinal Windows 7 type interface?

Are you running on a retina Mac?

 

[ascender]

Are you running on a retina Mac?

Yes, 13" TB MBP. Sorted the bug with the screen resolution needing the vmware tools, but the whole UI seems to be an inconsistent mess. There's stuff everywhere!

I did half think about installing Windows 7, but figured I just need to get used to Windows 10 and there's bound to be some benefits to it. Its not like I have to do much on Windows, its just for occasional use.

Very impressed with performance on the MBP though.

 

[maflynn]

Thanks for the advice, I now have Windows 10 up and running in a VMware session. Performance is really good on my 13" MBP with TB.

One question though.... Is there any way to get the UI scaled back to something approaching a traditoinal Windows 7 type interface?

check out the offerings from stardock.com They have utilities that alter the look and feel of windows, that might be something that does what you're looking to do.

 

[ascender]

WTAF... I did a clean install of Windows 7 Professional and then upgraded it. Windows 10, as well as these tiles everywhere, installs Minecraft and Candy Crush amongst other things. Am I derailing this topic too much by asking WTAF are Microsoft playing at?

 

[Kes.Siebring]

WTAF... I did a clean install of Windows 7 Professional and then upgraded it. Windows 10, as well as these tiles everywhere, installs Minecraft and Candy Crush amongst other things. Am I derailing this topic too much by asking WTAF are Microsoft playing at?

Tiles, tiles...
Remember that game minesweeper ? It's actually UI of the future windows releases.

 

[DMaria]

VMware Fusion has no limit to how many VMs you can create or run simultaneously.

I run 3 Linux VMs simultaneously on a 7 year old MacBook Pro dual core. Your machine will run well.

Try the free 30 day Fusion trial!

As for what Fusion costs: There's a fixed price (not sure, something like $80). And major upgrades (released every 1-2 years) are $49.95. And you can keep the last version you bought forever. And they are friendly towards giving free upgrades to support new operating systems. VMware Fusion 8.5 was a free major upgrade (instead of calling it Fusion 9), adding free Windows 10 support.

As for what Parallels costs: $79.99 per year. Forever. If you stop paying you cannot keep using Parallels. There's an option to pay $79.99 for a permanent license to "current version only. not eligible for free upgrades". Parallels are leeches that try to suck you dry.

VM Ware also includes a license for up to three machines. I run it on two iMacs and one MBP with no additional cost. With Parallels you pay for one license on one machine.

 

[AtheistP3ace]

I have a fully maxed out tbMBP.

I used VMWare fusion for a long time. With the release of fusion 8 windows server 2016 (windows 10) ran like complete crap. I had to downgrade it to compatibility 11 and turn off 3d acceleration which drastically increased performance. Supposedly there is some bug in compatibility 12 (directx 10 support) where no matter what you have video settings it only picks up 4mb of video ram. I was able to verify this by looking at windows hardware for display in control panel. Once I changed those settings it jumped up to what I actually had it set to (1024mb video ram).

Even with that drastic increase of performance it still wasn't great (I gave it 4 cores, 8gb of ram and 1024mb of video ram). I grabbed parallels and converted my VM and now it runs amazingly!!! Everything screams now. Not sure I will go back to VMWare until this is fixed.

I read somewhere they cut down their team size a lot so it may be awhile before the bug is fixed.

This is just my experience matched with some suggestions and input I found online but for me it was pretty spot on. I used VMWare for years before this but I can't deal with such bad performance for work. Just sharing my experience in case anyone else has this issue. It was driving me crazy until I figured it out.

 

[dyn]

I gave it 4 cores, 8gb of ram and 1024mb of video ram

And there is your reason why it runs like crap. Stick to the defaults and never ever assign more than half of the total amount of cores in your machine to a single vm. Any hypervisor is going to have issues when you overcommit the resources. Your host OS needs them more than your vm does; after all it is what sits between the software (hypervisor+vm) and the hardware. The issue is biggest with the amount of virtual CPU/cores you assign to the vm. Most often there is absolutely no need to have more than 1 CPU and 1 core for the vm. Software expecting a certain amount, testing multithreading, etc. are some of the use cases where you do need more than 1 (usually limited to 2 though).

Another thing you need to understand is the 3D acceleration. It doesn't support every part of OpenGL or DirectX. Due to it being virtualisation it simply can't. That's the reason why some see slow performance while others see an increase in performance. It depends on the application used.

As for the video RAM...you didn't read the sentence that is printed below the "Shared graphics memory" option which says: "The virtual machine may use less than this value.". In other words, you can't expect that the vm will use the entire amount that you entered there. Changing the setting within Windows may have caused it to either display the correct value (it could be an issue in Windows) or that it actually started using lots of video RAM and thus bumping up the total. VMware products manages their own resources between the vm's in order to use whatever resources are assigned to it by the host OS as efficient as possible. This, among many other things, includes memory de-duplication/sharing.

