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#Post#: 114--------------------------------------------------
VMWare Fusion 5.0 review.
DIR By: algernonbarton
Date: December 22, 2012, 8:38 am
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Fusion isn't quite as popular a way to run Windows with Mac
users as Parallels Desktop 8.0, perhaps because VMWare tends to
focus more on the corporate and enterprise markets where Macs
are still relatively rare.
That corporate emphasis is immediately noticeable with this
upgrade as you now have the choice of buying either the standard
Fusion 5 for £40 or Fusion 5 Professional for £68.69. The
Professional edition also offers discounts on multi-user
licenses for larger businesses and educational organizations.
Don't let that corporate emphasis put you off, though, as the
standard non-corporate edition of Fusion 5 is still a really
good choice for ordinary home users and small businesses too. In
fact, VMWare has gone out of its way to help non-technical users
to get started with Fusion 5 by including a series of video
tutorials that cover options such as installing Windows and
running Windows programs directly on the Mac desktop. And while
Fusion 5 may lack the more polished interface of Parallels
Desktop, it compensates by being quite a bit cheaper at just
£39.99.
As with Parallels Desktop 8, many of the new features in Fusion
5 are simply designed to bring it up to date with Mountain Lion.
You can use the new Search feature in Launchpad to quickly
locate and launch individual Windows programs, while support for
AirPlay allows you to view your Windows virtual machine running
on an HDTV via the AppleTV – something that could come in handy
for running presentations on a large screen.
You can receive status updates for your virtual machines via the
Notification Centre in Mountain Lion, and there are high-res
graphics updates for the new MacBook Pro with Retina Display.
Fusion has also been updated to work with Windows 8, both within
a self-contained virtual machine and when running from a Boot
Camp partition on your Mac.
VMWare Fusion review: interface
The program's interface has been tidied up too. The Library
window still allows you to view icons of all your virtual
machines, but also includes a new list view that has been
designed for the smaller screens on laptop Macs. Your virtual
machines are listed in a panel on the left-hand side of the
Library window, while the rest of the window displays a larger
preview of the selected virtual machine.
If you have multiple virtual machines on your Mac the list view
also allows you to keep things tidy by organizing them into
folders, and Fusion now allows you to allocate 8GB of memory to
each virtual machine, up to a total of 60GB when running
multiple virtual machines.
We tested the performance of a Windows 7 virtual machine running
the PCMark benchtesting software, which tests general tasks such
as web browsing or running business software. Fusion 5 produced
an impressive score of 3000 – handily beating the 2200 scored by
Parallels Desktop 8, and rivaling a number of i5-based PC
laptops that we've seen recently. It's not just hype when VMWare
claims that Fusion 5 can run Windows software at 'near native'
speeds.
The one exception to that claim, however, is when running 3D
games and graphics. Parallels Desktop 8 comes out on top here,
consistently producing frame rates that are 15-20% higher than
Fusion 5 when running Windows games such as Skyrim and Far Cry
2. However, neither program is quite ready to replace Boot Camp
as the best way of running Windows games on your Mac, so that's
probably not a deal-breaker for many people.
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