Rethinking My Virtual Options

I wrote a post some months back expounding on the various ways that one can include Windows in a Mac environment. One of those ways is to run a virtual machine. There are two main players in that market; VMware Fusion and Parallels. At the time of that writing I was definitely leaning towards the Parallels product even though I am a big fan of VMware's products. I couldn't point to any major thing that I really liked super better in one over the other or anything that I really hated on one. I just had a personal preference for Parallels.

I've since changed direction on that opinion. As I've spent more time with Parallels, I started to run into little issues. Nothing major and nothing that compromised the VM. But I had to open several tickets with their tech support and that's where I think things started to breakdown. In almost every case the initial time for tech support response was OK, but nothing exciting. Then in almost every case the initial response from tech support was always off-base. It was as though they really hadn't read my email so that their understanding of the problem was wrong. Then I restated the problem and waited a couple more days for a response that may have been on the right track on still as off as the first. I finally decided that if every time I had a problem tech support was going to be this lacking, I needed to take a hard look at the VMware product.

I ported over my Parallels VM to Fusion and got that running. I've been using it for the last month or so and so far I am really happy. I still think that there are a couple of things that Parallels does better, but I've not really needed anything from tech support which is a plus. VMware tech support probably isn't as accessible as that from Parallels, but accessibility isn't worth much if you can't get the issues addressed. I still think that Parallels is a good product and does a fine job of virtualization on the Mac platform. But at least for the moment, I'm sticking with Fusion.