Richii

The 2011 MacTech Conference starts up here in Los Angeles today, and TUAW will have reports and interviews live from the conference all week. Before things begin, however, MacTech has been busy benchmarking (as usual). Its latest benchmarking showdown features virtualization software options Parallels and VMWare Fusion. Both apps were tested under Windows 7 and, as with previous tests, Parallels stacked up quite well. Of the top tests, says MacTech, Parallels won 60% by a factor of 10% or more, and Parallels Desktop 7 beat VMWare Fusion in nearly 75% of the tests run.

Interesting results on the Parallels vs VMware Fusion testing.

I own both. My own fairly casual testing agrees for the most part; Parallels is quicker. That said, I'm pretty hard pressed to notice any real difference with the workloads I'm typically running.

However, it's more important for me to be able to grab the virtual machine and move it to another host, be it running OS X, Windows, or VMware's own ESX hypervisor - that compatibility is more important than raw performance to me.