Their uninstall icon sums up my feelings quite well. Their support is horrible, the forums are filled with people complaining and even their phone system is a joke; the IVR has a computer reading the name – Para-lel-ells – instead of a person.

The real deal breaker is the sticky keys bug.  Which ever the CMD key is mapped in a Windows VM doesn't work right. If you map CMD to ALT, Alt+Tab will 'stick'.  If you map CMD to WIN, modifier keys like WIN+D don't work right.

This bug with sticky keys was introduced a couple years ago when Parallels Desktop 4 was released, and still exists with v5.

Maybe VMware Fusion is slower¹, but VMware does virtualization right. I trust close to 90% of my servers to ESX/vSphere, and I'll continue to trust my desktop virtualization to Fusion. On a Windows desktop it's not even a question, VMware Workstation has no competition.

1. Fusion 3.1 RC is in public beta, so the MacTech benchmarks are already outdated [back]

I ran into an odd issue today on one of my colocated servers.  The server is a Core 2 Duo with 8 GB of RAM, running a thinned down version of CentOS.  The host is configured to fit all virtual machine memory into RAM, and the host s able to reserve 6400 MB of RAM.

There are 3 VMs on there; VM1 has 3072MB of RAM allocated to it, VM2 and VM3 each had 1536MB allocated.  I was adding some memory-intensive software to VM3 so I upped it's RAM allocation to an even 2GB (2048MB).

Shortly after that change the load on the host jumped from ~0.30 to ~1.8.  A handful of services on VM3 stopped starting and when I opened the Task Manager (it's a Windows server) the task manager process was pegging the CPU.  If you search for "taskmgr.exe 100% cpu" or "taskmgr.exe peg cpu" you'll find that most of the cases are spyware-related.  In this case it turns out that the host was starved for memory.  'top' on the host showed that I wasn't swapping any RAM to speak of, but I only had ~256MB free.

Tasks:  89 total,   1 running,  88 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
Cpu(s):  1.8%us, 58.5%sy,  0.0%ni, 39.5%id,  0.2%wa,  0.0%hi,  0.0%si,  0.0%st
Mem:   7457468k total,  7194396k used,   263072k free,    24652k buffers
Swap:  2048184k total,      120k used,  2048064k free,  6716580k cached

I reduced VM3's RAM back down to 1.5GB and magically all of my problems went away.

Tasks:  95 total,   1 running,  94 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
Cpu(s):  2.0%us,  5.1%sy,  0.0%ni, 92.5%id,  0.3%wa,  0.0%hi,  0.0%si,  0.0%st
Mem:   7457468k total,  7194588k used,   262880k free,    22956k buffers
Swap:  2048184k total,      124k used,  2048060k free,  6687792k cached