The Olympics may be complete for four years however in the virtualization world is nothing short of a bloody dogfight. Only last week here at VMX.biz we were looking at the just-released Fusion 5 from VMware. In case you missed it we were able to grab a Parallels 7 install with Windows 8 Release Preview and bring it into VMware Fusion 5.
VMware certainly improve the performance in its current incarnation for Macintosh over Fusion 4. They also announced a competitive upgrade for Parallel users.
And here it is a mere week later and we upgraded Parallels 7 to Parallels 8. The general release of this version is 3 September 2012.
As you can see in our video the upgrade was painless. Just be sure to quit Parallels before you begin or you will get an ‘I can’t do that notice’ from Parallels.
There is no opportunity to keep your previous version – it must be erased. However for the paranoid, you are running Time Machine, aren’t you?
And we had absolutely zero issues as you can see in the video. In the immediate future we will be looking at what’s new in Parallels 8. The short answer is, plenty. And right off the bat we do not need a stopwatch to confirm that start up and suspending virtual machines is indeed faster.
VMware Fusion 5 started a horse race between itself and Parallels Desktop 7. That lasted about a week.
The finesse of being able to display Windows 8 with Mac display quality is a sight to behold. Due to video compression it may be difficult to show you this. We fully expect to see a trial version of Parallels 8 shortly so you can find out for yourself.
There are a number of other slick tricks they have stuffed into the code, which we will delve into shortly.
One welcome feature in the new version is there is no longer a question about Parallels Tools installation. In previous incarnations of Parallels this has been a little bit of an issue from time to time. In the new version Tools installs without prompting. As part of our testing we went to a snapshot created in Parallels 7 and installed it. Parallels 8 immediately installed Tools without being prompted.
Stay tuned.
