Parallels® Desktop for Mac is used to run Windows on Intel or Apple silicon. Users can switch between Mac and Windows applications, while retaining the macOS appearance, or use the familiar Windows desktop aesthetic.
Because Hyper-V is a Microsoft product and based on Windows OS, creating virtual Windows servers and clients are easy. When we want to test our group policies it it best to do it on hyper-v environment then implement to production clients. The same goes with operating system quality and features updates as well as operating system upgrades.
Parallels works just like a window or application on the Mac. Hence, it is beneficial to keep both OS versions hand in hand. Parallels is very useful when writing code for mobile/iOS applications. File sharing and paste functions are very easy to use. More than one machine can be taken on Parallels. It also integrates with Microsoft Intune. It can run other OS versions other than Windows.
Virtualization - Hyper-V does this well and I feel like it might be the best and easiest software out there to use. I am able to spin up virtual environments very quickly. Hyper-V also has a "quick" add feature where you don't even need to have the OS ISO on your computer and you can choose between Windows 10, Server or Ubuntu.
Setup and Management - Hyper-V is pretty straight forward. When I first started using this it seemed a bit confusing, but after a couple of days of playing with it you end up finding out everything is pretty straight forward and really not that complicated.
Just turn off the VM and go into the settings and you can manage the Storage, Memory, and CPU's.
Setting a VM up on a Domain is super easy and you can create a static mac address for the machine so in Windows DHCP you can use that static mac address to give that VM an IP it can use every time it boots up.
I think the best feature is the ability to create "Checkpoints" - If you are going to be doing something over and over and you need to start from the same point with each test you can setup your VM the way you need it prior to testing. Create a Checkpoint. Do your tests and then revert back to the Checkpoint so the system will be exactly how you had it setup prior to testing. Then you can go on and do your second set of tests and so on.
Another great thing is the ability to just backup the vhdx file.
As I mentioned at the beginning of this review we run most everything from Hyper-V. I make weekly backup of the vhdx files which are the Virtual Environment files.
This is an extreme example, but if the building ever caught on fire I could go out and buy like 15 PCs at Best Buy and load up Hyper-V on them and just import the vhdx files and be back up and running fairly quickly.
File Transfer - You can easily transfer files between Parallels virtualized desktops and the host desktop either through Copy and Paste functionality, or Drag and Drop. You can also configure shared folders.
Switch Between Virtual and Host Desktop - You can configure swipe gestures on a MacBook Pro to be able to switch between the virtualized and host desktop. You can also launch apps from the OS X Taskbar.
Performance - Apps in Parallels run quite smoothly on my 2015 MacBook Pro, as of 2020. Considering they are running on a 5-year-old computer, I give Parallels top marks for performance.
I would love to see Hyper-V add a better remote control feature. As it is, it uses RDP to connect to any VM in the host. This is old technology and slowly deprecating. It would be significantly more useful to have a controlled interface for remoting to the VM's that is much more like Teamviewer, LogMeIn, etc.
The ability to do snapshots, backups, and other types of branching for VMs is a little confusing and takes a bit to get used to
The Parallels tools frequently pop up windows advertising functionality, while this is helpful at times it can also happen when you are doing a presentation or typing in a password.
Careful using the VMs on a shared cloud drive such as Dropbox or OneDrive, there are hundreds and sometimes thousands of files which are updated when running a VM and this can clog up your Dropbox or OneDrive sync for minutes to hours even on a 2gb connection.
Cheap and easy is the name of the game. It has great support, it doesn't require additional licenses, it works the same if it is a cluster or stand-alone, and all the servers can be centrally managed from a system center virtual machine manager server, even when located at remote sites.
We are completely pleased with the ease of deployment and use with Parallels. It has proven to be reliable, and Parallels technical support is there when we need them. There is a large user audience online for peer consultations and discussions. In general, it is a functional and easily maintained utility which serves our needs.
