I've tried this as I was really excited after hearing about fusions discontinuation and how incredibly poorly performing virtualbox IO and network is.
I found it to be even slower than virtualbox which I have no idea how this is possible. Tested on a late 2015 5k iMac top specced and a late 2015 MacBook top specced both running OSX 10.11 at the time.
I will re-test the latest version with MacOS 10.12.
Totally different results here. I use a Surface Book now but on my Mac (2013 MBA) Veertu destroyed VMware and VirtualBox for interactive latency.
Ie, VirtualBox and VMware were slow to the point I'd consider them unusable (I'm latency sensitive, eg, I consider Eclipse to the be same and other people think it's fine). Veertu made me actually test in Edge again.
Did you still have VMware or VirtualBox drivers installed? IIRC VMware doesn't actually remove itself when you uninstall it, you have to remove the kmods yourself.
That is weird. I've used Virtualbox and VMWare on my MacBook Pros, and interactive latency has always been indistinguishable from a native application.
I'm latency sensitive as well, and just wondering: have you found any virtualization solution on Windows which provides usable performance for Linux guests?
Well that is working out horribly so far. Fusion 8.5.x is unusable on 10.12 due to a bug that causes an immediate crash when grabbing input control. I as well as many others reported the bug long ago but they have been unable to fix it. No surprise - the outsourced team is probably still scratching their heads trying to figure out what's what.
Works fine here too, but you are correct that this is a serious issue that people are bumping into.
Here's a quote from the product line marketing manager from VMware Fusion on this topic [0]
<quote>
We're really sorry about this situation, but rest assured it's our #1 bug right now.
It's technically both our and Apple's bug. The default behaviour of something we always called/did was changed in a later near-final build of 10.12, and that introduced this bug.
We and Apple are working together but like always we can't disclose timelines.
Please note that we are absolutely working on resolving this issue and issuing an update as soon as we can.
What if they estimate it's not worth the effort? Or is misaligned with other interests?
e.g. Apple could sell macOS licenses to run in a VM on non-Apple hardware, but they don't. To run macOS per the EULA, it can only be done on Apple hardware.
The only updates I remember since I last bought Fusion (just over a year ago, not long before their announcement) was a security update (I think that was the one in September you refer to) and perhaps a small point release or two.
I'm not really expecting any awesome new features, just bug fixes mostly.
As I move (mostly) back to Linux on the desktop, I'd really like to use VMware but I can't rationalize $249 for a product that is quite possible "end of life" (for all practical purposes).
OK just re-tested with the latest version (which is very different looking for sure) on the latest OSX on my top specced late 2015 iMac 5K 27''.
I mounted the latest CentOS 7 ISO image, completely standard and md5 summed, it boots to install and I have no keyboard or mouse control OR the VM is immediately frozen.
Seemed to boot faster than Fusion which is an improvement from the last time I tried.
I just re-tried installing CentOS 7 for the 4th time from the install DVD again and mouse / keyboard randomly works!? I don't think it was user error, but I'm not convinced it was a bug in the software either, perhaps my desktop was blocking usb access for some reason.
Performance of the install seems a LOT better than last time I tried.
I found that bridged networking does not work at all, no traffic flows, but the default 'shared' networking works perfectly.
I'm now doing an update of CentOS and will install the latest stable kernel from elrepo kernel-ml and fio, then I'll benchmark disk IO (I'm running a PCIe NVMe SSD that averages 1600-2000MB/s for sequential writes/reads so this should be interesting)
All went well with the update as expect, nice to have a modern kernel running, clearly a lot quicker, boots in around half a second after the BIOS.
Points of note thus far:
- Unsure if EFI is supported?
- Seems to be no way to create templates
- Cannot import a single file OVF image
- Cannot clone a VM
- Cannot snapshot a VM
- While importing a VM, you can't access the main window to start / edit other VMs UPDATE: scratch that - you can - but it's slow as anything even with none of my computers resources maxed out, it appears to be single threaded and perhaps some locking is occuring on the GUI.
- DISCARD / TRIM SSD support works perfectly as expected, unlike in VMware.
Importing a Windows 10 shudder OVA _directory_ export from VMware Fusion worked perfectly and was quick to complete.
- After installing the guest addons which was very quick as they must be quite light weight, all drivers worked perfectly and performance seems good in general (for windows anyway), have not tested 3D yet.
- No native resolution scaling when resizing the VM window even after installing tools
_NOTE:_ I will turn this thread into a blog post and put it up on https://smcleod.net when I have time, perhaps this weekend.
Not OP but I, personally, stopped using Fusion because of the constant annoying advertisements. I could understand if it were free but I paid a non-trivial amount for it out-of-pocket.
I can't complain about Parallels' performance. I was satisfied with it in that regard.
Source on VirtualBox being faster? Couple of benchmarks I've seen put VirtualBox at considerably slower[1] and Fusion slightly to considerably faster than Parallels.
Found the same on a 2015 rMBP with max specs (Sierra, 16GB RAM, Core i7). It's much less performant with exactly the same VM as VirtualBox.
In fact, it ate my entire CPU while it was running, even when the VM OS (Windows 10) settled down after startup. and was apparently running no CPU-intensive processes.
It also crashed twice in the space of an hour, bringing down the entire VM, necessitating a restart.
Could very well have been a factor. I gave up on it quickly. Repeatedly crashing renders it an unnecessary annoyance. VirtualBox works well enough, is stable and reliable, and Veertu doesn't distinguish itself enough to merit the pain in switching.
I found it to be even slower than virtualbox which I have no idea how this is possible. Tested on a late 2015 5k iMac top specced and a late 2015 MacBook top specced both running OSX 10.11 at the time.
I will re-test the latest version with MacOS 10.12.