OnQ : Parallels

On Mac Virtualization

eriq — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 18:43:28 GMT

I've been collecting data and experiences for this post for a little over three months now, so I can speak with some level of certainty on the topic. This is one of those long ones, so either grab some coffee and a comfy chair or bookmark for later review.

I've posted several times over the last couple of years about my experiences with VMWare Fusion and Parallels on my Mac. A quick historical recap: I acquired an Intel-based Mac Mini as soon as they came out and immediately purchased Parallels so that I could run Windows XP and Office 2003 on the system (Fusion wasn't available at the time). This combination worked really well for me for a long time. I was able to use Outlook for my e-mail (Entourage, while a nice e-mail client in its own right, hasn't had the level of Exchange integration that I needed for my business) and Internet Explorer for those sites that forced me to use IE instead of Safari or Firefox. I ran the occasional Windows tool in Parallels as well (GoToMeeting, LogMeIn Rescue, etc.) but as the bulk of work that I do is in e-mail or hosted solutions, I spent about half my time in Outlook and the other half in a Mac-based web browser.

When Fusion became available, I played with it, and the choice of the word "played" is deliberate - I never did any serious work with Fusion because of a couple of issues I ran across that basically made it useless for me. I've become so used to working with the Coherence mode in Parallels, where my Windows and Mac apps present their own application windows seamlessly on my desktop, including the Windows Task Bar across the bottom of my screen just above the Mac Dock, that I insisted on trying to use Unity mode in Fusion, but that either required me to turn off the Windows task bar (not an option since I access tools in the system tray on a regular basis) or to move the task bar to a different area of the screen (yes, I could have moved the Mac dock, too, but the point is I didn't have to do either with Parallels). So, Fusion never got a serious look.

The second factor in my aborted look at Fusion was that I was trying to see if I could get Vista to run well inside Fusion. That's at the point where I started to realize the limitations of the Mac Mini hardware. It just didn't have the horsepower to run Vista in Fusion or Parallels plus the Mac OS.

I also had issues updating to later versions of Parallels on the Mac Mini because of screen display issues in Coherence mode, and since the version of Parallels I was resigned to using to avoid those issues would not run at all on Mac OS 10.5, I really was running on "old" stuff.

Late last year, after updating to Office 2007, XP SP3, and IE 7 in my Parallels virtual machine, the overall performance of the system began to seriously deteriorate. I was waiting on applcations to load data, waiting on screen updates, and my efficiency began to suffer significantly. It was time to do something about it. So, in December, I welcomed my new Mac Pro into the fold. I overpurchased on the hardware, getting an 8-core 2.8GHz sytem with 1.5TB of disk and 10GB of RAM, but I knew I wanted to be able to run multiple virtual machines on the box for testing, including possibly sticking a virtual SBS 2008 on there for a standard platform.

That's when the first law of virtualization really hit home: Virtualization only works well when you've got appropriate hardware underneath. That ultimately was the issue with my Mac Mini. It was a great little machine for virtualizing a fairly basic XP system with Office 2003, but trying to load newer software and OS updates on it pushed the boundaries of what it could do in 2GB of RAM and a dual-core 1.6GHz processor.

Currently, my production PC is running Vista Ultimate under Parallels in Coherence mode (Fusion still doesn't have Unity working the way I wanted, but I did run Vista Ultimate for a week as a production system under Fusion before I just gave up on having the Windows taskbar anywhere on the screen except just above the Dock, somethign that Fusion surprisingly still isn't able to do). I've turned off the Vista Gadgets due to an odd screen artifacting issue in Parallels, but quite frankly I haven't found a Vista gadget worth having present anyway, so it's not a huge loss. I'm running Office 2007, IE8, Chrome, and a couple of support tools quite nicely in this configuration. Speed and performance are very nice, and I have 2 CPUs "dedicated" to that Vista system.

I should note that I'm runnign the 32-bit version of Vista Ultimate. I did load up the 64-bit install of Vista Ultimate under Parallels, but ironically it ran slower than the 32-bit version, so I moved back to 32. Plus I didn't have to fight any printer driver issues that I know I'll have to deal with ultimately.

