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Neither offer major improvements for Windows users, but they add welcome support for Mac OS X Lion virtual machines
In the Mac-based desktop virtualization world, there are two significant choices: Parallels Desktop and VMware Fusion. Both have been updated to take advantage of Mac OS X Lion. 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. Prior to Lion, Apple restricted such usage to Mac OS X Server. Both Parallels and Fusion of course run various versions of Windows and Linux, their primary use case.
As our review of Parallels Desktop 7 noted, there's not much compellingly new to that product since its last update, a year earlier. Does VMware Fusion 4.01 up the ante in any significant way? Not really. 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.
[ See InfoWorld's slideshow tour of Mac OS X Lion's top 20 features. | Learn why IT won't like Mac OS X Lion Server. | Keep up with key Mac OS X, iOS, and other Apple technologies with the Technology: Apple newsletter. ]
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. If...