The IT Nerd

Last night I got around to migrating my virtual machines from Parallels Desktop 13 to VMware Fusion 10. It was something that I was dreading because of the time involved to do this. Plus I was expecting to have some problems along the way. But I knew that I had to get it done as I use these virtual machines frequently in my job. Now before I get to the part where I tell you how I did it, let me tell you why I made the move to VMware Fusion 10. There’s three reasons:

1. VMware Fusion 10 provides mitigations from the Spectre CPU vulnerability. That’s important to me as I take security seriously. Parallels Desktop 13 doesn’t appear to provide that mitigation which was a concern to me and was the main driver for me to make the switch.
2. The secondary reason for me to make the switch was the fact that Parallels Desktop 13 displays ads when you start the program. That’s a total #EpicFail in my mind because if you pay for a product, you should not ever expect to see ads. EVER.
3. I did note that in the process of reviewing VMware Fusion 10, it came out as simply the better product as it supports features such as NVMe devices, UEFI Secure Boot, UEFI boot, and TPM chips which means that I can accurately replicate customer environments so that I can understand why they are having an issue, and come up with a fix for it.

So with that out of the way. Migrating from Parallels Desktop 13 to VMware Fusion 10 was mostly easy. The process to migrate is detailed in this VMware document. It’s pretty straightforward for the most part. The only problems that I came across were:

• My Windows 10 and 7 virtual machines had no sound after they came up in VMware Fusion 10. To try and fix that, I tried this VMware knowledgebase document with no success. But thanks to my friend Google I found this discussion page from VMware which worked. Oddly, even though what each documents wanted me to do was largely the same, a couple of things that the VMware discussion page contradicted what the VMware knowledgebase document said. But still worked. VMware needs fix that to make life easier for their customers.
• My Windows 7 VM would not scale the video to match my MacBook Pro’s retina display until I reinstalled VMware Tools. Then it worked fine. I am guessing that something went sideways during the transition which required me to reinstall VMware Tools.
• My Windows XP virtual machine blue screened when it came up after I pulled it into VMware Fusion. Nothing that I did would fix that. Thus I decided to do without it as I haven’t used it in ages.

After that was all done, I deleted Parallels Desktop to reclaim some disk space and the migration was complete. Thus far, I am happy with the results. I should have made this switch long ago as VMware Fusion 10 will make a significant difference for me when it comes to my usage of virtual machines.

This entry was posted on February 23, 2018 at 8:08 am and is filed under Commentary with tags VMWare Fusion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.