Parallels vs VMWare Fusion???

[RYCeT]

Hi guys, I've been using VMWare Fusion for awhile. It's ok but I do have some problems running my MS Office 07 with it. Everytime I switch back and forth using office w/ fusion and bootcamp, it will ask me to reactivate it. My office is a legit copy and I hate having to reactivate it everytime, so I just use it under bootcamp which defeat the purpose of buying the fusion. A friend of mine who tried both parallels and fusion, prefer to use parallels. I'm just wondering if any of you have tried both and which software did you prefer and why?

[krmathis]

I have tried both VMware Fusion and Parallels. Using a disk image though, and not a physical installation (Boot Camp).
For me VMware Fusion stand out as a clear #1. It feels faster, and "just" works. Running VMware Fusion 2.0 Beta 1 now, which works fine for my simple needs.

[kugino]

agree with krmathis about vmware...i've used both and vmware uses fewer resources and just "feels" nicer.

[dvessel]

I agree, VMWare is the better choice. Its memory management is better and can allocate multiple cores to a single instance.

I haven't tried running Fusion off a BootCamp partition so I'm not sure about this.. Does VMWare run straight off the BootCamp drive or does it make a copy and run off a disk image?

I ask because if it is running off the same physical partition, then Office must be reading its' host hardware and registering itself to that and verifying itself every time it's run.

If Fusion makes it's own copy off the BootCamp drive then I'd guess that Office is phoning home which can be blocked with something like Little Snitch.

[krmathis]

VMware Fusion run MS Windows directly from the Boot Camp partition.
So when you run MS Windows through VMware Fusion it will detect the hardware its running on, then make you to register Windows. Then when you later run Windows through Boot Camp it will detect that the hardware have changed and ask you to register again.

Its quite stupid. But what you get as a paid Micro$soft customer, and their OS protection.

[xxbaker]

same thing krmathis said. it's because of the hardware change which means you should just do two different installs since with each copy of office you're allowed to put it on... 5 computers i think? something like that.

also VMware for sure. I bought parallels to use on my mac but at work i use VMware. i've had a lot of problems with parallels actually. for simple stuff it works fine but once you start to do anything remotely complicated it sucks. VMware has a smaller footprint too which is pretty important when you're running two OSs.

[stocklaz]

Parallels supporter here.

I try them both for quite a long time, and finally I choice Parallels. I cannot said it is because Parallels is better but I feel Parallels is less complex compare to VM. And I feel booting up the bootcamp partition from Parallels is more responsive than VM.

I am a very common user that usually using Parallels because of different download program, (mostly related to Chinese character so I cannot find a good replacement in OSX) and I did not need to use any remote desktop or some complex network emule.