Over a month has passed since my post about my Parallels and CentOs experience, where I mentioned that it was working rather well, and I would like to comment a bit more about it.
First of, pretty much everything I said on that post still holds: Parallels is convenient and quick to set up. Unfortunately, it also has several unadvertised problems - which the company just recently recognized as bugs - that would make me think twice about paying for it now if I hadn’t already.
First off, there is processor usage. Even when the virtual instance is doing absolutely nothing, Parallels tends to consume at least 30% of processing time in my MacBook Core 2 Duo. I understand that even in those cases Parallels probably has to provide clock and other basic services, but it still seems excessive. There’s also some issue, I expect with their network drivers, that causes that processor usage when idle to jump to around 60% on a Windows virtual machine just by loading Skype. These problems are exacerbated if you don’t turn off any of their recent, much touted features, such as Coherence or USB 2.0 support. Even worse, Parallels CPU usage is high even when it doesn’t even have a virtual machine runnning. There’s no excuse for that one - it’s simply bad programming.
But these problems would be minor if Parallels support reacted properly. Unfortunately, you’ll find many customer service horror stories, which can be summed up as either Parallels doesn’t work and they aren’t fixing these serious problems or simply Parallels is ignoring us. In my own experience, I didn’t get a reply to any of my e-mailed questions until there was a big public outcry on the forums about the general lack of support, and even then they replied only to one of the issues.
I’ve also been experimenting with VMWare Fusion, and at this relatively early beta stage seems just as stable as Parallels, and processor usage with even all their debug stuff thrown in is similar (if not lower). If you’re considering a Mac virtualization solution, I’d seriously recommend you try it as well. Parallels problems are not insurmountable, but right now they’re serious enough that I can’t recommend them.
Somebody on the Parallels forum mentioned I’ve been treated better as a prospective VMWare customer than as a paying customer of Parallels. Caveat emptor.
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