OpenSolaris on Mac: Goodbye Parallels, Hello VMWare Fusion

Let me state that my feelings regarding EMC are unchanged. Worst storage product line ever, someone needs to tell the CLARiiON product team that this is the 21st century and get it into gear. What a horrible storage company. Anyway, now that thats out of the way….

The laptop debate has for the last couple years gone like this for me: “If you want a portable workstation, buy an Acer Ferrari. If you want to walk into a room and get on the wireless and download your pictures and not waste half a meeting trying to get your laptop setup properly just buy a Mac.” Personally I’m not a fan of the OS X interface, I’m an E on X sorta guy and thats how I work best, but I got tired of spending time configuring things and being embarrassed in front of an audience because I couldn’t make my stupid laptop do what it needed to. So I like the ease of the Mac but I still need Solaris. What to do.

BootCamp is a waste, imho. Sure, you can boot another OS on your Mac but the point of buying a Mac is to have all that easy to setup, easy to configure goodness at your fingertips. Rebooting back into OS X is a pain and a waste, so I don’t really care for BootCamp.

Parallels was a great option. Except… well, it wasn’t. I’ll admit I never got Solaris to install properly with it. Yes, I read all the blog entries out there and notes on getting it up but I never had the same luck. Most of the time it would install to about 14% and just hang forever, and no it wasn’t running out of disk space. Things were fine when Sun offered up pre-installed Parallels images, but I really want to test installs myself and in general the product was just lacking.

Enter VMWare Fusion. I always root for the underdog, I had no interest in trying VMWare on Mac, but hearing several rave reviews I decided to give it a shot. To my great surprise it’s a much better product. So much so that I didn’t realize how much I was missing out on using Parallels. I downloaded the OpenSolaris B70 ISO and booted it with VMWare Fusion and the install flew along. Perception or not, VMWare just feels faster in general. Within the hour I was logging into B70 and installing my standard software packages.

If your a VMWare/EMC hater like myself (I’m certain I’m not the only one) and you have a MacBook its definately worth the try. Besides, Parallels isn’t the underdog that we thought it was, as it was quietly bought by SWSoft (makers of Virtuozzo the ISP in a box responsible for most of the crappy service available today).

… on a related note, iWork ’08 and iLife ’08 are the first releases that really look worth the $80. In the past the improvements were only such that I’d wait untill I got a new Mac in a year or so… but this time I may go out and buy ‘em. Of course, I really do have my eyes on the new iMac’s, but like I said, I don’t like OS X beyond the applications, so I think I’ll put the money toward a Sun Ultra40 or new whitebox instead.

54 Responses to “OpenSolaris on Mac: Goodbye Parallels, Hello VMWare Fusion”

  1. Iban says:

    Ey, Ben I have already installed Solaris Nevada b70 in my Parallels 4124 (running in a Mac Mini 1.6GHz with CoreDuo and 1.5Gb of RAM) and works very fine (the sound is not working yet) but all is working fine. So, what’s the problem with Parallels have you?

    What’s about performance with both Parallels and VMWare, this is more fast than Parallels?

    Cheers!

  2. AaronT says:

    What makes EMC and the CLARiiON SAN so bad? I’m not trying to say they are good, but just wondering as where i work has spent quite a bit on CLARiiON SANs.

    Not being a ‘SAN’ guy i havent been able to touch them, from what ive seen they dont seem that great.

  3. Tom says:

    Ben,

    Haven’t tried it on my home mac, but Virtualbox (www.virtualbox.org) now has a beta out for the mac.

  4. Alex Johnson says:

    I had the same experience with Parallels. Impressive enough when it was the only game in town, but once VMWare Fusion came out, it became pretty obvious that there were chinks in its armor. I bought a Parallels license early on and used the heck out of it, but have since bought a copy of Fusion and haven’t looked back. It definitely *feels* faster and more solid. Also, the ability for it to virtualize two CPUs to the guest OS is critical for testing multithreaded apps.

  5. Dan says:

    Ah yes, the infamous CLARiiON. I just have to say at my last job we has a StorEdge 9980 I really liked it. My current job we have a Symmetrix for high end and CLARiiON for lower end storage, and thats exactly what it is, low end. I’ve never seen so many problems with a storage array! The array trespasses all the time, some in part due to Sun Explorer touching all DMP paths, the SP’s seem very unstable and the Veritas ASL’s don’t work well with it either.

