Category: Windows

Since I have both Parallels and Fusion running, I found it useful to try out Vista under Fusion. According to tests, Vista runs better under Fusion, while Parallels’ forte is XP. No, I haven’t verified that, I’m entirely happy assuming those tests are right.

Windows Vista is kinda pretty, even though I don’t see any aqua or aero effects, or whatever they’re called. (Here’s a full size view on how it looks while it is huffing and puffing its way through the initial 49 updates of the OS.)

But, even the Mac Pro I’m running now, with its 8 Gb of RAM is starting to page out when I’m running Vista. Admittedly, I’m running a few more things at the same time…

… as you can see. Two XPs (1 Gb, resp 768 Mb) are running, Photoshop, Transit, the Fusion with Vista (1 Gb), Skype, Safari, OmniFocus, Mail, NeoOffice Writer, iTunes, Preview, Transit, and Activity monitor. As you can see on the activity pie chart, there’s just a gig of blue and nothing green to be seen. I guess the next move will be to fill’er up to 16 Gb of RAM, and if that’s not enough, I have to go to 32 Gb, which this machine is supposed to handle. I’m sooo spoiled…

Just like on OSX, I just now created a separate admin account and changed my regular account from admin status to “standard”. I’m very curious to see if it’s workable. While running as admin, I got a deluge of “Please approve this action” dialog boxes. Let’s see what happens if I’m not an admin and I try to install Open Office.

First, it blocked the download, warned me about the dangers of the internet, but it’s easy enough to approve it and proceed. Then it warned me about the installation program being unsigned, fair enough. Then it asked me for an admin logon to install the program (perfect!). And then the installation threw up an error box:

Did a quick Google and didn’t find anything about this error (“Wrapper.CreateFile failed with error 123”). Interestingly, after clicking “OK”, the installation proceeded, where I would have expected it to abort, rewarding me with:

And, hey, it seems to work! Ok, so far so good under a limited user account. That is definitely good news.

Next little test, let’s open Task Manager:

No problem, up it comes. Fine. Now let’s click “Resource Monitor”, which I know only admins can use:

Darn it, I’m bloody impressed! Instead of having to do that cumbersome “RunAs…” stuff, Vista does exactly what OSX does, asks for admin credentials (it even put in the right admin user name, which I rubbed out with a bit of yellow mud just above the password prompt). And up comes the resource monitor.

Phew, never thought I’d have to say I like this very limited first look at Vista after what I’ve heard about it. I think I’ll keep exploring it.

Now, let’s look at what Vista sees as the underlying machine, that is what Fusion pretends to be:

It sees a dual 64 bit processor and 1 Gb of RAM. Nice. If you look at the very bottom you see a new MS policy of automatically activating the OS, instead of letting the user do it. Normally I wouldn’t care, but if you’re running MSDN copies, you should be aware of this, since you often don’t want to waste activations on every installation you do. Vista isn’t going to wait for you to approve if I interpret that statement correctly. (I’ll wait and see if it goes ahead without asking or not after another three days, will keep you updated about it.)

So, what about the “Windows Experience Index”? It says “1.0” here, can’t be lower than that. Hm. Better check out the details:

Ah, now I see, the overall rating is equal to the lowest rating, which I got for gaming graphics. I have enabled “3D graphics” but I get no aero. I think Fusion doesn’t support Aero yet, but I couldn’t find anything on the web to confirm that, so I may be wrong. Apart from that, I find the above scores pretty impressive. Vista, at first blush, seems useable on this machine, not too sluggish, but then nothing is sluggish on this setup, really.

Way back when, I used to use VMware desktop on my Dell for development. When I switched to the Mac, I naturally selected Parallels desktop to let me run Windows instances under OSX. A couple of days ago I was offered a review license for VMware Fusion, so I tried it out to see if it’s better than Parallels, even though I actually have very few complaints about Parallels.

So what I’m comparing here is Parallels Desktop 3.0 for Mac and VMware Fusion 1.1.1. My comparison isn’t in any way exhaustive, just a first impression after a few days of use and for a fairly limited application, namely software development and backups and stuff.

The machine I’m running these guys on is my brand new Mac Pro with dual quadcore Xeons at 2.8 GHz and 8 Gb of RAM. On this machine it’s hard to have any software perform poorly, so I wouldn’t be able to detect much in the way of inefficiencies, if there are any. Nice for me, but it hobbles my advice somewhat. For details on the machine, see my earlier entries on “Mac XP”.

I’m running an old Win 2000, and two instances of Windows XP under Parallels. One XP is equipped with MS SQL Server developer’s edition and Visual Studio 2005, while the other one harbours Visual Studio 2008. They have 1 Gb resp. 768 Mb of RAM allocated in Parallels. The Win 2000 has just 512 Mb, but I don’t use that one much.

