This is a real pity: VMWare Fusion is AFAIK the only stable desktop virtualisation app for OS X.
It's competitor, VirtualBox has the honour of being the only piece of software that 'taints' the Linux kernel, not because it's proprietary (VirtualBox is OSS) but because it's that poor quality that the Linux kernel maintainers don't want to support it.
This is really a shame. I am really hoping Veertu[1] will be a thing, because the idea seems to be really nice: providing a good UI for OS X's hypervisor framework.
I installed Veertu it and gave it a try. I'm mostly interested in hosting FreeBSD clients, so I was happy to see a FreeBSD net install disk image in its list of options, but the client kernel panics as it boots. Fusion supports FreeBSD (and any other OS I've thrown at it in recent memory) flawlessly… Guess I'll stick with it for now.
And good luck if you re-install more than five times (on the same hardware, no less). "Too many activations. You must purchase another license." I called, they 'reset the counter', giving me five more activations. Called. "I see we've already reset the activation counter..." "Yes?" "Hmm..."
FWIW, I think they've gotten better in the last release or two.
My sincere hope, if Fusion is going to go away, is that Parallels will have an influx of customers and not be forced into doing silly advertising/bundling things to maintain their revenue.
I have always preferred Parallels and every time I evaluate the two, Parallels integrates better and performs better.
In my experience (I left Mac over a year ago, so it may be out of date), Parallels has always felt a little faster than Fusion on Mac when running Windows, especially if you were running games.
1. VirtualBox shared folders performance is terrible.
2. VMWare Fusion is the only shared folders implementation I've found (tried Parallels, VirtualBox, and VMWare Fusion) that can follow symbolic links, making them look like normal files/directories on the guest (useful for Windows guests which don't understand nix symlinks).
3. IIS can't host applications off of VirtualBox shared folders for some permissions reason, which cannot be fixed.
I really hope VMWare Fusion doesn't die, as it's the only product I've found that supports my use case.
Can't stress enough point #1. I've seen a HUGE performance difference between VB and Fusion with actual web-development workload.
Enough to justify moving from a free solution to a paid one.
Plus you get other nice features, eg. open a file on Mac OSX with a program installed in a Windows VM.
When they discontinued VMware Server 2, I migrated over a dozen machines over to VirtualBox on CentOS. We have had no issues with performance or stability with any of our machines. VirtualBox 5.0 brought feature parity to VMware Server for our needs. The only thing we have found lacking are more remote management features.
Comments
This is a real pity: VMWare Fusion is AFAIK the only stable desktop virtualisation app for OS X.
It's competitor, VirtualBox has the honour of being the only piece of software that 'taints' the Linux kernel, not because it's proprietary (VirtualBox is OSS) but because it's that poor quality that the Linux kernel maintainers don't want to support it.
This is really a shame. I am really hoping Veertu[1] will be a thing, because the idea seems to be really nice: providing a good UI for OS X's hypervisor framework.
[1] http://veertu.com/
I installed Veertu it and gave it a try. I'm mostly interested in hosting FreeBSD clients, so I was happy to see a FreeBSD net install disk image in its list of options, but the client kernel panics as it boots. Fusion supports FreeBSD (and any other OS I've thrown at it in recent memory) flawlessly… Guess I'll stick with it for now.
Does it have it's own format for images, or does it support VMX / VMDK ?
I'm sick at the thought of having to deal with Yet Another VM Format.
I had a FreeBSD VMDK, but I couldn't figure out how to get Veertu to open it, so if Veertu does support it, it's not obvious how.
I had no idea osx had a hypervisor framework. It showed up in 10.10!
https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/releasenotes/MacOSX/...
It does :). There is also an ecosystem developing around it, e.g. the xhyve tool:
https://github.com/mist64/xhyve
CoreOS on xhyve:
https://github.com/coreos/coreos-xhyve
Parallels runs on a Mac. You have to pay continuously for upgrades, but it's there.
And good luck if you re-install more than five times (on the same hardware, no less). "Too many activations. You must purchase another license." I called, they 'reset the counter', giving me five more activations. Called. "I see we've already reset the activation counter..." "Yes?" "Hmm..."
Never mind - I'll buy Fusion.
Parallels is riddled with advertising.
FWIW, I think they've gotten better in the last release or two.
My sincere hope, if Fusion is going to go away, is that Parallels will have an influx of customers and not be forced into doing silly advertising/bundling things to maintain their revenue.
I have always preferred Parallels and every time I evaluate the two, Parallels integrates better and performs better.
Like for other products? I've never seen an ad in parallels and have been using it since it first came out.
In my experience (I left Mac over a year ago, so it may be out of date), Parallels has always felt a little faster than Fusion on Mac when running Windows, especially if you were running games.
I've not had any problems running VirtualBox on Linux. Is it worse on Mac or is VMWare better is some way?
The reasons I use VMWare Fusion are:
1. VirtualBox shared folders performance is terrible.
2. VMWare Fusion is the only shared folders implementation I've found (tried Parallels, VirtualBox, and VMWare Fusion) that can follow symbolic links, making them look like normal files/directories on the guest (useful for Windows guests which don't understand nix symlinks).
3. IIS can't host applications off of VirtualBox shared folders for some permissions reason, which cannot be fixed.
I really hope VMWare Fusion doesn't die, as it's the only product I've found that supports my use case.
Can't stress enough point #1. I've seen a HUGE performance difference between VB and Fusion with actual web-development workload. Enough to justify moving from a free solution to a paid one. Plus you get other nice features, eg. open a file on Mac OSX with a program installed in a Windows VM.
When they discontinued VMware Server 2, I migrated over a dozen machines over to VirtualBox on CentOS. We have had no issues with performance or stability with any of our machines. VirtualBox 5.0 brought feature parity to VMware Server for our needs. The only thing we have found lacking are more remote management features.
Parallels is awesome, and stable.