VMware's Fusion: Nothing But Smooth Sailing (So Far, At Least)

As I indicated in the comments section of a previous post, I put VMWare Fusion (along with a fully-patched-to-SP3-plus build of Windows XP Professional, which oddly activated just fine even though I’d previously installed and activated that very same license key on the Boot Camp partition, which presents a completely different hardware profile than does a virtualized machine) onto my MacBook prior to leaving Taiwan. Granted, I don’t have many virtualized applications loaded up yet, though I did successfully install D-Link’s Windows-based utilities so that I could monitor the webcams back home (a thousand curses on you, annoying ActiveX-based browser pages that aren’t Firefox- and OS X-compatible and don’t even reliably work under Internet Explorer) and I also tossed the trial version of Office 2007 on the system. But so far I’m mighty impressed with what I’m experiencing.

When I want to put the system to sleep, I simply close the lid. OS 10.4 smoothly transitions into slumber, virtualized Windows along with it. I reopen the lid, and OS X (along with Windows) comes back up instantly and glitch-free. I’m amazed at how speedy the virtualized O/S runs (to clarify, I’ve bumped up the amount of memory available to the virtual machine from the 512 MByte default to 1 GByte, along with enabling dual-core support, and by default VMware Fusion also performance-prioritizes the virtual machine ahead of the underlying OS X and its apps). And Unity mode, like its Coherence counterpart offered by Parallels Desktop, makes the transition between OS X and Windows pretty darn seamless.

Since it looks like I’m going to need to do a complete reinstall of Windows and my app suite no matter which way I go, I’m seriously considering blowing away the Boot Camp-created NTFS partition and running Windows virtualized on this system from now on, no matter how crazy it seems to me to say this. I’m reaching this conclusion even though my desire to simultaneously run OS X and Windows has been nil to date, and even though going forward I still envision I’ll spend the majority of my time in Windows (thereby showcasing the incremental value of a thin-and-fast hypervisor veneer between the hardware and any particular virtual machine, versus a full-blown operating system like OS X).

Why? First off, I suspect that my multi-partition, multi-O/S configuration made necessary by the system’s EFI foundation was at the root of many of my past problems; ditching NTFS will eliminate the hybrid GPT/MBR kludge. Google-searching has convinced me that I’ll have no trouble ActiveSync’ing my Windows Smartphone to the virtual machine, or tethering my Zune to it. I’m jazzed about the ability to periodically do manual backups of the virtual machine by copying a single file to an external HDD, as well as easily migrate the Windows XP VM to other systems and to play around with other virtualized O/Ss such as Linux. And VMware Fusion’s Snapshot take-and-if-necessary-later-rollback feature provides an additional safety net against Windows Updates (and other installations and upgrades) gone awry.

I’ve run Parallels Desktop (off my Boot Camp build) on-and-off in the past, but at least for now I’m going to take a stab at standardizing on VMware Fusion going forward. User experiences I’ve culled from Google-based research generally suggest that Fusion-based virtualized O/Ss run faster and lighter (as measured by factors such as CPU utilization and memory footprint) than do Parallels’ alternatives. And the ability to tap into both CPU cores, something that I can’t currently do with Parallels’ product, is a huge plus in my book.

If I was planning on doing a lot of simultaneous OS X-plus-Windows juggling, I might stick with Parallels Desktop; in this regard, it currently seems to be the more mature of the two approaches. You’re able with Parallels’ product, for example, to globally define file extension-based application launching behaviours that span both O/Ss…clicking on an email link in Firefox for OS X, say, might launch Outlook running in virtualized Windows. And I can’t seem to figure out how to access icons located in the virtualized Windows desktop with Fusion’s Unity view; I can see them, but can’t click on them to launch the corresponding file and underlying application.

But I suspect such discrepancies will get resolved in short order. Although VMware was late to market with Fusion as compared to the upstart Parallels competitor, the company now seems to be aggressively implementing v1 upgrades and v2 betas, and its longstanding presence in the virtualization space can’t be ignored. Parallels, in contrast, seems to be slowing its upgrade rollout pace. But, since both companies now offer tools that convert competitors’ virtual machine images to their own preferred formats, I should be able to fairly easily (I always cringe when I type those words, knowing I’ve just jinxed myself by doing so) move back and forth between Parallels and VMware in the future on an as-needed basis.

The bottom line, it seems, is that neither Apple nor Microsoft is (understandably, pragmatically) motivated to make Windows-native-on-Mac-hardware an ironclad experience. Inserting a virtualization middleman between them, though doing so might seem counterproductive at first glance, may end up being the preferable alternative. My Boot Camp travails have certainly provided plenty of blog fodder over the past year-plus, and I suspect the same will prove true for my future virtualization experiences, on both the online- and print-published fronts (albeit, I hope, with an overall smoother tenor!). Stay tuned…

p.s…check this out: Sunday evening I was streaming the Lost season-ending 2-hour episode from ABC.com to my MacBook (in Firefox on OS X, not in virtualized Windows). Near the end, the video playback started stuttering and then the system abruptly went dead. At first I thought the On2-based plugin might have crashed the system, but punching the power button had no effect. It was then that I realized I’d forgotten to attach the AC adapter to the unit, and that the battery was drained. I plugged the MacBook into wall power, hit the power button once again, the system came back up within a few seconds (it automatically goes into hybernation mode when the battery is nearly dead, I later remembered)…and the video automatically started playing again, right where it left off. Amazing.

Followup: great prices on both VMWare Fusion and Parallels Desktop, courtesy of Dealmac.