For this comparison, I created a third Win XP and gave it 512 Mb of RAM. I plan on using this VM as a “utility VM”, containing stuff like backup software. The first thing I installed in it was Retrospect 7.5 for Windows that came bundled with my Netgear ReadyNAS+ (5 clients included) and then I purchased and added a further 5 client licenses. So it can now backup 10 clients, mixed Mac OSX and Win clients.

It turns out that Fusion is a pretty good choice for this “utility” VM, since it allows me to allocate 2 virtual CPUs. Retrospect does exploit multiple CPUs if you have them, so this allows Retrospect to use two of the eight cores I have in the machine. Parallels would limit Retrospect to just one core.

Running Retrospect in one of the other XP VMs would make that VM go very slowly. All it’s activities would be limited to one core on the Mac and I would have a nasty time of working in Visual Studio in the same VM at the same time. Having Retrospect run on two cores in its own VM allows me to work in the other VMs without noticing any slowdown at all. It’s great! In all fairness, running Retrospect in a Parallels VM would have had the exact same result, except Retrospect would have run slightly slower.

I’m usually writing quite a bit of multithreaded code, making it practically necessary to run on a multiprocessor to avoid subtle bugs. That would seem to mandate Fusion. But I don’t know how fully it emulates two CPUs. Does it interrupt right in the middle of memory accesses like a true multiprocessor machine would do, or is it more civilized than that? The lack of documentation about this is a problem, just like for hyperthreaded CPUs. In both these cases, it’s very unclear how close they mimic a true multiprocessor machine.

As far as simply running most software, I think both these products do a grand job. I’ve not encountered any problems with either, but remember I’ve done much more on Parallels than on Fusion. The network setups are also practically identical with choices for host sharing, bridged, and host only. The intricate and flexible network configurations we see in VMware’s Windows product aren’t found in Fusion (yet). What’s also lacking is a decent snapshot management in Fusion. You can take snapshots and revert, but there’s no management of multiple snapshots like in the Windows product or in Parallels.

Miserable keyboard handling

Now for my real beef with both of these products: the keyboard. Obviously, most keystrokes should be passed on to the virtual machine, some should be converted, and some intercepted and sent to the host OS. Both these products have made a mess of this even though it ought to be simple to get right.

In Parallels, the command and control keys swap nicely on the left side of the keyboard while remaining unswapped on the right side. Kinda confusing, but I don’t mind getting used to it. But function keys is a real problem. Sometimes I succeed in getting them through to the VM using different combinations of command and control or something, then I can’t remember exactly what I did. It also varies according exactly which function keys we’re talking about. The function keys that have predefined uses for dashboard, exposé, and similar, behave differently from other function keys. Parallels does have a menu where one can select magic key combinations to send to the VM, but it would have been great to have these keystrokes pass right through under their own steam, so to speak. Having to select function keys from a menu is good for once or twice, but get’s old real quick. This is how it looks under the “Actions” menu in Parallels:

Under VMware, there’s a setting in the “Preferences”, which means that it is the same for all VMs under VMware:

As you can see, there’s a single checkbox “Enable Mac OS keyboard shortcuts” and it works admirably. A little too admirably, in fact. Once you deselect it, all keystrokes go to the VM, including command-tab. Now there’s no point in passing command-tab to the VM since Windows doesn’t know what a command key is. But it makes sure I can’t easily switch between apps on the Mac. This is ridiculous, since Windows reacts to alt-tab, so they could just as well left command-tab for OSX. The new Mac keyboards also have a special “Fn” key where the useless “Help” key used to be. That ought to be exploited by Parallels and Fusion somehow, but isn’t.

I don’t know which of the systems, Parallels or VMware, got the key settings most wrong; it’s a close call. To me it’s obvious they really could spend a little effort in getting this right, since it’s the one thing that makes working with VMs hard; everything else is almost perfect. Having options allowing all keystrokes to pass to the VM except command-tab and possibly control-space (which I use for QuickSilver), would be absolutely great. Allow the user to freely define another couple of magic combinations that should not pass to the VM, and you’re set.

Converting: defeated by Mickeysoft

Both products are able to convert a VM from the other product to its own system. Both of them take forever to do it, but seem to do a good job of it, ultimately. But Windows isn’t happy about it, since it sees the conversion as a move to another machine and then insists on needing a new activation. Just to be a real PITA, Windows only gives you three days to reactivate, if it was already activated. Considering that you get 60 days to activate (for the MSDN version of XP), you are actually severely punished for having activated your XP in the first place before the conversion. How very nice of MS. Actually, WGA being what it is, it’s not a good idea to convert Windows installations from Parallels to VMware or vice versa at all. Actually, if you can avoid activating at all, that’s even better, but it limits you to 60 days per setup.

