I’ve been using Parallels Desktop for OS X (build 1848 and 1884) on my MacBook to put together demos for my Desktop Deployment seminar. I could have used VMware Workstation on my HP Compaq nc6120 like I do on my workstation, but my MacBook is faster and it gave me an excuse to try out Parallels Desktop. The following are the areas I think are important differences from my experience with VMware Workstation:
Speed:
My 2.0ghz Macbook kills my Athlon X2 4200+ in overall responsiveness inside the virtual machine. I’m talking Windows XP virtual machines only, I haven’t tried Linux yet. Both machines have 2GB of RAM. My desktop has a Western Digital Raptor 15K RPM drive while the laptop is only a 5400 RPM drive. The virtual machines in Parallels Desktop just fly.
Multiple VMs:
Each VM is like a document in Parallels. The easiest way to open a virtual machine is to find the .pvs virtual machine file and open it. There’s no inventory feature or tabs of virtual machines. Each virtual machine runs in a different instance of Parallels Desktop. I’m a big fan of VMware Workstation’s virtual machine tabs.
Snapshots:
There’s a complete lack of snapshotting in Parallels Desktop. This is huge for me. I use snapshots on my Workstation constantly. The lack of snapshotting in Parallels Desktop is pretty unforgivable. My client virtual machine that I will be imaging in the seminar I have to replace the virtual disk file after each demo to reset it.
Crashing:
I’ve had the “Shared Folders” feature crash the guest OS only (BSoD), and again it managed to actually crash the Parallels Desktop application as a whole on another attempt to copy files again. Update: Parallels itself has now crashed on me a few times now just during normal usage, causing me to lose what I was working on.
Networking:
The speed of the networking leaves me wanting more. VMware Workstation is much faster at installing Windows XP over a network than Parallels Desktop. Even worse is that the VMware Workstation computer is going out on the network for the installation files, and the Parallels Desktop machine is grabbing it from another virtual machine on the host-only network.
When using host-only networking, DHCP is enabled on the network by default. With VMware Workstation, all host-only networks require you to put a DHCP server on them if you want that feature. For my demo, I needed to invent a network from scratch and the embedded DHCP server only got in my way. You can disable it using the /Library/Parallels/.dhcpd_configuration file and setting DHCP=0 under the interface header. I just happened to find this tidbit in the Linux version of Parallels Workstation’s forum.
With Parallels Desktop, there are no multiple private networks or any custom network settings at all. You get either a bridged or host-only network. Even worse, there is only 1 host-only network. More complex setups will be running into a dead end with Parallels Desktop.
Summary:
Parallels works well enough. For someone that wants to run Windows XP on their Mac, it’s a good solution. For my needs however, I’ll be holding out for VMware Workstation for OS X. Here’s hoping they release the beta sometime soon!