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Virtualization software for New Macbook Pro

jerryk said:
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.
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Absolute vanilla Windows 7 Professional SP1 install, upgrade to Windows 10 and that's what I've ended up with.
 
yogeewan said:
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.
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Yup same here, as I said in an earlier post. Loved VMWare since v5. 2016 15 tbMBP + VMware v8 with windows server 2016 VM. Terrible performance. Coverted it to parallels and it runs wonderfully. Really hope VMware figures it out because I did really like their stuff. Powerful, simple and didn't force things on you. I hate how parallels tries to do all this crazy drive mounting and sharing between host and VM by default. It screwed up some the stuff my company develops since they have some configuration in Documents and parallels remaps all that. As soon as I turned it off everything worked again but annoying it was on by default.

And my network drops like every 30 mins in the VM but I think that has something to do with Little Snitch. If I turn LS off it works fine but if its on every 30 mins windows network stops working. If you disable and enable network adapter it starts working again but its annoying. I even gave prl_naptd a rule to allow any connection in or out but that hasn't fixed it.

EDIT: Scratch that. Even with LS disabled it drops network connection. No idea what the issue is. Happens when its bridged too so I guess that would mean its not LS since bridged connection would bypass LS. Damn. Wonder what the issue is.
 
agaskew said:
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.
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My last Fusion upgrade (to add full support for Sierra) was free. IIRC VMWare intends to do free alternating with paid updates instead of a yearly paid update. The user license of VMWare and Parallels struck me as being very different, and I didn't like how with Parallels you were renting the software unless you had the educational version.
 
TrueBlou said:
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.
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Another detail often overlooked is that parallels installs a kernel extension. This could be good or bad.. but I prefer as few as possible for stability. Additionally, I believe this why you must buy an upgrade with parallels while VMware will continue to run when you upgrade your Mac's OS. Parallels business model is pretty greedy, but then again they don't have a massive corporate based business like VMware where they make most of their profits..

Most benchmarks these days put VMware ahead in performance to those of you wondering, easy to find on Google
 
I used VMWare Fusion until maybe 2010, and started to use VirtualBox since then, mostly with Linux Gentoo (and a few other Linux distros) hosts. My VMs get used every day for development and testing. For this use, VirtualBox never disappointed me. I do not get the "VirtualBox is for nerds" thing. Sure I am more an advanced user than most (doing research in CS and dev everyday), but do not have time to tinker everyday to get things working. Even in the beginning, the transition from VMWare to VirtualBox was not hard at all. I would say it is worth trying, especially for the price...
 
icymountain said:
I used VMWare Fusion until maybe 2010, and started to use VirtualBox since then, mostly with Linux Gentoo (and a few other Linux distros) hosts. My VMs get used every day for development and testing. For this use, VirtualBox never disappointed me. I do not get the "VirtualBox is for nerds" thing. Sure I am more an advanced user than most (doing research in CS and dev everyday), but do not have time to tinker everyday to get things working. Even in the beginning, the transition from VMWare to VirtualBox was not hard at all. I would say it is worth trying, especially for the price...
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Agree 100%. VBox has some nice features, gets regular updates and costs zero.
 
I moved from VirtualBox to VMware Fusion running Ubuntu guest because the graphics performance was significantly faster.

Jim
 
jimgl said:
I moved from VirtualBox to VMware Fusion running Ubuntu guest because the graphics performance was significantly faster.

Jim
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Yes, VirtualBox has terrible virtual 3D card drivers, and Ubuntu requires tons of OpenGL support because its Unity desktop environment uses constant OpenGL3. With VirtualBox, the entire Linux guest is slow and has tons of graphical glitches. All gone when switching to Fusion with its proper 3D emulation.

But Ubuntu in general is a slow guest. I recommend that you switch to Xubuntu instead. It's got all the same app repos as Ubuntu and the same core but a different desktop frontend (Xfce) which is about 3x faster in Fusion than regular Ubuntu. And solves many performance and tech issues of Ubuntu. By avoiding Ubuntu's bloated desktop environment.

You can tweak Xfce a lot, to make it really beautiful. There are themes like Arc for it to re-skin the whole OS to look awesome, and you can change the launcher panels to black and transparent, change the icon set for the whole machine, etc. Xubuntu looks far better than Ubuntu when done and runs faaaar faster.
 
michaelromanenko said:
Give Veertu a try. It is a new and still a bit undercooked project, but fits my needs quite well. It is built on Hypervisor framework, mentioned by @dyn
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Veertu looks very promising. I observed a few graphics glitches during startup with a Ubuntu MATE guest, but the performance was impressive. Great to have another alternative for virtual machines on the Mac.

Jim
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SteveJobzniak said:
But Ubuntu in general is a slow guest. I recommend that you switch to Xubuntu instead. It's got all the same app repos as Ubuntu and the same core but a different desktop frontend (Xfce) which is about 3x faster in Fusion than regular Ubuntu. And solves many performance and tech issues of Ubuntu. By avoiding Ubuntu's bloated desktop environment.

You can tweak Xfce a lot, to make it really beautiful. There are themes like Arc for it to re-skin the whole OS to look awesome, and you can change the launcher panels to black and transparent, change the icon set for the whole machine, etc. Xubuntu looks far better than Ubuntu when done and runs faaaar faster.
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Thanks for your comments on Xubuntu. I tried it briefly and liked the crisp display and performance. However some applications like Dropbox would not work properly without Gnome support. I now use Ubuntu MATE and like the classic Gnome user interface. I hope someday that drivers are available to run Ubuntu native on the MacBook Pro but the virtual machine works pretty well.

Jim
 
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