It is very easy to configure new virtual machines and manage them. But you have to use different interfaces to perform various tasks. Especially as soon as it comes to clustering you have to use at least two different interfaces (Hyper-V Manager and Failover-Cluster Manager) to perform all necessary tasks. The newly released Windows Admin Center is a way into the right direction to get all management tasks into one single interface.
It has a good integration, including the connection of peripherals. Taking files back and forth works well and I can attach my Home drive as a network drive in Windows. There is even integration with iCloud and other macOS services. There are also a few different display modes which are useful and fleixible (coherence, windowed, full-screen with multiple screens)
In the past 2 years our Hyper-V servers have only had a handful of instances where the VM's on them were unreachable and the physical Hyper-V server had to be restarted. One time this was due to a RAM issue with the physical box and was resolved when we stopped using dynamic memory in Hyper-V. The other times were after updates were installed and the physical box was not restarted after the updates were installed.
Hyper-V itself works quickly and rarely gave performance issues but this can be more attributed to the physical server specifications that the actual Hyper-V software in my opinion as Hyper-V technically just utilizes config files such as xml, and a data drive file (VHD, VHDX, etc) to perform its' duties.
Most of the time, you can find support on the thousands of websites, blogs and community sites that are out there. Very much Internet supported, and if you don't stray too far away from the standard setup of Hyper-v, you shouldn't go wrong. I've had to call a couple of times, and Microsoft was very good at resolving my problem. it seem that Microsoft has heard from people and their support system, and are doing a much better job in this
So, this rating is a little skewed toward older behavior from Parallels, as I haven't had to contact them recently. However, in an older version of Parallels, an "update" included pop-ups urging users to upgrade to the latest version, implying that their current version wouldn't work for the latest MacOS. I found it very frustrating to be getting ads for a new version of the software in a version I had already paid for. I contacted support about this and got a generic, uncaring response. It was pretty disappointing.
We had in person training from a third party and while it was very in depth it was at a beginner's level and by the time we received the training we had advanced past this level so it was monotonous and redundant at that point. It was good training though and would have provided a solid foundation for learning the rest of Hyper-V had I had it from the beginning.
The training was easy to read and find. There were good examples in the training and it is plentiful if you use third party resources also. It is not perfect as sometimes you may have a specific question and have to spend time learning or in the rare case you get an error you might have to research that error code which could have multiple causes.
initial configuration of hyper-v is intuitive to anyone familiar with windows and roles for basic items like single server deployments, storage and basic networking. the majority of the problems were with implementing advanced features like high availability and more complex networking. There is a lot of documentation on how to do it but it is not seamless, even to experienced virtualization professionals.
Considering the maturity of ESXi, Hyper-V is something I would definitely consider using in future jobs or organisations. We selected Hyper-V after many years of using ESXi; several factors led us to this change, including a poor support experience with VMware, and the lower cost of Hyper-V. We looked at other options including Nutanix and Hyper Converged Infrastructure, however with such a busy team we didn't have the time to learn this completely new technology stack, whereas (whilst also new) Hyper-V had a much easier learning curve.
Parallels provides what we need at a reasonable cost. VMware was a bit pricier, and Parallels has more of a "Mac-like" feel for the application itself. UTM and Crossover were a bit too "hacker-ish" for basic end users that just want to pop in and out of windows when necessary. Parallels is well supported and easy to use. It is also heavily used in Higher Education, which gives us a peer audience to work with.
Nothing is perfect but Hyper-V does a great job of showing the necessary data to users to ensure that there is enough resources to perform essential functions. You can also select what fields show on the management console which is helpful for a quick glance. There are notifications that can be set up and if things go unnoticed and a Hyper-V server runs out of a resource it will safely and quickly shut down the VM's it needs to in order to ensure no Hardware failure or unnecessary data loss.
The cost versus benefit is definitely in the users' favor - the licensing terms for simple desktop usage are very generous, and the business impact is enormous, being able to seamlessly jump from one OS to the other without dealing with multiple physical VMs or cloud remote sessions.
