The short: Fusion delivers, Parallels chugs.
The long:
In a perfect world, websites and technologies would work the same on every platform. This world is far from perfect, as are the standards by which we interact with technology. As a developer, you need to be able to test your products on various systems–and that’s where a nice Intel Mac comes in quite handy.
Most of us don’t have access to a Mac, a PC, and a Unix box–it’s usually one of the three. Enter virtualization software, which allows you to run multiple operating systems on one machine. Two of the better software packages for this are Parallels Desktop and a new release of VMWare’s Fusion. I’ve been using Parallels for a while now, and while it does what I need (I test my pages on IE 6 & IE 7), it’s a huge memory hog and doesn’t really accommodate my multi-tasking disease. (I typically keep 6-10 programs open at once.) With Parallels it’s a risky venture running it along side much of anything. Even with 2GB of RAM my iMac gets sluggish–and even after I close Parallels it doesn’t fully recover until I reboot.
I’ve recently installed Fusion, and so far it blows away Parallels. I’m able to run everything I need along side it, and it’s “Unity” feature lets me run a Windows program right along side my Mac program as if it were literally running from OS 10. Here’s a screenshot of iTunes for Mac (left) running along iTunes for Windows (right). Click for the full image:
Parallels has a feature called “Coherence” that does the same thing–but it’s never been as smooth or seamless for me as Fusion. I took it another step further and downloaded one of the many available pre-built systems you can install from VMWare’s Appliance page. Just for fun I downloaded a LAMP-ready Ubuntu install and had Ubuntu running alongside Windows XP and Mac OS X. Here are three versions of the same website being run on three different OS’s (left to right: Ubuntu, OS X, and Windows XP) from one machine (click for larger):
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