Systura Where information becomes knowledge...

I fired up VMware Fusion on my Mac last night and converted my Parallels images into Fusion.  The conversion went very smoothly and I was up and running in Fusion as easy as the conversion from VirtualBox to Parallels.  Like Parallels, Fusion supports Windows 7 Aero, but Fusion does not seem to perform as cleanly as Parallels.  In Parallels, Windows opening, and minimizing were quick and snappy.  I find in Fusion they are just a bit slower, sometimes like in slow motion.  Because of the speed, I seemed to have some issues with keyboard entry; I am not certain if the issues were my bad typing, or the actual speed of the Windows 7 in Fusion - but, I did not have these problems with either Parallels or VirtualBox.

Besides the speed, Fusion integrated into OS X as well as the other virtual environments.  It was easy to map a shared folder and other devices into the environment.  In Parallels, I was able to drag files from OS X into Windows 7, I have not tried that yet in Fusion, but will check that out later.

The main reason that I am trying Fusion is the ability to run any VMware image, which is as expected, very easy.  I just open any VMware image and it is up and running without any issues.  I was even tested communication between two virtual images and the communication worked without issue.

I was wondering what was the difference between VMware Workstation and VMware Fusion and one of the things that I have found different is the networking is not as detailed.  In VMware Workstation, you have up to 8 different networks; NAT, bridged, and the rest host networks.  In Fusion, it appears that you only have three networks; NAT, bridged, and one host network.  I do not think this is a major limitation for most of the work that I do.

At this point, the speed is the biggest issue.  It is not as crisp as Parallels was.  I just have not decided if the speed is enough to prevent me from using Fusion on a daily basis.  I am committed to running Fusion for the rest of the week before I make a final decision.