Just note this means you can't back up your Mac VM separately via Time Machine if you don't have a USB drive for that purpose. Because most FireWire and Thunderbolt drives also have USB ports, you can switch buses for that migration, then go back to the speedier bus for everyday operations. And like Parallels Desktop, Fusion doesn't see FireWire or Thunderbolt drives, so once you're running the Mac installer or Lion itself in a VM, you can't use the migration tools that Apple provides for such transfers.
Like Parallels Desktop, Fusion can't install Mac OS X from an existing partition, a Time Machine backup, or a disk image. But it shows that Parallels assumed newbie users, whereas VMware assumed more technical Mac users. You need to get it yourself, which is not at all difficult. Ironically, what Fusion won't do is connect you to the Mac App Store to download a fresh copy of the installer, as Parallels Desktop does. Last year, both companies delivered ambitious new versions to capitalize on back-to-back debuts of Windows 10 and OS X El Capitan, but the 2016 editions are somewhat more. That's not the case with Fusion 4.01, which works with the Install Mac OS X Lion.app installer file just as easily as it does with a Windows or Linux. In what has now become an annual ritual, VMware and Parallels have updated their respective Fusion and Desktop products to coincide with the recent release of macOS Sierra. If you've already downloaded the Lion installer image, Parallels makes you jump through arcane hoops to use it. I disliked the difficulty of installing Mac OS X Lion in Parallels Desktop 7 the software assumes you don't have a local copy and thus defaults to re-downloading the whole 4GB image file.
Just as Parallels Desktop 6 runs fine on Mac OS X Lion, so does VMware Fusion 3.1 the main reason to upgrade to Fusion 4.01 is to gain the ability to run Mac desktop VMs, a handy feature if you're a Mac developer or tester. Does VMware Fusion 4.01 up the ante in any significant way? Not really. Both Parallels and Fusion of course run various versions of Windows and Linux, their primary use case.Īs our review of Parallels Desktop 7 noted, there's not much compellingly new to that product since its last update, a year earlier. Prior to Lion, Apple restricted such usage to Mac OS X Server. In addition to supporting Lion as a host, both take advantage of Apple's change in policy that lets users run the desktop version of Mac OS X Lion in virtual machines. Both have been updated to take advantage of Mac OS X Lion. In the Mac-based desktop virtualization world, there are two significant choices: Parallels Desktop and VMware Fusion.