I read somewhere they cut down their team size a lot so it may be awhile before the bug is fixed.

Then you clearly didn't read the entire topic, the previous page has the info about the lay offs.

 

[AtheistP3ace]

And there is your reason why it runs like crap. Stick to the defaults and never ever assign more than half of the total amount of cores in your machine to a single vm. Any hypervisor is going to have issues when you overcommit the resources. Your host OS needs them more than your vm does; after all it is what sits between the software (hypervisor+vm) and the hardware. The issue is biggest with the amount of virtual CPU/cores you assign to the vm. Most often there is absolutely no need to have more than 1 CPU and 1 core for the vm. Software expecting a certain amount, testing multithreading, etc. are some of the use cases where you do need more than 1 (usually limited to 2 though).

Another thing you need to understand is the 3D acceleration. It doesn't support every part of OpenGL or DirectX. Due to it being virtualisation it simply can't. That's the reason why some see slow performance while others see an increase in performance. It depends on the application used.

As for the video RAM...you didn't read the sentence that is printed below the "Shared graphics memory" option which says: "The virtual machine may use less than this value.". In other words, you can't expect that the vm will use the entire amount that you entered there. Changing the setting within Windows may have caused it to either display the correct value (it could be an issue in Windows) or that it actually started using lots of video RAM and thus bumping up the total. VMware products manages their own resources between the vm's in order to use whatever resources are assigned to it by the host OS as efficient as possible. This, among many other things, includes memory de-duplication/sharing.


Then you clearly didn't read the entire topic, the previous page has the info about the lay offs.

I didn't read the entire thread. I was simply sharing my experiences. I only upped the resources when the defaults gave terrible performance. Something you need to understand is this wasn't one day of bad performance. This was weeks of reading forums, reading the including information, playing with different combinations of settings, using those settings for days to get a feel for the changes.

With a quick search you can find that this is a pretty well known issue with VMWare 8 and windows 10. I was simply sharing my experience with the person who started the thread asking for peoples experiences. Maybe you were trying to help but you come off as a bit rude. Thanks anyway for the info.

 

[dyn]

Have you tried the current 8.5.3 (which is 4 releases newer than 8)?

 

[AtheistP3ace]

Have you tried the current 8.5.3 (which is 4 releases newer than 8)?

Yes. My work pays for the software. I've run every version since 5. VMware worked great with windows server 2008 r2. Wasn't until I built a fresh development VM with 2016 that I started experiencing issues. Made lots of changes and was able to make it run better but not as good as 2008. Switched to parallels today and it's amazingly fast.

I would prefer VMware honestly. Every other developer uses VMware so it's easy to share VMs between us if we all use the same software.

 

[itsamacthing]

VMware all the way... Parallels is for people who didn't know VMware is the standard and they are always looking to milk you for money. With that said, I migrated all my server infrastructure to Hyper-V for licensing benefits and love that it's built into desktop versions of Windows. Come on Apple, give us built in virtualization! Let me add that you are better off running a headless Windows box someplace and just remoting in when you need to use Windows and you can use Hyper-V for free on it

 

[TrueBlou]

VMware all the way... Parallels is for people who didn't know VMware is the standard and they are always looking to milk you for money. With that said, I migrated all my server infrastructure to Hyper-V for licensing benefits and love that it's built into desktop versions of Windows. Come on Apple, give us built in virtualization! Let me add that you are better off running a headless Windows box someplace and just remoting in when you need to use Windows and you can use Hyper-V for free on it

Having a headless system is definitely a great option, I did just that myself until recently. But it's not necessarily an option everyone wants/can have. So for software virtualisation I have to agree and echo many of the same sentiments expressed here. VMware is by far the better option, it's powerful efficient and just seems to work more fluidly than other options.

 

[yogeewan]

I have had the exact opposite experience on the 2016 15 tbMBP. Parallels 12 runs like a dream, VMWare fusion on the other hand, was so sluggish even with all the recommended options / changes that were suggested. I believe parallels has got the consumer context with respect to windows running in a VM nailed.

 

[jerryk]

WTAF... I did a clean install of Windows 7 Professional and then upgraded it. Windows 10, as well as these tiles everywhere, installs Minecraft and Candy Crush amongst other things. Am I derailing this topic too much by asking WTAF are Microsoft playing at?

What are you talking about? My windows 10 has no tiles, no Minecraft or Candy Crush. Never had any of this sort of stuff.. You must be doing something very strange.

 

[agaskew]

Just remember that VMWare and Parallels like to regularly stiff you for paid upgrades. Every time Apple release a new OS X, they tell you that you need to buy the next version of their product, in order to 'support' this new version of OS X (while delivering close to zero new functionality). Although I liked VMWare a lot better than Parallels, I jumped over to VirtualBox about a year ago and its been absolutely fine for my needs.