I’ve been using Parallels for over a year now and generally I’m very happy with it. But a few people recently have said I should check out VMware Fusion. It’s a direct competitor for Parallels with one obvious selling point, that you can use VMware images created on other operating systems on your Mac. So I built a new XP machine and have been using it instead of Parallels this weekend. Overall the two products are almost exactly the same. I have had a few problems with VMware in single window mode where I can’t use the keyboard so I have to use the Unity mode (the equivalent of Coherence mode in Parallels) but Unity actually seems better to me than Coherence anyway so that’s not a big problem. There’s no appreciable speed difference which would be my main requirement at this point. My MBP is getting on for 18 months old now and the 2gb memory and slower hard disk are beginning to be bottlenecks for my system’s performance.
I think I’ll probably stay with Parallels for the moment, but it’s nice to know that if necessary I can run a VMware image as well on my Mac as I could on a Windows machine.
