I recently needed to decide which virtualization software to use on my new MacMini.

I see three main competitors for Desktop Virtualization on the Mac:

•     Paralles Desktop for Mac (~ 80 €)
•     VMWare Fusion (~ 70 €, now 40 € introduction price)
•     Virtualbox (OpenSource / with Extension pack usage under their PUEL License)

Parallels and VMWare are commercial products while Virtualbox (at least the main part) is now OpenSource and if you use their Oracle Expansion Pack is at least free for personal use under their PUEL License).
It proved to be hard to find some serious comparison of the three at a recent version. So I decided to make my own. Fortunately VMWare and Parallels provide time-limited demos of their software for evaluation purposes. I took that offer. Installed the three and made some testing and benchmarks.

The tests were conducted on a MacMini 2011 with 2,3 GHz Core i5 Processor and 8 GB RAM and the Stock 500GB Toshiba MK5065GSFX HardDrive.

I installed each of the three on a fresh installation of Mac OS X (10.7.2), rebooted between startup tests and bechmarks to avoid caching effects. And waited at min 1 Minute after Startup to ensure all system services and startup items were done.
No additional software was installed on the machine, just bare Mac OS + one of the virtualization software products.

Tested product versions were : Virtualbox 4.1.6, VMWare Fusion 4.1.1 and Parallels 7.0.15052 . Each virtual machine was installed with standard options, given 2GB of RAM and 20 GB of dynamically expanding harddisk.

Windows startup performance was measured with a stopwatch, taken 7 times, best and worst time were thrown away and the other times averaged for each product. Taken was the time from pressing the "Start VM" button until the Desktop background first appeared, this means these times include startup and initialization of the VMs and it's bios.

Results

Analysis and remarks:

In Windows 7 Startup performance the clear winner in my tests was Parallels Desktop. However I assume they use some startup optimization by modifying the windows boot process. How come ? Well Virtualbox and VMWare show the normal boot screen just like a regular PC for Windows 7 ( the three moving colory things), while Parallels shows some Vista style progress bar. Hence I assume they somehow change and enhance the bootup process to get this clear advantage.
I could probably have tested some Linux / Mac operating system startup performance, but that would have increased my test time more than I would have wanted – maybe next time.

Unfortunately I had to disable 3D acceleration for the Virtualbox tests, when it was turned on PCMark would crash for me right after starting. This leads to bad graphical performance for Virtualbox in DirectX, Video Playback and other graphical parts of PCMark and thus results in an overall "bad" PCMark Score not directly comparable to the other two.

Crystal Disk Mark showed odd high values for Parallels and Fusion read tests, most likely because they use some form of caching, which is why I only included 4k write values here. They show a huge (~ 50%) advantage for Vmware.

Geekbench is a computational intensive cross platform benchmark, that stresses mainly the CPU with Encryption, Compression, Image Manipulation and mathematical tests. All products are in a very close range here, with a variance of approx 1%. You could say that all three products perform almost identical.

Conclusions :

In Windows startup performance (at least for Windows 7 32bit) the crown clearly goes to Parallels Desktop for Mac. However I did not test VM suspend/resume performance thoroughly which is probably at least as interesting …

Pure CPU computing performance (geekbench, PCMark image manipulation etc.) just differs by about 1% between the three tested products. So if you run just CPU intensive stuff like whatever (image manipulation, scientific calculations) that does not use much data from the disk it does not matter much, which one you choose. Even though I would attest  Parallels a quantum of advance in this field.

Putting caching effects aside, VMWare seems to achieve the best disk IO performance.

In my tests VMWare also achieved the best 3D graphcis performance. Here you have to consider that Virtualbox is not as bad as 1 fps suggests, I have successfully tested games using Virtualbox on my older macbook, so in general 3D works there too, it just did not work with PCMark 7 in my tests. However I think Fusion does best when it comes to 3D Applications.

