What's better, Parallels, VMWare or VirtualBox? To start, Parallels and VMware are companies with multiple products, so the question needs to be narrowed, unless you meant to actually compare the companies for a career path, investment, etc. Note: VirtualBox’s network virtualization appears to work quite differently than Parallels and VMware and causes macOS to have issues contacting DEP during the Setup Assistant. As a result, we have found VirtualBox to be quite troublesome to work with when testing DEP and advise against it. Both Workstation and VirtualBox support hardware virtualisation, however, only VirtualBox supports emulation. USB Support Workstation. VMware’s software offers full USB devices support out of the box. All USB devices can be connected directly to a virtual machine. Lol thats why i am contacting you 'Parallels' you are the vm manufacturer. I would like to see in the next version a way to 'Export' my vm into a format that can be read by another virtual machine package like VMWare, because i move back and forth between PC and Mac.
Last updated April 3, 2018
The Apple Device Enrollment Program (DEP) is a crucial building block for the modern macOS deployment workflow. When configured correctly, Apple DEP enables a business to purchase new Apple computers that automatically configure themselves, install necessary software, and enroll in an MDM upon unboxing and first boot- without hands-on intervention by DevOps or IT.
Before a business goes live with Apple DEP, a validation phase typically takes place. This allows a business to become comfortable with the DEP process as well as confirm that their DEP account and MDM configurations are working as expected.
Testing a DEP workflow can be time consuming. The workflow can only be tested when a device starts up and is initialized for the first time. As a result, using virtualization software such as VMware Fusion, Parallels Desktop, or VirtualBox is often much more practical than reinstalling the OS on a Mac computer after each test. Most, if not all virtualization software supports snapshotting, allowing a user to “roll back” their device state to a designated point in time. This makes it easy to revert a macOS image to a point just before the initial DEP process begins.
Through working with our customers and our own internal development efforts, we’ve put together a guide that we’d like to share with you.
First: Your Mileage May Vary
It is worth stating that using DEP and MDM with virtual machine technology can be rather finicky and exhibit odd behaviors not seen when testing with physical devices. For this reason, we do not recommend using DEP or MDM with virtual machines in any capacity beyond workflow testing. As examples, if a FileVault configuration isn’t working or a device is not enrolling over the MDM user-channel, it may be due to using virtual machine technology.
Additionally, we cannot recommend using VirtualBox at this time. We’ve provided more information on this below.
Creating a Virtual Machine
To get started, you will need to create a virtual machine. Various methods exist for creating an initial macOS virtual machine, some specific to a particular VM technology. Here are a few useful resources that walk through the process:
- Parallels Desktop:Creating a DEP VM using Parallels Desktop (jerbecause.wordpress.com)
- VMware Fusion: How to create a VM that’ll work with DEP on VMware Fusion (rderewianko.com)
- VirtualBox: How to create a macOS High Sierra VM to run on a Mac host system (tobiwashere.de)
A Common Gotcha: Invalid Auto-Generated Serial Numbers
MacOS expects the serial number of the device it is installed on to be alphanumeric. If you plan to link your VM to Apple DEP, you will be setting the serial number of the VM to be equal to the serial number of a real Apple device, so this will not be a problem.
If you are not specifying the serial number of the VM yourself, note that some VM technologies generate a serial number with special characters. For instance, a serial number similar to “fZjdIehS/ds+” can be generated by VMware. If the VM has a serial number that is not alphanumeric, macOS will appear to enroll with an MDM, but will ultimately not complete the process or be able to communicate with the MDM to receive configuration or further commands.
Linking to Apple DEP
Upon first boot, macOS presents the user with the Setup Assistant. Once an internet connection has been established, macOS contacts Apple to determine if the device is configured for DEP. When the device contacts Apple, it provides its device serial number as a form of identification. Apple, in turn, provides the device with a DEP configuration if available. This DEP configuration is fairly minimal; it specifies basic configurations like whether the device is to be placed in supervised mode and if it should enroll in an MDM.
Since the serial number acts as the device identifier for DEP, the virtual machine you create will need to be configured to use a serial number that exists in your DEP account. We suggest using a serial number for a computer that is no longer in use, or at the very least, has a low likelihood of being wiped at any point, since using the serial number in a test DEP workflow would invariably cause the device to also enter the workflow.
