VMware Fusion 2.0 Beta 1

A while back I compared the three biggest Virtualisation products for the Mac. Parallels, VMware Fusion and VirtualBox are all impressive products that performed equally, and I used the free Virtualbox for my occasional Windows needs. Parallels was part of the recent MacUpdate bundle which I bought, so I’ve been using that most recently. It’s been running well and seems more responsive than the previous versions I tried.

The reason for this recap is that VMware Fusion 2 beta 1 has been released, and adds some interesting new features. Multi display support will please some users, even if support for eight monitors is very niche. Importing Parallels and Virtual PC machines is a useful if late addition. DirectX 9.0 Shader Model 2 is perhaps the most interesting, and I’m wondering how well this will work on my hackintosh. Perhaps the biggest improvement is that version 2 allows any printer attached to your Mac to be used direct from Windows without installing drivers.

Also new is an updated version 1.6 of Virtualbox. It’s now out of beta, although there are a few things still not supported:

Currently, we are aware of the following restrictions:
•    No support for Host Interface Networking
•    No support for Internal Networking
•    No support for audio input
•    No support for VT-x/AMD-V (rarely required)
•    No support for raw disk access
•    The numlock emulation isn’t implemented yet
•    The VirtualBox kernel extension is currently accessible from all user accounts
Note that we are planning to address all known issues.

Things are certainly moving on in the Mac virtualisation market, so I’ll be trying all three products again this week with some updated results to follow.

Parallels Vs Virtualbox

In previous posts I compared VMware Fusion and Innotek Virtualbox, and looked at how both of these running Windows XP measured up to native apps on my hackintosh. To complete the testing of the big three Virtual Machine packages I have run the same tests on Parallels.

VMware Vs Virtualbox, round 2

In the first part of my testing of VMware Fusion and Innotek Virtualbox I looked at boot time and geekbench scores. Since Geekbench had issues on VMware (and I still haven’t got to the bottom of that) I have moved onto real world tests. I used the Adobe Photoshop CS3 trial and VLC for the testing. I’m fairly certain everyone has heard of Photoshop, and VLC is an open source media player for a wide range of operating systems.

VMware Vs Virtualbox, round 1

I recently discovered Virtualbox, a free virtual machine client for Windows, Mac and Linux. I’ve had a chance to start some basic benchmarking of Virtualbox, so here are the results compared to VMware fusion. As a reminder, I’m running Mac OS 10.5.2 on a Core 2 Quad @3Ghz with 2Gb ram and a 500Mb Samsung HD501LJ hard drive.

The first test was boot time. Both apps were the only ones running on the Mac, with 512Mb memory allocated and one virtual processor. Windows XP Pro was the guest operating system, freshly installed with nothing extra but a virus checker added and all the latest Windows software updates. Time was measured from clicking the start button for the Virtual Machine to the appearance of the Windows desktop taskbar. VMware took 21 seconds, Virtualbox took 17 seconds. Fairly close, but impressive for the free Virtualbox to knock a few seconds off the commercial VMware.

Virtualbox

I’ve been toying with VMware Fusion and Parallels for a while now trying to make up my mind which one to settle on, and the decision just got a lot easier. Innotek’s Virtualbox is another X86 virtualiser, with the big distinction of being free. Innotek have just been aquired by Sun Microsystems, so it looks like there won’t be any shortage of funding. I’ve been playing with the latest Beta 3 for OS X hosts, and for a beta product it’s pretty smooth. There are virtual machine additions just like VMware and Parallels so you can freely move the mouse cursor out of the window, and dynamic window resizing is supported. An impressive list of supported guest operating systems including all flavours of Windows from the past 18 years, OS2, Linux 2.2,2.4 and 2.6 kernels, BSD’s, Netware and Solaris. One of the things I wasn’t expecting was support for hiding the windows desktop so only application windows and the taskbar show. It’s called seamless mode in Virtualbox, and operates in the same way as Parallels Coherence and VMware’s unity.

This is looking like an impressive product for all my virtualisation needs, so if testing continues as smoothly as it has so far I won’t be needing anything else. Next up is some benchmarking using geekbench so I will post again when I have the results.

Hackintosh part 6

After yesterday’s post I had a working 10.5.1 system with my applications and home folder copied from a backup drive. Everything looked to be where it should when I logged in so I started the testing.

The first app I tried was iMovie 08. I know it’s had a lot of flack from the iMovie HD purists, but I find it a lot easier and quicker to use than the last version. So what if it doesn’t have themes? The speed of editing means I don’t put off making the holiday videos due to the time it takes. The biggest issue was running iMovie 08 on my Macbook. Even maxed out with 2Gb of memory the editing process wasn’t smooth. It’s fine with standard video from a miniDV camcorder, but I treated myself to a Sanyo Xacti HD2 last year before a holiday in Florida. The camera was light and easy to carry around all day and took 7 megapixel photo’s and 720p HD video (that’s 1280×720). The Macbook hardware just struggled to handle that resolution of video. Playback had lots of stuttering and spinning beach ball delays.