Windows 7 Visualization on Mac OS X
- Image via Wikipedia
Since I got my first Macbook Pro one week ago, the overall experience has been pretty positive. One of most impressive feature I like is quick switch from/to sleep mode. In Windows (and Linux) it usually takes more than 10 seconds but it takes than 1 second on Mac OS. When I touch the touchpad, the computer wakes up from sleep and becomes up-and-running almost instantly.
Apple computers are great. But sometimes you just could not find your favorite app on a Mac, MS Visio being one of them. When you do not want to switch to a different machine, you have options – visualization. There are several different products on the market – VMWare Fusion 2 and VirtualBox 3 being the most popular.
Both of them have some nice feature sets. I like “Unity” mode in Fusion (the counterpart in VirtualBox is called “seamless mode”). VMWare has more interesting integrations, such as mirroring Mac home directory, iSight under Windows, to name a few. VirtualBox, on the other hand, is more configurable via the command line.
However, VMWare Fusion does not support Windows 7 yet, at least officially. The official Fusion blog suggested to use “Windows Server 2008″ as the profile when installing Windows 7 beta and RC. As a result, the above nice features are not available – home directory mirroring and iSight under Windows. In this case, Dropbox will be helpful if you want to share documents between these OSes.
Performance-wise, VirtualBox seems to be the winner. Windows applications in VirtualBox (MS Office 2007 and Visio) are more responsive and the host OS is not slowed down by any means. Windows apps in Fusion feel a little bit sluggish, given the same configuration (1G of physical mem). Please note, these are not really scientific performance analysis – they are totally my subjective feeling of “responsiveness”.
In summary, Fusion 2 and VirtualBox 3 are both great products. I am hoping when Windows 7 is officially released, VMWare Fusion will have more integration with it. Oh BTW, Fusion costs $70 and Virtualbox is free for personal use.