Below are configurations for each virtual machine technology. Replace [SERIAL] with the serial number of the device. “mac_hw_model”, at this time, does not need to be accurate for the provided serial number.
Be sure to use straight double quotes and not curly quotes.
Parallels Desktop
Shut down the VM. Within Parallels Desktop, visit the configuration screen for the VM image, select the “Hardware” tab, and navigate to the “Boot Order” option. Expand the “Advanced Settings” disclosure and enter the following in the text box:
VMware Fusion
Shut down the VM. Locate the VM file on your computer. These, by default, appear in “~/Documents/Virtual Machines/”. Right click the file and select “Show Package Contents”. Within the resulting window, locate a file with a “vmx” extension and open it with a text editor. Add the following lines:
VirtualBox
Note: VirtualBox’s network virtualization appears to work quite differently than Parallels and VMware and causes macOS to have issues contacting DEP during the Setup Assistant. As a result, we have found VirtualBox to be quite troublesome to work with when testing DEP and advise against it.
If you wish to try anyway, the following VBoxManage command line interface command can be used to set the serial number of the VM. Note that “[VM NAME]” must match the name of the virtual machine that you are modifying:
Snapshotting Before Setup Assistant
A DEP configuration effectively acts as a bootstrap. It provides a device with enough configuration to complete the Setup Assistant and enroll it with an MDM. That is the extent of its responsibility. As a result, Setup Assistant contacts Apple DEP exactly once during the initialization process. If you change your DEP configuration at any latter, the device will not receive the updated configuration.
It’s important to snapshot the virtual machine image before Setup Assistant has a chance to contact DEP. Because most VMs have access to internet at boot and do not have to wait for WiFi credentials, the outreach to DEP can occur very early on in the Setup Assistant process, before progressing past the first screen.
Convert Virtualbox Vm To Vmware
We recommend taking a VM snapshot before the Setup Assistant becomes visible. This can take a bit of practice; it is easiest to take a few snapshots while the VM is still installing macOS so that you can revert to a previous point and have a second chance to take a “closer” snapshot if needed. Additionally, we have found that reverting to this snapshot is sometimes not enough. With Parallels in particular, we revert the snapshot and then immediately “reset” the VM. Without a reset, we sometimes see old cached DEP data or a company name of “(null)” during the Setup Assistant screens.
Wrapping It Up
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VirtualBox vs VMware vs Parallels
Platform Virtual Machines (VM) are being used very heavily because they provide the ability to emulate a complete physical computer machine on top of another. Most of such software allows having multiple machines on top of one physical platform. VirtualBox, VMware and Parallels are three of the most popular platform VM software. VirtualBox is the most popular VM software at the moment. Meanwhile, VMware and Parallels are the two major players in the Mac consumer virtualization (commercial) software market.
What is VirtualBox?
VirtualBox (Oracle VM VirtualBox) is a virtualization package for x86, developed by Oracle corporation. It is released as a member of their family of virtualization products. Its original creator is innotek GmbH, which was bought by Sun Microsystems. VirtualBox is installed on top of the existing operating system (host systems). Then, using the VirtualBox, many other operating systems (Guest OSs) can be loaded and run. VirtualBox supports Linux, Mac OS X, Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7, Solaris and OpenSolaris as the host operating system. VirtualBox supports Windows, Linux, BSD, OS/2, Solaris, etc as guest operating systems. It also allows restricted virtualization of Mac OS X on Apple hardware. It is considered the most popular virtualization software at the moment.
VirtualBox provides the ability to start, pause, stop and resume any of the host operating systems it loads, without disturbing other virtual machines. Furthermore, each virtual machine can be independently configured to run with its own software/hardware emulation (if supported). A common clipboard (among many other methods) is used for the communication between the host and the guest operating systems. In addition, communication between two virtual machines is also possible with proper configuration in place. Because, both Intel’s VT-x and AMD’s AMD-V hardware virtualization extensions are supported by VirtualBox, it can safely avoid few issues that arise when only software emulation is used.
What is VMware?