I am also running Fusion, but in a different way. Currently, I have a Windows 2008 Terminal Server box running in windowed mode under Fusion, and I also have a Windows 7 64-bit box running in a Fusion window as well. One lesson I learned quickly was trying to run more than one virtual machine in Coherence or Unity mode caused great confusion to the operator. Also, Parallels has this annoying habit that when something happens in one of its virtual machines, it brings that machine to the forefront, and if you have multiple virtual machines running, the "alerted" machine jumps to the foreground, no matter what mode its in (windowed or Coherence) and no matter what you were doing in the other VMs. That got to be really annoying, really quickly. I had hoped to have my main production Vista running in Coherence along with another Parallels VM running in windowed mode, but that quickly proved impossible.

Interestingly enough, when I initailly built the 2008 Terminal Server that's now running on my Mac, I had created it as a VM under VMWare Workstation on a 2003 server I have as a test platform. Performance on that platform was pathetic, so I shut down the VM, copied the files from the 2003 server over to my Mac, and loaded up the VM in Fusion. It loaded right up, did a couple of platform conversions, requested a re-registration of the OS with Microsoft, but otherwise ran exactly as it had done under VMWare Workstation, save for being a WHOLE LOT faster. [Note: I ended up rebuilding the box in a new VM on the Mac for unrelated reasons. Had I not inadvertantly nuked something in the config, I'd still be running the same VM that I pulled over from VMWare workstation.]

Bottom line, I have a working system that is doing what I need it to do and more. I have a Vista environment that is very stable and runs very quickly. I have a Leopard environment that is very stable and runs very quickly. I've got a 2008 Terminal Server that runs faster now than it did before, and I'm spending some serious time with Windows 7. I will be testing a load of SBS 2008 on here at some point in the (hopefully) not-too-distant future, and fully recognize that I'll probably have to scale back some of the other stuff that I'm doing on this thing, but as my overall processor utilization is still under 10% across the board, I might not have to scale back too far. And I've learned a couple of good lessons about virtualizing on the Mac. It's certainly doable, and I'd say that you wouldn't even have to go as far as a super-decked-out Mac Pro to do it. My wife's iMac 20" has more than enough horsepower to run all the photo and video stuff she's doing plus running a Windows environment of some sort. And the new Mac Mini should be able to do virtualization nicely, but you'll have to probably go to the full 4GB to make it work. For me, though, Parallels is still the better solution, simply for the way it handles the full-screen integration with the Mac OS. If Fusion would ever figure out how to display the Windows task bar on top of the Dock like Parallels does, I'll be more than happy to give it another go, as in general I feel a bit better about recent developments from VMWare than I do from Parallels. But I'm running and not having any issues, so I'm not complaining.

On Downgrading

eriq — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 16:04:00 GMT

Well, my experiment with Leopard and Parallels has come to a close. As of this morning, I'm back running Tiger and Parallels build 4128. I was able to get Build 5582 running on Leopard and mostly had everything the way it should be, but performance was HORRIBLE! Now, I had made a number of changes all at the same time, so it could have been any one of them. I was running Leopard on an external firewire drive, so that could have caused performance issues (however, my XP hard disk image has been running on another external firewire drive for months, and that posed no problems). I also updated to OFfice 2007 SP1 because of the lingering performance issues I've seen with Office 2007 in general, and overall that seems to have done nothing. Plus, I did upgrade Parallels from 4128 to 5582, and who know.

So I retracted in several steps. First, I went back to my default Tiger system, keeping Office 2007 SP1 installed and Parallels build 5582. Same performance issues. So it's not Leopard itself or running the main OS from an external firewire disk that caused the problems. Then I went back and installed Parallels build 4128, and bingo, all my performance issues went away., even leaving Office 2007 SP1 on (I won't say that Office 2007 performance has improved over what I was seeing, it just went back to what it had been before the Leopard/Parallels test.

So, to keep my sanity and performance intact, I'm sticking with this for the time being. Next step will be to give that Fusion a real run for it's money and see how insane that makes me before I go back to this configuration. I must say, though, that I am getting more and more disappointed with the steps, or lack thereof, that Parallels is making with their recent builds. And I've been unable to get anyone at Parallels to follow up on the requests I've made for assistance, even after following their guidelines for requesting support. We'll see what Fusion has to say about all of this.

