On Fusion with Vista

So for the last 8 months I've been running along happily with Windows XP running under Parallels Desktop for Mac and going through all the updates that Parallels has made in the product. What I had initially hoped would be a product that would run Outlook 2003 fast enough that I didn't want to kill myself has turned into a tool that I'm very, very dependent upon now. As I regularly tell anyone who asks, I spend about 50% of my time using the Mac tools and about 50% in Windows. And with the Coherence technology in Parallels 3.0, it's become harder and harder for me to specifically note which tool is which. Sure, there are a couple of areas where it's a little weird, but for the most part, I'm using applications that I need to run my business, and there's not a distinction of what platform I'm using for any of it.

Given that, I decided today was the day to take a look at VMWare Fusion and their virtualization product for Mac. I've been needing to do this for a while for a couple of reasons. One, I want to see how the initial release of Fusion stacks up against the more mature Parallels product. Two, it's about time I took a serious look at Vista. And given that I don't want to upgrade my existing, working XP environment, going with a clean install of Vista in Fusion makes some degree of sense.

My initial thoughts are generally positive. The install of Fusion was as straightforward as any basic Mac app, no surprises there. Creating the VM for Vista was also pretty direct with no real surprises. The interface to go through this setup is quite unlike the VMWare Windows interface, so if you're looking for an exact GUI match between the two products, prepare to be disappointed. But the Fusion VM setup isn't where people will be spending any degree of time. I have a separate HD attached via firewire where I store my Parallels config and virtual disk, and it wasn't any trouble to point the Fusion config to the same drive.

The install of Vista was, well, and install of Vista. It is what it is, and nothing about Fusion got in the way. [I had gone through a couple of installs of Vista under Parallels right after Vista was released and noticed pretty much the same thing, but I blew away those installs for disk space reasons.] By default, it did set the networking to be NATted, so my resulting Vista box wasn't on the same network as everything else, but once I realized that and changed the setup to bridged networking, the network connectivity worked as expected. I was able to run the ConnectComputer wizard and join the Vista workstation to my SBS domain without a hitch, and have been able to install the apps I've wanted to install and be happy about it.

Next, I installed the VMWare tools to get the additional video support, including Unity, which is the VMWare implementation of Coherence. This is where I could start seeing significant differences between Parallels and VMWare. With Coherence in XP, I get a full Windows task bar, but it sits right on top of my Mac Dock. Coherence does put icons in the dock for each Windows app that runs, but clicking on that app in the dock is a little slower to bring the app up than clicking on the appropriate tab in the Windows task bar. Unity and Vista put the Start button in the bottom left corner of the screen, and there is no visible task bar at all. If you're wanting to see the time in the task bar, or the application/service icons in the system tray, you're not going to get that with Unity. That may or may not be a big deal to you. Clicking on the Windows application icon in the Dock does bring the application immediately to the foreground (well, faster than Parallels running XP does, anyway). Both Unity and Coherence have some video artifacting problems with the "hidden" desktop background, in that when you open a new window (or move a window) the "hidden" desktop will be displayed, and if it's one of the hi-res default desktops, that can lead to some jittery screen updates, but this technology is also pretty young still, so I expect it will get better with age. This is actually my big beef with the Vista Sidebar, too. It allows the "hidden" Windows desktop image to bleed through on the right hand side of the screen, completely obliterating access to any desktop items that may be on the Mac desktop beneath it, even though I only have the default Sidebar items present. Considering some of those default items are the Mac hard drive and network volumes, this could present a bit of a problem. And this honesty may be the same behavior under Coherence, but I haven't loaded Vista side by side in both, which probably means there will be an updated post doing an apples to apples comparison, pardon the pun.

Performance seems to be about the same with the Windows environment under Fusion. At least the Windows stuff I've started doing doesn't seem to be much slower. I was actually expecting that I might see Vista run a bit slower than XP virtualized, but intiially that doesn't seem to be the case. Once I load it down with additional stuff, that might happen, but we'll look at that a little closer later.

The big thing I have left to do right away is test the drive management tools that Fusion offers. For some silly reason I took the default 20GB hard drive size, and with a basic Vista install, domain join, and installation of Office 2007, I'm down to 6GB free, which isn't going to hold any mustard once I start really trying to use this Vista thing in the same way I've used my XP. I fully expect that many of the challenges I'm going to experience are going to be based on an XP to Vista learning curve instead of a Parallels to Fusion migration. I'm also going to see about pulling other VMWare VMs that I have on other boxes onto the Mac to see how well they perform under Fusion. With the exception of RAM and CPU, I fully expect that they should run smoothly no matter which VMWare host I've got them on, but time will tell. And that's another blog post anyway.

So I guess that initially I don't see anything about Fusion that gives me pause, and I'll be able to run in parallel with Parallels for a bit until I finish my XP to Vista transition (if I really can). I will be looking at comparing direct performance between the two platforms with both running Vista, and if I can figure out how to get the same VHD running under both, that will be an even better comparison, but it's Friday and that's a project for another day...