The Macintosh virtual machine market is heating up as the two leading contenders, Parallels Desktop and VMware Fusion release updates of their products. First VMware Fusion has added a number of improvements in version 3.0.1. You can see the entire list here. All of them are meant to increase speed. A Vista VM that I tested went from 2.9 to 4.4 simply by doing that update. A significant increase. Parallels Desktop 5 hasn’t rested on their laurels having kicked up an update to their product. You can see the list of changes here. I use the latter product and my Windows experience score in my Vista VM has gone up from 2.9 to 4.2. That’s not a minor performance difference either. But oddly, my Windows 7 score dropped from 4.2 to 3.9 because my gaming performance dropped to 3.9 (Your Windows Vista or Windows 7 score is based on your lowest score). What’s up with that?
In any case, the battle continues. The winners will users of these products. That’s a good thing.