My Verdict :

Parallels Desktop for Mac
+ choose if you want absolute fastest CPU performance, even though only by a margin
+ very good Mac integration (copy & paste between Mac Desktop and Windows VM)
- faster release cycle with a lot of paid upgrades
- highest Retail price

VMWare Fusion
+ best IO performance
+ best 3D performance
+ very good Mac integration (copy & paste between Mac Desktop and Windows VM)
+ can be used with one license on a Desktop and a Laptop by one person (> link)
- offered no upgrade between Fusion 3 and 4 at all.

Virtualbox
+ Free – obviously the best price
+ OpenSource (at least the main part)
- worst IO / 3D performance of the three

If you only occasionally use a virtual machine or two. I would choose Virtualbox. Free is simply too good of a price. It works good, has almost all the features the other two have – but unfortunately doesn't have such good Mac integration as the other two.
I choose Fusion – why ? It has good performance, all the features I need and I can install it on my MacMini and my Macbook simultaneosly, so I have my VMs when I'm on the road.
I once used Parallels, but I didn't like their paid upgrades which came quite often ( and which I would have needed to run it on Snow Leopard). So I cross-switched to Fusion in a promotion for about 10€. I'm quite happy with it. VMWare has a huge userbase with all their virtualization products across all platforms and you can google solutions to almost everything related quickly. Unfortunately they do not provide an upgrade at all from 3 to 4, however the posibility to run it on all my Macs makes that up for me. So I took Fusion 4 with the promotional discount for about 40 €.
 

Telling you that it can not work with your Terminal because it doesn't know anything about "xterm-256color".

The root cause is that with 10.7 apple set the environment variable "TERM=xterm-256color" probably to promote some new capatibilites of Terminal.app. This variable is then on the other unixes interpreted from terminal programs using the Terminfo library. However they do not have the proper definition for "xterm-256color" in place, so we have to add it.

If you google this error, it will yield a bunch of results with most suggesting copying over the complete terminfo folder to your mac. While this will probably solve the problem, because the missing terminfo file is then available, I consider this an absolute non-optimal approach as it could break some stuff with existing terminfo files getting overwritten.
 

I rather recommend using the less invasive method of just copying over the needed terminfo file form your mac.

(Open)Solaris :

ssh SolarisMachine
pfexec scp MacUserName@MacComputerNameOrIP:/usr/share/terminfo/78/xterm-256color /usr/share/lib/terminfo/x
pfexec chown root:bin /usr/share/lib/terminfo/x/xterm-256color

Linux

ssh LinuxMachine
sudo scp MacUserName@MacComputerNameOrIP:/usr/share/terminfo/78/xterm-256color /lib/terminfo/x
sudo ln -s /lib/terminfo/x/xterm-256color /usr/share/terminfo/x/

Please note that the above terminfo location (/lib/terminfo) was for one of my Ubuntu LTS 10.04 servers, you may have to adjust this if you use another distribution …

Now everything runs for me as smooth as it should.

Made my EasyTAG build for OSX Lion compatible. Thanks to the gtk+ people who provided gtk Lion patches in no time.
Please post some feedback if it works correctly. I would especially need feedback from 10.4 Users (if there are any left because I can't test that myself

  Go get it

Unfortunately Time Machine told me that I could not do so, because my Time Machine / AFP server didn't have all necessary capabilities. Humm it worked fine with Snow Leopard …

Then I tried to connect to the server via AFP – and that didn't work either :
After inputting my password in the authentication dialog Finder told me that "The version of the server you are trying to connect to is not supported. Please contact your system administrator to resolve the problem."

That would be me …

So I fired up Google and the problem seemed well known :

For security reasons apple disabled "DHCAST128", which is an asymmetrical encryption algorithm used for the password authentication, as allowed for the AFP Protocol in Lion. Now the minimum requirement is "DHX2" – the successor of DHCAST128.

