Round 2 of our VMWare Fusion vs Parallels Speed test kind of surprised me. In Round 1, we pitted VMWare Fusion vs Parallels with Windows XP SP2 for our speed test. Parallels was the victor in every category in Round 1 which wasn’t much of a surprise since it is the more mature product and VMWare Fusion is the newcomer.
In Round 2 of our speed test, we decided to use Windows Vista with VMWare Fusion and Parallels for our speed test. All test were run 3 times and an average of the 3 speeds were used for the results. I must admit there were some really strange results in this test and the ultimate winner was kind of a surprise also.

For this test we decided to give the virtual machine a little more memory. We bumped the memory to 1500mb of memory for the power hungry Microsoft Vista. The machine that this test was run on was a MacPro with dual 2.66 processors, 5GB of memory and 4 500GB HDD configured striped. We ran the same test as we did in round 1:

Time to install from first boot to the desktop showed up for the first time.
Time to reboot with a clean OS install
Time to suspend the machine with a clean OS install
Time to boot with a clean OS install
Time to wakeup from a suspended system with a clean OS install

So, here are the results:

Time to install from first boot to the desktop showed up for the first time

WINNER = VMWare Fusion – 10 Minutes 44.5 seconds
Parallels – 12 Minutes 39.7 seconds

Time to reboot with a clean OS Install

WINNER = VMWare Fusion – 39.6 seconds
Parallels – 53.6 seconds

Time to suspend machine with a clean OS Install

WINNER = VMWare Fusion – 4.5 seconds
Parallels – 5.5 seconds

Time to boot machine with a clean OS Install

VMWare Fusion – 48.8 seconds
WINNER = Parallels – 35.6 seconds

Time to wakeup from suspended system with a clean OS Install

WINNER = VMWare Fusion – 4.3 seconds
Parallels – 5.1 seconds

So, round 2 goes to the newcomer. With the exception of time to bootup the powered down virtual machine, VMWare Fusion takes every category with Windows Vista.

Some interesting things to note on these test were that both Parallels and VMWare Fusion had problems waking up the suspended Vista Virtual machine the first time. The Parallels Vista Virtual machine seemed locked up and after 2 minutes and 30 seconds, I had to force quite the application. The VMWare Fusion Vista Virtual machine took 48.7 seconds to wakeup the first time. I ran 3 test on each after the first attempt to wake the machines for this test since both had problems on the first wakeup after being suspended with Vista. Another thing that really surprised me was the difference in time that it took Parallels to install its tools in Vista versus VMWare Fusion. Fusion handled the Vista Tools install very quickly while Parallels took much longer for its tools install.

The only other thing I found very strange was that on VMWare Fusion, you could reboot the machine faster than you could startup a shutdown virtual machine. This is the only category that Parallels outpaced Fusion in during the Microsoft Vista test. All test were run 3 times though and the same strange results happened each time.

Vista VMWare Fusion vs Vista Parallels Speed Test – And the Winner is VMWare Fusion!!!