On Leopard, Parallels, and Fusion

eriq — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 15:51:00 GMT

This is a long post. You have been warned.

Today is my day to try and get caught up on Leopard. I haven't been able to fully move over to Leopard on my main work machine for several reasons, which will become clearer shortly. I have Leopard up and running on my PowerBook, and I'm really, really liking the interface, so I'm really wanting to get it going on my main work machine. Which means I have to tackle either Parallels or Fusion to get my Windows stuff working properly. Let me explain.

I've been running Parallels version 3.0 build 4128 for quite a while, mostly because I had display problems in the latest public build 5510. I'd gone back and forth with the Parallels support team, but they had not been able to replicate my display issues (Coherence mode just flat broke in 5510, making Parallels practically useless for me in a production sense), so I stuck with running 4128 until the next update was released.

When Leopard released, I cloned my disk to an external drive, ran the upgrade on that, and promptly broke Parallels. I again went round and round with the Parallels support folks, and they released a couple of beta builds that I tried, but still had problems with Coherence, making Parallels again all but useless, and since I could not get build 4128 to run AT ALL on Leopard, I went back to Tiger, where I've been since.

All that changed today, or at least that was the plan. I had received a note from VMWare that Fusion had finally gone production (and I could get $20 off by ordering now), so I decided to give Fusion a try under Leopard and see how that worked. I've previously documented my experiences with Parallels versus Fusion when it comes to their desktop integration (Coherence for Parallels, Unity for Fusion), and how I believed that Parallels was the more useful (for me) and mature product. Well, today I purchased, downloaded, and installed Fusion. While downloading Fusion, I checked back on the Parallels forum and lo and behold saw the note that they've released build 5582 to address Leopard issues, so I downloaded the latest Parallels build and got ready to start the Leopard update.

I booted from my external drive loaded with Leopard (after making sure I had installed the 10.5.1 update from Apple which addresses some of the security issues noted in the initial release) and installed Fusion. Fusion launched right away, and I opted to use the "Easy Install" method and install Vista Ultimate (I"ve been running XP under Parallels, and I really need to see if Vista is "all that and a bag of chips" or not for me) and within about 30 minutes, I had a basic Vista install running under Fusion under Leopard. I joined the Vista machine to my SBS server using the Connect Computer wizard, and then installed Office 2007. I kicked the VM into Unity mode, and other than the Windows taskbar showing underneath the Dock, it seemed to work OK. %^@&# annoying to have to either move the Dock or move the taskbar to get access to both, tho. Maybe there's a setting for that, but I didn't take the time to look.

Seeing that Fusion/Vista was behaving as expected, I started to take a look at Parallels. I uninstalled the previous build of Parallels and installed the latest update, per recommendations on the site. I was able to launch my existing Windows XP VM without problem, but I did get a report about the trial version key expiring. It took me a bit of work to track down my licensed keys, but I was able to get Parallels back running with my original keys.

The performance with Coherence is definitely improved in this build, but it's still not 100% where it had been (or where it should be). I have had to enable the "Group All Windows" setting for Coherence (which can only be modified when the VM is stopped, by the way) and even with that, I'm still not seeing exactly what I'm expecting to see with Parallels.

Bottom line, I'm back in production again with Parallels on top of Leopard. Next step will be to move the Leopard install from the external drive back to the internal drive and hopefully regain a bit of system performace. Leopard is definitely running faster on my PowerBook than Tiger was, and I'm hopeful that I'll see that same performance improvement once I get the system set up the way I want.

On Bullheadedness

eriq — Sun, 19 Aug 2007 20:12:00 GMT

OK, so I'm just not happy leaving things like my last two blog posts - undone. This Fusion/Parallels/Vista/XP thing has really got my goat, so to speak, so I spent some time this weekend working through a lot of it. Here's what I've been able to nail down.

Taskbar - Parallels has it, Fusion doesn't.

It may or may not be a big deal to you either way, but some of us are rather set in our ways for accessing resources, and having a completely invisible taskbar just doesn't work for me. Some folks are going to be thrilled about the way Fusion completely removes the taskbar, and I must admit, there are some parts of their implementation that really, really make sense. Except for one thing.