Dock difference

Parallels shows an actual live image of the VMs screen in the dock and in the task switcher, so even though a VM is hidden behind a stack of other apps, I can keep an eye on the dock icon and see if some compile has finished or a dialog box is waiting for input:

Fusion, on the other hand, just shows a Fusion logo, missing an opportunity to display something useful:

Conclusion

My current conclusion is that both products are great and work just fine. Both need serious work in the keyboard handling. Fusion has dual CPUs, a major advantage, especially on a multicore machine. Parallels has better snapshot handling and really useful dock icons.

I finally got the Mac Pro fully installed. Using the migration utility on a Time Machine backup screwed up the mailboxes in Mail somehow, so I had to hook up the old iMac as a firewire target and copy it all over again. Then it worked.

Some apps needed re-licensing, especially Adobe is a mother when it comes to this. You need to de-activate the old installation before you can activate on a new machine. Max two activated machines per serial number. I can’t imagine what you would have to go through if the old machine isn’t bootable so you can de-activate from it. Moral of the story: don’t ever reformat the old machine before you’ve excercised all your apps thoroughly.

Some other apps needed a new license entry, but none of the others needed deactivating on the original machine. Zinio reader was its usual obnoxious self, needing all kinds of manual removals of files in library and plists and stuff, plus reinstallation. This is about the fifth or tenth time I’m doing this with Zinio, and they really ought to get their act together.

Parallels needed a little fiddling to get the “shared networking” working. The trick is to go into system preferences, networking, and the system automatically wants to activate en3, which is what is missing if you migrate Parallels from another machine. Problem solved.

As a first test, I started up three instances of Windows, and had one of them compile a hefty DLL using Borland C++. At the same time, the other instances remained totally responsive, while OSX itself didn’t slow down in the least. Everything remained snappy as can be. Took a shot of the screen estate with the CPU graphs (8 of them stacked…) on top of the left Windows XP. You can admire the screenshot here. The current version of Parallels isn’t able to use or emulate more than one CPU per instance, but I think they will provide for that later. Let’s hope.

Just now, the rest of the parts arrived, that is four 500 Gb drives and 4 x 2 Gb RAM, all from OWC. I was a bit impatient and forgot to snap pictures of it before putting it into the box. But you all know how hard drives and RAM looks, right? Except this particular RAM has a lot of black fins on it (see earlier pictures).

Anyway, I took out the 2 Gb RAM that was in the machine and replaced it with 4 modules of 2 Gb each. I’ve read somewhere that memory access is the fastest on these machines if you have 4 modules. Maybe there is a 64 bit wide bus for each module and the computer has a 256 bit wide memory bus? Actually, I don’t know, but it didn’t seem worth slowing down the memory bus for just a meagre extra 2 Gb, so out they went. My next Mac Pro (yeah, right) can then get these for a 4 Gb start in life.

I also took out the single 320 Gb drive that was in the machine when it arrived from Apple. Put in 4 x 500 Gb Seagates instead. All the drives had a jumper in place limiting them to a transfer speed of 1.5 Gb/sec. I seem to remember the Mac Pro can handle 3 Gb/sec so I took them out. Fiddly in the extreme, had to use a knife to get them out.

Started up the machine, but discovered I couldn’t open the optical drives with the classic Mac keyboard, no reaction as I hit the eject button. (I’d taken the new keyboard and used it for the iMac.) Had to switch to the new keyboard and then I could open the drive to get the install DVD in there.

When installing, you have to select “Disk utility” first and format the drives. Time to figure out how to divvy up these drives. My first inclination is to use two of the drives like “regular drives” and save the last two drives for Time Machine. Yes, I do run regular backups through Retrospect to an external NAS, but still, Time Machine is really nice and useful. TM on the iMac sucks too much computing and disk power, however, so I’m hoping this isn’t the case on the Pro. Especially if it can use two internal 3 Gb/s drives, it ought not to get in my way, even though I’m running several Windows instances under Parallels (every change in those gigantic virtual machine files trigger a backup of the whole file, maybe 5-10 Gb at a time. Heavy. I’m not too sure this is a good idea.)

Right now, the Pro is migrating from my iMac using the Time Machine backup on an external 500 Gb Lacie Porsche. It still has another hour to run. Interesting factoid: the little Lacie Porsche makes more noise than the entire Mac Pro under it. Fascinating.