No Need To Be Shy About Fusion

You may have seen that VMWare announced the new Fusion 3.0 upgrade will come at the end of October.  But what we noticed is that many of those "new" features are already in the current version of Parallels.  The Parallels Desktop team posted some of these features, including support for Snow Leopard and 3D graphics, and helps for switchers.  Take a look.

Stefan Prestele, our senior director of consumer marketing had this to say:

Parallels “According to today’s announcement, VMware Fusion 3 introduces support for Snow Leopard, migration functionality and improved graphics performance.  These capabilities have existed within Parallels’ Mac solutions for some time:  we have supported Snow Leopard since its launch, and already have a comprehensive offering for customers moving from a PC to a Mac with our dedicated Parallels Desktop Switch to Mac Edition, launched in August. We set the standard for performance and graphics support, and are continually working to deliver the richest, fastest graphics solutions. These efforts make Parallels Desktop the number 1 Mac system utility.  

Our relentless drive to delight customers fuels our ongoing effort to deliver innovative solutions to our customers, as can be seen in our awarding winning Parallels Desktop 4.0 for Mac and our more recently delivered Parallels Desktop Switch to Mac Edition.  We haven’t stood still since the release of Parallels Desktop 4.0 for Mac and are committed to delivering additional innovations in our upcoming releases.

That should clear things up a bit. 

OK, but what about those of you in the market to upgrade now either because you're a new switcher or you're looking for Snow Leopard support ?  You need to buy something, so you may be thinking to go with whatever is newest.  Well, we have something for you. 

Yeah, we're not shy.

Comments

[Sean]

Ug. Fusion 3. I don't think you folks have anything to be shy about.

I'm on the latest release, and when I got the notification to update, I was excited.

No more - Aero effects while running W7 as a guest OS are nice... when the Fusion emulated S3 Video Controller doesn't crash, that is, which seems to be on a regular basis. Windows regularly flicker, sometimes disappearing for a moment. The taskbar itself takes a few seconds to display the quick view images.

Disk I/O in Fusion horrible. I see that Fusion now defaults to using a SCSI based controller when creating new VMs, but it doesn't seem to help. Even with the "Optimization" that Fusion reports to provide, there are noticeable slow downs while booting. It takes 30-40 for the W7 "colors animation" to appear and blend in.

Snapshots in Fusion have been the worst area in the past, and nothing has changed. After installing W7 I took a snapshot and my MPB exhibited terrible slowdowns - to the point where Firefox wouldn't load pages and music being played iTunes was cutting in and out - I literally walked away at that point since I couldn't do anything with my machine. The Fusion icon in the dock itself was flickering and it literally took around 30 minutes to take a snapshot of a plain-vanilla W7 install. The progress circle on the dock icon spun around like 40 times or more. I don't know how that's optimized, or even a releasable product.

Here's to Parallels 4.0, which has the most solid and capable virtualization on the mac. Looking forward to the next release to get the Aero effects and to finally rid my system of Fusion