VMware is a virtualization software developed by VMware, Inc. VMware is based in California, USA and was founded in 1998, although now it is owned by EMC Corporation. Desktop versions of VMware (VMware Workstation, VMware Fusion and VMware Player) can be run on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. However, VMware server versions (VMware ESX and VMware ESXi) can run directly on server hardware without requiring an operating system, because they use hypervisor technology (that maps host’s hardware directly to virtual platforms’ resources). VMware Workstation allows running multiple x86 or x86-64 operating systems. VMware Fusion is a similar product intended for Intel Mac users. VMware Player is free software similar to both VMware Workstation and VMware Fusion. VMware software provides virtualization of video/network/hard disk adaptors. Pass-through drivers are provided by the host for USB and Serial/Parallel ports. So, the virtual machines running on VMware are extremely portable, allowing system administrators to pause on a one machine, move it to another machine and resume from exactly where it was paused.
What is Parallels?
Parallels (or Parallels Desktop for Mac) is a virtualization software that offers hardware emulation virtualization for Mac computers with Intel chips. It is developed by Parallels Inc. Parallels VM software also uses hypervisor technology (similar to VMware). This makes it possible for all virtual machines to act exactly equal to a stand-alone machine (with all properties of an actual computer). Consequently, this provides high portability (i.e. allowing to stop a running virtual machine, copy it to another and restart) to the instances of virtual machines, because all virtual machines utilize the identical drivers regardless of the actual resources used on the host. Parallels can use Mac OS X 10.4 or later running on Intel powered Mac machines as the host operating system. It can have Windows, Mac OS X Leopard Server and Mac OS X Snow Leopard Server, several Linux distributions, FreeBSD, OS/2, Solaris and many other operating systems as the guest operating system.
What is the difference between VirtualBox and VMware and Parallels?
Although VirtualBox, VMware and Parallels are popular virtualization software, they have a lot of differences between them.
– They all support Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows 2003, Windows Vista, Linux and Mac OS X as the host operating systems. But, VirtualBox is the only software that supports Windows 7, Windows 2008 Server, Solaris 10U5+, OpenSolaris, FreeBSD (in the near future) as the host operating systems.
– All three software support DOS, Windows 3.1, 95, 98, NT, 2000, XP, Vista, Linux as the guest operating system. But again, VirtualBox is the only software that can load Windows 7, Windows Server 2003/2008, OpenBSD and OpenSolaris. VMware does not support OS/2, while Parallels does not support FreeBSD and Solaris as the guest operating system.
– Although, all three support 64-bit versions of guest operating systems, only VirtualBox and VMware support 64-bit host operating systems.
– Both VirtualBox and Parallels support Intel VT-x and AMD-V virtualization extensions, but this support is limited on VMware.
Parallels Vmware Virtualbox 비교
– VirtualBox, VMware and Parallels provide virtual network cards up to 8, 4 and 5, respectively.
– Both VirtualBox and VMware can support IDE or SATA virtual disk controllers, but Parallels will support only IDE. However, VirtualBox is the only software that supports iSCSI (which allows virtual machines to directly access storage servers over iSCSI).
– Although all there software provides Serial ports, only Parallels and VMware provide Parallel ports.
– Only VirtualBox supports CD/DVD writing.
– Furthermore, VirtualBox is the only virtualization software with unrestricted 3D acceleration. In fact, Parallels does not have any 3D acceleration capabilities.
– Out of VirtualBox and Parallels, only VirtualBox supports VMware images.
– Unlike VirtualBox and VMware, Parallels does not support Headless operation.
– VirtualBox is the virtualization software with unrestricted remote virtual machine access (with Integrated RDP server). In fact, Parallels does not have any remote access capabilities. Similarly, only VirtualBox supports remote USB access.
– Only VirtualBox and VMware provide reports on guest power status.
– Only, VirtualBox and VMware come with an API. But only VirtualBox is open source (with few closed source enterprise features).
– Unlike with Parallels and VMware, customizations are possible (upon request) with VirtualBox.
– Finally, VirtualBox is the only free virtualization software out of the three. However, Parallels is considerably cheaper than VMware.
Read more: http://www.differencebetween.com/difference-between-virtualbox-and-vs-vmware-and-vs-parallels/#ixzz2KLdQKqh5