Virtual Machines on the Mac

In my work world and private as well, I still need the ability to run Windows. The obvious choice, since I am a Mac guy, is to run a Windows virtual machine on my Mac. The two main players in this arena are Parallels and VMWare with their Fusion product. I've written below about them and have bounced between them over the years, although I had settled on Fusion.

The problem was that my Fusion VMs were giving me fits. I had two different XP VMs on two different Macs and both seemed to be starting and running poorly. Long story short, I started looking at the disk space that the VMs were taking up and found some serious issues. When I had created the VMs I had specified that they could grow to some large size; 120 GB in one case and 40 GB in another. I had specified that Fusion would create 2 GB files as it needed to grow and there is nothing wrong with this. The problem with this, though, is that they never automatically shrink. However, in both cases I had never put more than 20-30 GB of data on the 120 GB one and probably never more than 10-15 GB of data on the other one. When I looked at the size of both of them, Windows saw the "available" space, but I was only actually using 10-15 GB on each VM. However, in both cases, the actual disk space being used on the Macs was equivalent to the space that I said they could grow to. I have no idea why this has happened since I've never had anywhere near that amount of data on either VM and the VMWare people were confused as well.

I decided to do the shrink process, which was a pain in order to get space back. I deleted all temp files and cleaned up the disk. Then I ran a disk defrag. Then I downloaded and ran Mark Russinovich's SDelete to zero out the unused disk space. I finally ran the shrink tool from the VMWare tools library to do the shrinking. When I got done, I was using Mac disk space that was more in line with what the Windows VM said I actually should be using. But this whole thing just put me off Fusion.

It was about this time that Parallels came out with their Version 6. I bought a couple of new copies and installed them, migrated over my Windows VMs and fired them up. So far Parallels has not given me any real problems and it does seem much faster than Fusion. To be fair, the shrink process did resolve my speed issues with Fusion, but for the moment, at least, I sticking with Parallels.