    Anyway, I have to agree with you Ben regarding Parallels, I ran the prepackaged OpenSolaris image for awhile, but wasn’t happy with it. I’ll have to check out Fusion

  6. Gimlet says:

    Ben, I’m confused. First you say that “I got tired of spending time configuring things and being embarrassed in front of an audience because I couldn’t make my stupid laptop do what it needed to” but then you state that you “don’t like OS X beyond the applications.” So, OS X is easy to use and has applications that you like, so what’s rubbing you the wrong way?

  7. Calum says:

    @Iban: I suspect Ben had the same problems I did with Solaris in Parallels… no clock sync, no shared folders between host and guest, no automatic desktop resizing when you resize the guest machine’s window (yes, this even matters if you run in fullscreen all the time– my external monitor in the office is bigger than my MBP’s screen), no battery info passed through to Solaris etc. Fusion handles all of that out of the box (well, once you’ve installed the VMtools), and more.

  8. Calum says:

    Oh, I forgot that sound works out of the box in Fusion, as does copy/paste/drag-n-drop between Solaris and OS X!

  9. jzambon says:

    The Clariion product line is the worst! I administered a CX700 at my last job and we had the DMP trespassing problems that Alex mentions. I’ve never seen a SAN with such instability. On more than one occasion, we had the entire SAN down due to trespassing problems. I use Hitachi and StorageTek at my current job and it’s rock solid.

    I’m sufficiently happy with Parallels in OS X, and I had no problems installing Solaris 10. I did have some clock sync issues, but I could live with that.

    I second Dan’s comment about OS X. Ben, if OS X does everything you ask of it, why don’t you love it?

  10. Claire says:

    “If your a VMWare/EMC”

    Looks like firefox red underline of alarm can’t fix up homonym confusion – it’s “you’re” ;)

  11. greg says:

    As someone who has been running Parallels and VMware Fusion side by side ever since Fusion first went beta, I concur that VMware Fusion is now a much better program. Parallels started out as faster, but Fusion quickly pulled ahead. Also the crashes on Parallels would, on a regular basis, corrupt the disk image so bad I was forced to re-install the guest. I am now a happy camper, with Windows, Linux & Solaris all able to run on my Mac (and yes I do use them all).

  12. I did a bakeoff of four of the main VMs for OS X when I was looking for a way to have a copy of Windows for testing. To cut a long story short Fusion, then still in beta, was way ahead of Parallels or QEMM or VirtualBox. I have WindowsXP, Solaris 10 and Ubuntu installed in it and it all just worked, like Macs are supposed to ;)

  13. Agreed on the Parallels stability comments. Between all of the 3.x releases up to the 41xx not more than one update would be stable enough to use. Their kernel drivers are obviously very badly done, for just launching Parallels’ UI without the guest running could take down OS X, sucking out 90% of the CPU, at the fault of a kernel module trying to load, but never loading. VMware’s core is the same on Fusion as it is on Linux and Windows, and the UI is done in Cocoa/Obj-C to wrap the backend, and I must say they did a great job with that, considering how cheap Parallels seems to be side by side. The only gripe with Fusion is lack of multiple snapshots and FUSE integration of volumes, oh and a UI option for VNC functionality, which can be done by editing the vmx file. But all in all, unless I must have multiple snapshots, I use Fusion. As for Parallels, just look at the proprietary disk format and instability if you’re still not sure that you should try Fusion. I bought both at reduced price, by opting for pre-release license, but at the end of the day my mind is at ease, and my system remains up and running. Solaris support is a lot better with VMware anyways, always has been versus other virtualization solutions. After beta3 of Fusion the performance caught up to Parallels. Feature creep is the culprit for the armor damage in Parallels, well that and probably the legacy architecture which was ported quickly with no real design initiative. Sad that they have fallen by the wayside on their Workstation product (Parallels) since their disk format is undocumented and is only portable with VMware’s migration tool, or by flat disk conversion.

  14. Eric says:

    Please don’t confuse EMC with VMW. Even though EMC owns a majority stake in VMW, VMW is a completely disjoint company, and has a much better reputation for product quality. And it isn’t just your perception, Fusion really is faster, there are benchmarks out there to prove it.

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  36. Caspar says:

    Very interesting article: “OpenSolaris on Mac: Goodbye Parallels, Hello VMWare Fusion”

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  48. Ben says:

    Does someone tried solaris on a mac using Sun virtual box? If i plug a USB disk can i put zfs? I’ll try and tell you…soon

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