Choosing a virtualization application

So now that you've read our reviews of Fusion 2.0, Parallels Desktop 4, and VirtualBox 2, you may be wondering just which program is the best virtualization solution for your Mac. The answer, unfortunately, isn't quite as simple as simply picking one of the programs and saying, "There you go. That's the best." Each has its strengths and weaknesses, and as such, each program works better in some situations than in others.

To help you with the task of picking between these three programs, I've created this guide that makes recommendations based on your virtualization needs. Just skim the document until you find a category that closely matches what you intend to do, and then read about which program handles those tasks best.

The good news is that you can download and try all three of these programs free of charge, so even if you don't agree with my conclusions in a particular category, you can try out the alternatives yourself before making your buying decision.

Performance

Before I get into the recommendations, though, I wanted to spend a bit of time talking about performance, specifically the performance of the virtualization apps with Windows. Generally speaking, all three of the virtualization solutions handle basic duties just fine in Windows XP Pro and Vista.

We'll have some official Macworld benchmark results soon, but I wanted to do something on my own to get a sense for how each system performed.

After some hunting, I decided to use PassMark's PerformanceTest 6.1, which tests CPU, 2D and 3D graphics, memory, disk, and CD-ROM performance for Windows XP Pro and Vista operating systems.

In addition to these standardized tests, I also tested playback of Windows high defintion video, using both a 720p version of the Coral Reef Adventure on Microsoft's WMV HD Content Showcase page, and some random 720p demo video I found on the net. I also ran a number of hand-timed operational benchmarks, looking at the time required to start up, shut down, sleep, and resume both XP Pro and Vista.

PassMark's PerformanceTest was used to get a sense of overall virtual machine performance.

I tested on both a 2.66GHz Mac Pro quad core with 4GB of RAM and a 2.5GHz 15-inch MacBook Pro with 2GB of RAM. On each machine, I installed (as new virtual machines) versions of XP Pro and Vista Business (as well as Ubuntu Linux, though I didn't run any Linux benchmarks) in Fusion, Parallels, and VirtualBox. If you're counting at home, that's two versions of Windows on two machines in three different virtualization applications, or a total of 12 Windows installations (on which I ran multiple benchmark tests, multiple times). So yes, I'm tired of installing and updating Windows!

To the extent I could, I made the OS X side of the test setup as clean as possible. On the Mac Pro, I used a separate partition with a totally stock OS X 10.5.5 installation. On the MacBook Pro, this wasn't possible, so I went ahead and tested in my user account, with my usual suite of login items but without any other applications running. Because I ran these tests myself, and my testing setup is far from ideal, I'm not going to report on the exact benchmark results. Instead, I'll share some general insights revealed by the testing results, and borne out by my experience with each system.

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