VMWare Fusion Rocks
13. Jun, 2007 
17 Comments
I’ve been a loyal Parallels User for their first two versions. However, there are two things that drive me crazy with Parallels:
1) Too many keystrokes are passed back to Mac OS while running in full screen mode. For example I use Shift-F11 in Visual Studio a lot and I had to remap it to Ctrl-Shift-F11 to avoid the slow motion reveal desktop.
2) Idle mode performance is abysmal. When XP is sitting idle, I regularly see CPU utilization > 25% over both cores. Needless to say that this kills battery life while working in Windows.
So far, VMWare Fusion Beta 4 is very usable. The annoying keystroke passthrough behavior is not there (yay!) and the idle time performance is much, much better – I’m seeing < 20% across a single core right now.
Looks like a keeper.
Hi John,
Y dont u use.. VPC for MAC
There’s no resharper installed into your VS?!?! Are you crazy?
Downloading VMWare Fusion in hopes of dumping Parallels
Why are you using Windows XP and not Vista in VMWare Fusion?
@Ahmad:
There is no VPC for Intel-based Macs.
@Keith:
No ReSharper, ut I do have ViEmu
@Matt:
Neither Parallels nor VMWare supported Vista running natively until recently. And I’m just too lazy to rebuild another dev image for a while longer. I might consider dropping Vista onto my BootCamp partition and running Fusion once it goes RTM.
@John,
“I might consider dropping Vista onto my BootCamp partition and running Fusion once it goes RTM.”
A very wise move! The “run from BootCamp partition” feature of VMware fusion is a Godsend. The best of both worlds, w/o a doubt!
re: The CPU usage of two cores, I’ve noticed w/ WMware Fusion if you try allocating usage of both cores to the image it tends to push the idle CPU usage through the roof. A single core, as you point out, has much more sane CPU usage. It seems maybe VMware has a ways to go before it’s ready to handle multi-core processors on OSX.
Just purchased a copy based on your review – without trying it first! The current pre-order price is cheaper than the Parallels upgrade, so it makes sense
John,
Can you share your color scheme you are using in Visual Studio with us? It looks much like VibrantInk.
@David:
Yep – single core is definitely the way to go. When I get the time I’ll report back on how the Bootcamp experience goes.
@Rich:
I’m definitely going to buy a copy of this thing – it’s so much better than Parallels. I have a free upgrade to 3.0 as well for the copy that I bought for my 17″ MBP. But I doubt I’ll ever use it…
@Nick:
Will do that in a separate post. It is Vibrant Ink – I spent a bunch of time entering RGB values for the colors from the Vibrant Ink theme
New and Notable 171
Acropolis David Hills blog is here and the Team Blog is here One nice post on the Team Blog is Extending
New and Notable 171
Acropolis David Hills blog is here and the Team Blog is here One nice post on the Team Blog is Extending
VimEmu over Resharper? If you really want to save RSI… I’d like to see a screencast of using VimEmu or even Vim where you can get the same type of effect as :-
http://resharper.blogspot.com/2007/05/coding-session-with-resharper.html
John,
I am the only person at my office using VMWare Fusion on an Intel Mac for .NET development (one other guy uses Parallels, so we compete features). You are highly respected here, so you just gave my decision some cred!
However, have you tried RC1 version yet, published on July 3rd? I upgraded after the OS X 10.4.10 patch, and am having much more difficulty. I almost wish I could go back to Beta 4!
Sincerely,
RyanR>
p.s. We are in Bellingham. If you pass through on your way back to the mother country, would you be willing to do a talk for our .NET group? (I am also the only Ruby pioneer in the group)
@Ryan:
I’m running RC1, and haven’t had any problems at all with Fusion. I’m also running 10.4.10. I take it that you’re running XP and not Vista?
Not sure if I’ll get up to Bellingham anytime soon – we generally fly to Toronto
John,
Thanks for the reply. I am running XP SP2. I did just realize that I am still using the 1.1.2 version of Boot Camp, which my VM is running off of. Maybe I will try Beta 3 and see if that helps.
For some reason I thought you were from Vancouver. Sorry!
Okay, I tried the Boot Camp Beta 3 drivers and it did not help. It is definitely a graphics driver issue, though. I turned the Windows resolution back down to 96 dpi (was 125dpi) and slowed down the graphics acceleration (not doing 3D in Windows anyways) and at least my VM window stopped disappearing on start up!
I also switched the VM settings back to using one core at your suggestion. Now I’ll see if the USB behaves any better. Their forum has some good discussion, but the direct support has been poor thus far. I like to assume they’re working hard on that final release!
Hi John,
Can you share any details on how you configured your Boot Camp partition? I was confused by a) the limits on how big to make it. b) which format (FAT32 vs NTFS) to use. I was concerned about the Mac not being able to write to the windows partition.
Thanks, Jim