Over the past several months, I’ve become increasingly frustrated with VMware Fusion 4’s performance with Mountain Lion - dual monitors are a disaster, Unity mode results in loss of focus and ghost images, and lots of other little quirks require me to bend my workflow to VMware rather than it

enhancing my workflow. Seeing that the latest version of Parallels was included in the last MacUpdate Bundle, I decided to give Parallels a shot.

It takes 15 second on Google to find about two dozen sites showing Parallels 8 to have superior benchmarks to VMware 4 or 5. Additionally, with the bundle, I’d get Parallels for $50 instead of the $70 crossgrade charge (although checking http://parallels.com today, the charge is also $50), which means the cost would be the same as upgrading VMware Fusion to the current version. Parallels emphasizes the ease of use of their software and the seamlessness of its operation. So, I

downloaded the trial version and fired it up.

I converted the Win 7 64-bit machine (40 GB HDD, 2 GB Memory) that I’d been using with VMware on my 13” 2011 MacBook Pro (500 GB 7200 RPM HDD, 8 GB Memory). The wizard converted the machine seamlessly and left the existing VM intact, which is certainly positive. I’d elected to run the machine

“more seamlessly,” so the machine was created to run in coherence mode. Here are a handful of things I learned:

Coherence Mode has many of the same problems Unity Mode in VMware 4 does with ghosting, losing focus, etc. This issue may be tied to the extent to which I rely on spaces (e.g. Messages, Lync, & Outlook in a space together, LabTech, Connectwise, and IE in another space, Safari along with RDP sessions in another, maybe more), but Coherence mode was unusably frustrating to me.

Performance was not noticeably different from VMware for the tasks I was doing. But, I don’t typically run anything that needs much horsepower on my virtual machine.

Customization/configuration of the vm in Parallels 8 seemed obtuse to me. Exercising the same sort of granularity of control and the ease of adjusting settings/sharing/file location

that VMware does so well remains inscrutable to me in Parallels.

Now, I work with vSphere and ESX on a nearly daily basis and have had Fusion on my Mac since the last time I gave up on Parallels (too long ago to be relevant here), so there’s certainly a familiarity component at play. Nevertheless, I felt like an Android user moving to iPhone must feel with

Parallels, and that feeling is, for me, a deal-breaker. A locked-down iPhone enhances my workflow; a vm that takes tons of effort to tweak results in nothing but headaches. At least for me, upgrading to VMware Fusion 5 proved a much better move than switching to Parallels.

So, I’ve upgraded my version of VMware Fusion to 5 and my virtual machine to Windows 8 and am reasonably happy there. Unity mode still leaves a lot to be desired, but performance is fine and the annoying issues with spaces and multiple displays seem to be resolved. For those of us in the enterprise world stubborn enough to stay on our Macs, VMware Fusion may be as good as it gets…