But before I get into that, let me describe the methodology. As mentioned previously, I've had XP running under Parallels for about 8 months. I tackled Fusion, but worked with Vista in that. So, I went back and installed Vista in Parallels and XP in Fusion. The install of Vista was smoother in Fusion than in Parallels. I'm not sure why, but I couldn't get any networking in Vista until I installed the Parallels tools. I don't recall that from my initial XP install under Parallels, but I've slept little since then.

Getting into Coherence/Unity mode is easier in Parallels than Fusion. In both XP and Vista, Parallels will come fully up into Coherence mode when the VM boots up, so that in XP I get a floating "Press Ctrl-Alt-Del" box in the middle of my Mac screen. However, when Vista comes up in Coherence, it takes over the entire $@^&# screen with its login prompt and obliterates everything else on the desktop until I get logged in. That's a tad annoying.

You get the full taskbar in Parallels in Coherence mode. With Fusion, you have to pull some tricks to get a taskbar, and it's still not exactly what I want. I had to hunt around Google to find references to my issue, but I finally ran across this thread in the VMWare forums about it. Somone documented a settings file that can be modified to get a full taskbar out of Unity mode in Fusion, documented below:

A new hidden option to always show the Windows task bar in Unity. To enable the task bar always:
1) In the Windows guest, go to: C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\VMware\VMware Tools. NOTE: The Application Data folder won’t be visible unless Windows is set to display hidden files and folders in Windows Explorer.
2) Open tools.conf in Notepad.
3) Add the following line unity.showTaskbar = "true" and save and close the tools.conf file. Restart your Windows guest.
4) Next time you enter into the Unity view, VMware Fusion will show the Windows task bar.

There's only one catch with this: the Windows taskbar appears behind the Dock, not above it like Parallels does. Meaning I can access the State button and a couple of the icons in the system tray, but that's it. Everything else is completely inaccessible behind the doc. That's just not really useful. I guess I'm still in favor of the Parallels implementation of the taskbar over Fusion.

The Mac-integrated application launcher is better in Fusion. I'm still not sure how much I'll be using this, but when I have Fusion as the foreground application on the Mac, I can access the Applications menu, which presents most of the contents of the Start menu in the Mac menu. Again, if I have access to the Start Menu through the taskbar, no big deal. But If you go barless, this will be key. As there's not a keyboard shortcut that will bring up the Start Menu in Fusion. In Parallels, hitting the Windows key (natively maps to the Command key on the Mac keyboard) opens the Start menu just like in real Windows. Now if Fusion will put in a set of menus to access any taskbar toolbar icons, I may be able to get around this, but I haven't seen it yet.

Fusion has better individual application windowing, hands down. If I'm in a Mac app, say Firefox for example, and I click on one of my Outlook windows in Fusion, only that window comes forward. If I do the same in Parallels, when I click on the Outlook window, ALL open Windows windows come forward. Fusion has figured out how to really individualize the application display. Same thing if you click on the application icon in the dock - Fusion opens that application Window set, Parallels brings forward all the Windows windows, and sometimes doesn't select the app window you selected. Significant advantage for Fusion over Parallels.

Fusion lets you assign a Windows app its own Dock icon so you can launch a Windows app in Fusion by clicking on the Dock icon. OK, that just rocks. So I can put application icons in the Mac doc, even if they're Windows apps, and launch that app by clicking the Dock icon. Did I mention that rocks? Yes, I have to have Fusion open, and yes, I have to be in Unity mode, but that rocks. I'm really, really hoping Parallels will implement this feature in an update for Coherence.

After spending some quality time in all four interface combinations now, I'm still going to be sticking with Parallels as the primary Windows interface for the time being. For the way I work, it's going to allow me to be more efficient in the short term. I really hope they'll come up with some of the nice features that Fusion has implemented in Unity, and I think they will, but how quickly remains to be seen. I'm still gun shy about the disk trouble I had with Fusion, but I can only hope that was an oddity and not a commonality. We'll give it another shot at some point and see how it goes, probably not until after they release another update to Fusion, though.