Unfortunatly the provided solutions did not work for me … :

They suggested adding the following line to afpd.conf

But hey I already had this line there. hmmm. I searched around for other stuff but couldn't find the error.

Then I decided to try out the newest beta version of netatalk (2.2-beta4) but ended up the same. I thought it was "correctly" configured and indeed all the configuration options in the configuration file were correct.
The problem was that "uams_dhx2.so" did not exist in /usr/local/etc/netatalk/uams/ .
Weird – I looked through the build scripts and the build log and there it hit me :
libgcrypt was checked for CAST5 support which it did not find

If I would have paid more attention at build time I would have obviously noted that :

uh ah,

the configure summary too listed that the dhx2 module was not build :

The reason for this is as stated in the configure log, that the installed libgcrypt does not support the CAST5 algorithm. And why ? Because of patent issues … (Opensolaris "Bug" 15527)

I can't relate to that because as far as I could research, Cast5 (also known as CAST-128) which is described in IETF RFC2144 is even though (partly) patented, has been granted for use for any purpose by anyone royalty and license free (1, 2).

So in case you want Lion support and are sure that you are not affected by any patent issues (in doubt you should probably contact a lawyer), then compile libgcrypt yourself with CAST5 support and then your AFP auth should work …

Instructions :

Please note that I am disabling zeroconf (aka bonjour), because I want to set it up manually like described in my previous post ->here.
Someday I may combine everything into a single instruction set for current OpenIndiana / Solaris 11 Express / Nexentastor.

Everything is working again and I am happy

I ended up renaming ~/Library/Keychains/login.keychain to ~/Library/Keychains/login.keychain.OLD and then restored a version from 2 weeks ago from one of my TimeMachine backups. Logged out – Logged in and everything works perfectly again.

TimeMachine saved the day

The feature list includes :
   » Usage of the OS X MenuBar
   » Added Mac OS X alike themeing
   » Update notification and self-updating capatibilities with a Sparkle helper application

-> Go get it while it's hot
 

I would be very interested in any feedback, especially about 10.5 and 10.4 experience and I would like to know even if everything works perfectly  

I wish everyone a happy new year !

I had this article lying around for about a year as a draft now – recently I fixed the avahi TimeMachine advertising and I thought finishing up and publishing this article would be a good thing.
Of course some things have changed, like most recent versions numbers and Opensolaris … but it should not matter if you try this on Opensolaris B134 , Illumnos or Solaris 11 Express because the internals are almost the same :

Until now I used to exchange files between my MacBook and my HomeServer running Opensolaris via the smb protocol. Sadly this is far from perfect because smb does not support some of the Apple specific network filesystem stuff.
It gets especially nasty with Snow Leopard and TimeMachine. In 10.6 I could not get TimeMachine to work properly with samba – so I decided to take the time and configure my OpenSolaris to be an AFP server too.
It turned out that this was rather easy either way, especially with netatalk 2.0.5 and above having "extended" TimeMachine Support via the "tm" switch.

Even cooler ZFS provides you with quota options and additional transparent compression for your TimeMachine backups …

Here are the steps I performed.

If you haven't compiled anything manually on your OpenSolaris box, an easy way to get a gcc development platform is installing the gcc-dev package :

Table of contents :
» Configure a ZFS filesystem for use with TimeMachine
» Installing Berkely DB
» Installing Netatalk
» Configurin Avahi
 

Configure a ZFS filesystem for use with TimeMachine

If you do not already have a seperate filesystem for the TimeMachine Backups, I recommend making a seperate one for each TimeMachine client. It's very easy and introduces only minimal overhead with ZFS.
ZFS provides very useful options for its filesystems among them are quotas and transparent compression.
Quota is very useful because you can easily limit the timemachine's backup size and prevent filling it up your whole pool. I recommend setting the quota to at least 1.5x the size of your Macs harddrive if you can afford. That way even with an almost full harddisk you can keep some older backups in your timemachine (always depending on how much you change between timemachine cycles). For the 160GB HD in my MacBook this means 250GB backup space on the ZFS filesystem.
Very cool is zfs transparent filesystem compression. TimeMachine does not use compression and afaik it can not be turned on manuall either. So you just tell your zfs to compress everything TimeMachine writes to it by issuing the simple command mentioned below. This will turn on standard ZFS compression, which is a good trade-off in terms of compression/speed ratio. If you want to use a more agressive compression scheme, just look up the compression part in the ZFS manual.

