Parallels or vmwareFusion on MacBookAir?

The Air is doing the tasks it was designed for very well. Is there a reason you HAVE to use an Air with virtualisation or could you also use a MacBook or MBP ? I would recommend one of these, since the Air will run hot soon when you let II or Fusion churn cpu cycles in addition to OS X and its apps.

Volker

You're not going to get significantly less RAM usage with Fusion, if at all. The amount of RAM used is primarily dictated by the guest OS in the virtual machine. The amount of RAM that Fusion or Parallels uses compared to the guest is nearly insignificant. (Assuming you're using Windows or a GUI based Linux.) Significant in your case because you only have 2GB of RAM. I don't have Parallels installed right now, but on my MBP, Fusion is using about 45MB of RAM above what the virtual machine uses. Compared to the 1GB that my virtual machine takes, that's what I mean by Fusion's RAM use being insignificant.

As stated, the MBA is what it is: designed for light use. So simple answer is if you can't run the guest OS within the 2GB you have, it's Boot Camp or sell the MBA and get a MB or MBP (or ugh! a PC. NOOOOOO! 😉 )

IrelandsNextTopModel wrote:
Hi Asatoran

When you're dealing with virtual machines that need
gigabytes of memory, even a couple hundred MB gets meaningless.
So compared to a 2GB Win7 virtual machine, a couple hundred MB is still quite small.

True.
And I can understand your standpoint.

But I am in a totally different position than you.

I cannot afford to waste one single Megabyte, because
the (largest!) MacBookAir forces me to live with 2GB
until the end of times.
Sigh, bitten into the Apple, thrown out of paradise 🙂

I have successfully run virtual machines in Fusion when my MBP had only 2GB. Of course, I could only run one virtual machine at a time and I couldn't have open very many other programs on the mac side, if any, depending on the needs of the virtual machine. But it is not impossible. It's just that with 2GB of RAM, its like having a quarter-ton capacity pickup truck. You can only haul a quarter-ton at a time. If the load is one-ton, then you need a different truck. Thus the recommendations from me and others that the MBA might not be the best choice for you.

(a) 1.19 GB is not max-accuracy.
Can you please once turn down the guest-RAM below 1GB, thx.

See answer to point (c).

(b) Please switch on all Memory-columns. Does anyone know,
which of the columns is relevant for the actual physical RAM usage?
RealMemory

Real Memory

(c) If I would ONLY sum up your RealMem column:
1190 3+42+0.08+0.08+0.648+0.216+0.3880.001 = 1236.4
Please tell me the exact RAM size of you guest OS, probably 1024MB?
1236.4 - 1024 = 212 MB

2GB allocated to the virtual machine. In actual usage, you can see that it's using 1.2GB. I didn't state the sum because I believed it was quite obvious from the screen shot that the RAM used by the helper apps is not really that significant compared to the virtual machine. Unlike your screen shots, where it's difficult to determine how much RAM the Parallels virtual machine is using, with Fusion, the VMX process is the virtual machine, and all the VMWare related helper apps are grouped close by, which makes it easy to see that the RAM usage of the virtual machine is really what you need to be concerned about. When you're down to the last hundred MB of RAM, you're basically out of RAM anyway. Thus you need to close whatever else on the Mac side. If that's not possible, then you need more physical RAM, which in your case, means a new computer, which is what has been recommended to you already.

The reason I have allocated 2GB to this Vista virtual machine is that Vista needs 1GB as a minimum in order to run at any reasonable speed. But that's just for Vista. The window in the background of my screenshot is the virtual machine. It's Vista Business at the login prompt, not logged in yet and it's using 1.2GB of RAM without any other apps running! So 2GB is usual minimum recommended in order to actually use Vista or Windows 7 with "standard" business apps and not pull your hair out. When I had only 2GB in the Mac and the Vista Virtual machine was allocated 1GB, I could only have Outlook and possibly Word or Excel open simumtaneously. And because the Vista virtual machine was using nearly all the remaining free RAM from the Mac, I couldn't open anything else on the Mac side.

