OnQ : VMWare

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 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.

On Revisits

eriq — Fri, 17 Aug 2007 21:27:00 GMT

Just a week ago, I had the notion to take a serious look at Fusion and Vista on my Mac and posted my initial observations about it. Those observations, as noted, were based on just a few hours work with the product. Over the next few days, I had an opportunity to really dig into different parts of the setup and get a lot of other experiences. So, a week later, I'm posting my next update to my experiences with Fusion and Vista.

In summary, it's off the machine. I had trouble, I tried to fight through it, I gave up. I lost a lot of productivity Monday and Tuesday, so I went back to my tried and true Parallels and XP to get business back on track.

That doesn't mean that Fusion and Vista don't hold promise. It just means that in my opinion, based solely on these experiences, I can't recommend Fusion and Vista as a viable, reliable platform for business use. The rest of the post will shed a little more light into the whys of it all.

First, the background. I had initially created a 20GB HD partition for Vista under Fusion, and after installing Vista, Office 2007, and some of the standard SBS tools, the disk was at 65% full. I knew that wasn't going to hold water, and so I was planning on rebuilding the HD anyway.

Well, I got my opportunity earlier than I had thought/hoped. After a lengthy power outage on Sunday which knocked my Mac out of commission, I came in Monday and could not get Fusion to boot the Vista HD image at all. This was when I noted the lack of apparent disk image management tools in Fusion. As best as I can tell, if you have problems with a VHD file in Fusion, you're toast. Granted, I didn't spend a lot of time looking (then) for tools to repair the VHD, I decided that I'd go ahead and just reinstall into a larger VHD file and move on. So I blew away the Vista config setup and went on. I created a new profile for Vista with a 40GB HD, installed Vista, connected it to my SBS network, and installed Office 2007. I was in the middle of syncing my OST file for Outlook when my Mac crashed again. Normally I manage to only crash my Mac about once a year, and that was Monday (along with everything else that was going on Monday. After restarting the Mac, I again could not get Fusion to load from the VHD file. Again, I blew away the Vista config and started over. I left the Office 2007 install going and went home.

Tuesday I came in and first thing did a normal shut down of Vista and quit Fusion altogether. Then I did a normal restart on my Mac and restarted Fusion. Vista loaded just fine. *whew* Thought I was out of the woods. Then later in the day Tuesday I did something inside Vista that caused the Vista to lock up, and my only choice was to Force Quit Fusion to get back to a point to try to relaunch Vista. Guess what, Fusion wouldn't load the Vista HD. That was the last straw. I nuked the VHD for Vista/Fusion and went back to XP under Parallels, because I just had to get some work done.

Second, I'm not sure about how Fusion implements the Unity display. Granted, this may be more of a Vista thing than a Fusion thing, but according to the info on Fusion, their approach seems to be to try to completely hide the task bar in Unity mode and just use the Mac Dock for application icons. That may be well and good, and I do still get the Start button in the lower left corner of the screen, but what about the system tray icons? I have several tools that have a visible presence in the system tray, anti-virus software among them, that I regularly access from the system tray. Those icons were nowhere to be found in Fusion. In Parallels, because I get the entire Windows taskbar displayed above the Mac Dock, I get my system tray along with my application buttons, so I can access what I need. Unfortunately, Fusion/Vista kept crashing too often for me to get in and really look at that given everything else I needed to get done, so I can't say that it's not possible to get that, I just didn't see it on first glance.

I do plan on dong more testing with both Parallels and Fusion. Specifically, I'll be loading Vista into Parallels and see if I observe some of the quirks I noted in Fusion's installation of Vista. I'll also be loading XP under Fusion to see if some of the oddities are related to Fusion or to Vista. I know where I think it's going to be, but I'm reserving judgment until I can take more time with it.

In the meantime, to those who have asked me about Fusion and its viability as a production app, I have to issue a caution that right now I can't recommend it for a production solution like I can with Parallels. True, this is the first version, and VMWare has a long history of turning out quality product, so I know that Fusion will likely be a very good tool down the road, but I just can't recommend using it right now with Vista and expect to get any serious productivity out of it. Hopefully my experiences are in the minority and others have had better success with it, but being one who has to go on what I see with my own eyes, I'd say hold off a bit on Vista/Fusion. I expect that at some point in the future I'll be able to publish another post that gives the thumbs-up for Fusion/Vista, but that's not today.

On Fusion with Vista

eriq — Fri, 10 Aug 2007 22:55:00 GMT

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...