Install Berkeley db

The Berkeley db is the database backend needed by netatalk to store all kind of stuff.

You have two options for installing it :
1. Use the "unofficial" package from the OpenSolaris Contrib repository
2. Compile and install it on your own

I prefer the second one for now, because I consider it less likely that a dist upgrade of bdb breaks my netatalk – and the bdb in the contrib repository is not the newest version.
The downside is you have to manually install and "mantain" it.
Your choice …
 

Easy Installation

Via the Package Manager from the Opensolaris Contrib Repository

http://pkg.opensolaris.org/contrib/en/catalog.shtml

Find the "bdb" entry and click on the "Install" Button, then follow the instructions from the Packetmanager

Manual Installation

Download the latest version from
http://www.oracle.com/technology/software/products/berkeley-db/db/index.html

move to an appropriate place, configure, build and install it

Install netatalk

Download the latest netatalk package from
http://sourceforge.net/projects/netatalk/files/

Configure netatalk

If you haven't set up a filesystem for TimeMachine Backup, look here and then continue.

Edit the netatalk configuration files in /usr/local/etc/netatalk/

We just need AFPD – ATALKD is for pre OSX Systems and PAPD is for printer services.
 

the first entry is the path in the filesystem on the Opensolaris System, the Second one inside the hyphens "The Name" displayed in the Finder.
Then the access priviliges, if you want a specific user to have access you can replace "@staff" with your username.
The "tm" option is essential and it is only available in netatalk 2.0.5 and above as this feature is brand new .

If you want your home folders to be accessible to I recommend replacing the standard option

with

if you don't want them to be shared via AFP comment that line out

Make netatalk start automatically as a service

Based upon a smf service description I found here, i made a modified one, with all the correct paths for the current netatalk version (2.5) and a current Opensolaris version (~ build 130).

Grab it here : netatalk.xml (for versions < 2.1)    netatalk.xml (for versions >= 2.1)

Install it and enable the service :

Configure avahi

Avahi is an Implementation of apple's bonjour protocol.
It advertises your computers network services in the network. When correctly configured it helps the Finder to find and display your Computer under "network servers" section in the sidebar
In an standard OpenSolaris install, you already have it installed.

First you want to advertise your servers afp capatibilites :

Then you want to advertise your TimeMachine shares specifically so they can be used and seen from the TimeMachine prefPane and the TimeMachine restore application from the (Snow) Leopard Installer DVD :

Another advantage of this is you don't need to set the TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes switch anymore.

Make avahi start automatically as a service

If you have any problems with avahi autodiscovery – I had too. Restarting avahi-bridge does not seem to suffice after making configuration changes. You first have to refresh / restart multicast and then avahi-bridge like this :

References  :

Mac-[Datei|Backup]-Server mit CentOS 5 | reh-anton.de
Apple Time Machine Network Interface Specification
Build your own Linux Time Machine Server | Terry's Tech Blog
Nexenta Project – AFP with TimeMachine – The Nexenta Project
'[Netatalk-devel] Avahi and Time Machine' – MARC
FreeNAS forum • View topic – Time Machine
tek-ops » Blog Archive » AppleTalk on Solaris (AFP)

If you have any suggestions, improvements or corrections leave a comment or drop me an email.

Introduction

Tunnelblick using OpenVPN is imho the best solution for making VPN connections on Macs, and I have been using it for years …
It's relatively easy to set up, very extensible and OpenSource.