With a WinXP virtual machine, I could also run with 1GB allocated to the virtual machine. But SP3 for XP and the various updates to the apps and antivirus, 1GB was getting nearly as bad as Vista. So again, I could only run Outlook and Word and maybe Excel simultaneously. But again, the virtual machine was using all free RAM on the Mac side so again, I couldn't open any apps on the Mac.

My point is that, yes it's possible to run a virtual machine in 2GB of physical RAM. BUT(!) you have to limit yourself since you don't have RAM. AND(!) if you don't allocate enough RAM to the virtual machine, the virtual machine's performance suffers. No point in tweaking down the RAM so much that the virtual machine side runs horrible. Sorry, I've not got much time at the moment to post more tests of the virtual machine at other RAM settings. You'll just have to take my word (or not. 😉 ) But really, as I said, IMHO the MBA is for light work. (One of the reasons for the name "Air", hint, hint 😉 ) One virtual machine lightly used is possible on the MBA. But it's only one because you basically have to give the virtual machine half of your total RAM. (Assuming a Windows virtual machine or any Linux with a GUI. Different story if you're running a DOS virtual machine. You don't say what OS your virtual machine is running. But if you've only allocated half a gig of RAM to a Windows virtual machine, you'll likely go to swap file and that's even worse for a virtual machine due to the additional overhead inherent to disk writes in most virtual machines.)

For what it's worth I have used Fusion, Parallels & Virtual Box for Ubuntu, Win. XP, Win. 7, Vista & Google Chrome OS on an original MBA. None were unbearable short-term. Chrome OS was only tested on Parallels 5.

Hello, as others have pointed out, ram is primarily used by the VM not the program itself, and the AIR is suitable only for short period of time use.
For that reasons I am "off the air" now, and have moved over to the small macbook pro which is a way better machine for real use anyway. It still is portable enough and it does normal duty tasks.

I run VMWare nowadays because past versions (I was on parallels until version 3 included) of parallels crashed my kernel from time to time, and I could not be happier, it is really impressiv what VMWare has achieve in such a short period of time on the mac, I even can switch between bootcamp boots and VMWare boots in no time, without having to reactivate Windows, and everything runs really smooth and fast.

"[Apple] chose to produce a 2GB computer in 2009 which cannot be upgraded to more RAM. Incredible in itself."

What's incredible is that you knew that, and you bought the computer when you needed more than 2GB of DRAM.

Apple Discussions is a user-to-user tech support forum for Apple products only. If you wish to ask specific questions about 3rd party software, people use the forums for those 3rd party products.

IrelandsNextTopModel wrote:
(*) vmware VS parallels

Rest assured there is no meaningful data to be found on that topic.

(*) could neither be discussed +independently enough+ in vmware forums
(*) nor in parallels forums

Try Macintouch for one. I'm sure there are others.

(*) Virtualisation it is very important for OS X users, because there is still some software which runs only on Windows

That is true. That is why there is a forum specifically for Windows compatibility.

(*) the discussed topic had enough answers to proof that it is important to the people here - or do you want to really silence this vote-with-the-feet ??

Actually? Yes, because it is a waste of time. You bought a machine that can only be expanded to 2 GB RAM, now you want more. Your memory usage is as good as it gets. Too bad. Deal with it.

(*) It is an important MBA question, how much overhead both virtualisations have.
(*) no one else on this planet would discuss a 650MB-vs-722MB problem in virtualisation of a 500MB guest OS, only us MacBookAir users - because we are the only ones to not be able to extend the RAM memory. So this discussion +belongs HERE+.

Oh really? What about those of us who ran (and still do run) Windows via Parallels on 1st generation Macbooks with only 2GB RAM.

Do you now understand why we discuss it here, etresoft?

What is there to discuss? You have 2 GB of RAM. That's it. You knew that when you bought it. You want to know if VMWare will do better? Apparently not. What are your options? VirtualBox, maybe better, maybe worse. BootCamp, definitely better with different tradeoffs. A machine with more RAM, definitely better.

I have set the Parallels VM memory on my MBA to 384M. I am still able to boot and run XP in the VM, and Parallels seems to be using less locked-down memory. I have not tried lower values than 384M, but I may, since the jump from 512M to 384M was so helpful.