However there always have been some small improvements I wanted to have such as :

» TimeMachine not always starting, while I am on the road and have my bridged tunnel open to home – TimeMachine starts and backs up recent changes to my home server. This saturates the line and on most connections just isn't feasible to even backup 20 MB without having to pause other work that goes over the tunnel. So I had to manually turn it off and on all the time – very annoying.

» Growl Notifications on connection und disconnection events. I like Growl very much, it's informative, unobtrusive and very costumizable. And even though there exists a patch for Tunnelblick which integrates Growl support – it was unfortunately not included in the main branch – so I had always to repatch and recompile every new tunnelblick version I wanted to use – very annoying too …

» Setting my nameserver to the one inside my home network, so I can access all my ressources via the internal domain name (such as xyz.local) .

I looked through the available options for implementing this stuff and figured out it would be the best (read : simple) solution to use the integrated up and down script features of OpenVPN.
Most stuff was only poking through the docs, but one thing was a hard nut, if I changed the TimeMachine preferences, the MenuIcon would not reflect that, because it hasn't been notified … Funnily even if you change it in the TimeMachine PrefPane it doesn't update correctly for me (10.6.5).

Quick Setup Instructions

Prerequisites : Tunnelblick (obviously). This script packages makes use of brand new features of Tunnelblick, which at the time of writing this are only available in svn > r1235 , this means you'll have to compile tunnelblick yourself from svn – the next beta release of Tunnelblick should included this feature and is scheduled at approx. Jan – Feb 2011. If you want Growl notifications to work you need to have "growlnotify" installed which you can find in the Growl distribution disk image (Extras -> growlnotify).

1. Download the tb_up_down.zip archive and extract it to a folder of your choice. In this folder you should find 2 subfolders : "TMMenuIconReloader" (Source code of the TimeMachine MenuIcon Reloader) and "tb_up_down_scripts". Get into "tb_up_down_scripts" and there you'll find 2 files (TMMenuIconReloader, YourConnectionName.tblk )

2. Copy the file "TMMenuIconReloader" to /Users/YOUR_USERNAME/Library/openvpn/ .
TMMenuIconReloader is program I wrote, which reloads the TimeMachine MenuIcon after configuration changes. The said file is a universal binary, so you don't have to compile it yourself – but the source code is included too. If you want to know more about "TMMenuIconReloader" jump here – else continue with the instructions.

3. Right click on the "file" "YourConnectionName.tblk" and click on "Show packages Contents", a new window should pop up – navigate down the folders Contents -> Resources.

4. Copy your hopefully already working Tunnelblick configuration file for the appropriate connection e.g. "example.conf" or "example.ovpn" from "/Users/YOUR_USERNAME/Library/openvpn/" into the Resource folder of "YourConnectionName.tblk" (you can simply drag and drop the file in the Finder).

5. Rename the configuration file to config.ovpn !!! (Check it ends on .ovpn). Then you can close that Finder window.

6. Rename the file "YourConnectionName.tblk" to the Name you desire your connection to have.

7. Double-click the file, and Tunnelblick will ask you to install this configuration, I recommend installing it for "this User" only.

8. Done – you should have Growl Notifications and TimeMachine awareness with Tunnelblick.

If you want the scripts not to perform some of the features, just edit the the *connect*.sh  files in the Resources folder of the .tblk Bundle and comment out any unwanted actions with an "#" in front of the line. By default setting nameservers is disabled, you can obviously enable it by uncommenting the feature.

Changelog

TMMenuIconReloader

TMMenuIconReloader is a small command line utility, which does nothing more, than send an Notification to the MenuIcon to reload the TimeMachine configuration – it works quite well for me – but was really hard to figure out
Previous version of this utility un/reloaded the TMMenuExtra, but the new approach is much better.

Anyhow this small utility is free to use at your own risk (see LICENSE.TXT in the Distribution) …  you will find the source code and a precompiled  binary inside the script package.

Let me know how you think about it in the comments or drop me an email.