Veertu - Native Virtualization App Reviews

The app is off to a great start, and a lot less bloated than VMWare and Parallels. The app needs two things IMO, - GPU Support - A new icon/UI, colors could use a revamp, but not as bad as the icon itself!!!!

From my perspective of running productivity apps on Windows, Veertu is already miles ahead of the competition, even though it still has a few kinks. I found installing Windows a bit difficult (the cursor didn’t work, so I had to use tab), but now that I have Windows (as well as the provided “guest add-ons”) installed, everything is working great. Having virtualization software that builds directly on OS X’s architecture (the download is only 13 MB!) makes all the difference. Very nimble and snappy. Only issue so far has been that sometimes after sleep the virtual machine takes a few minutes to resume. Other than that, Windows is running beautifully (and in full screen mode, which you wouldn’t know is possible from the screen shots). Highly recommended

20MB!!! Very impressed with this app. Now if they can figure out a way to run windows programs without booting into windows that would be great!

With Vmware laying off it’s US-based fusion staff, I am excited to see how this progresses. It has no where the same features aas the other providers quite yet, but it’s functional and takes an entirely different approach using OSX’s APIs. I wish this early on they’d charge a bit less than 40 bucks, but I already paid it, so there’s that :).

Veertu has the potential to be a worthy competitor to VMWare Fusion and Parallels Desktop. It’s speedy, booting up significantly faster than Parallels Desktop 11 in my tests, and seems snappier in operation. Not having all the “integration” between desktops allows Veertu to be much cleaner and smaller, though users who really want that Windows Desktop/Finder integration will want to steer to VMWare or Parallels. Veertu still has some rather serious glitches to iron out, though, particularly in the file sharing between a VM (at least a WIndows 10 virtual machine) and the Mac side, said file sharing being iffy and rather fragile, often disallowing access or not appearing at all. And with no demo/trial version that doesn’t limit you to using only their download version of a Linux VM, it makes it difficult to really evaluate the product. The company needs to consider providing a fully-functional time-limited demo downloadable from their web site that allows a prospective purchaser to try the software with a Windows ISO whch is what most Mac users probably want. Overall, it’s off to a promising start. Time will tell how it progresses. UPDATE: Still problems with being able to retain file sharing with the Mac, which remains fragile and fails or even disappears regularly. Veertu VMs running Windows also do not work well in Active Directory environments; you can bind a VM to the domain and use a domain login, but you cannot connect to servers or other file shares regardless of the network settings (Shared or Host) though the network is active (web surfing works properly). In addition, performance seems to be degrading, though I don’t have any objective testing to prove it at this point. So this may be a solution for those with very simple needs to run basic Windows, but is not yet a solution for advanced users.

For absolutely free, you get a hypervisor capable of installing and running popular Linux distributions (e.g. Ubuntu!). This is great for software engineers working on apps that require a Linux backend. I used VMware Fusion until I heard their staff was fired, that leaves an expensive Parallels Desktop and an open source VirtualBox for virtualization. Both of those options require an intrusive installation process that modifies the OS kernel and installs other hidden dependencies. As a software engineer, the integrity of my machine is extremely important for development work. Sandboxing is crucial to keeping my work machine secure and stable. I feel that with a product like Veertu, we are getting that promise through use of sanctioned Apple methodologies (i.e. hypervisor.framework introduced in OS X 10.10). Here’s what I would like to see in the future: 1. Sparse images for VM hard disks (make it an In App Purchase, I’LL BUY IT!) 2. Snapshot capability (IAP… don’t you want my money??) 3. Premium Linux and Docker features like guest additions etc. (SHUT UP AND TAKE MY MONEY!) Some of us don’t want to touch Windows, which is why we are on a Mac in the first place. Think about the Linux developer and we will send you that coin.

fantastic app! Just needs VT-x support

Relative to native OS, its still slow. However, it is still very useable as a testing environment. I am using veertu to do cross platform testing and it’s been a huge help.

When a publisher offers an evaluation/free version of their product, one would expect to be able to actually evaluate it. In this case, the free version is crippled to the point of being useless. The user can’t create a new VM or even import an existing of their own. It’s useless! The only evaluation option the user has is to download existing VM’s from the Veertu website. None of those Veertu VM’s include any Microsoft Window products. So if your interest is in Unix or Linux VM’s great. If your interest is in running Microsoft Windows, you sadly out of luck. It disingenuous for Veertu to offer such a crippled product for evaluation. Further to ask users to spend $39.99 to be able to actually test the product. There are other companies in the VM marketplace such as VMware who offer 30-day evaluation versions. No limitations, no restrictions and no purchase necessary. It’s a no brainer! In summary, unless you have $39.99 to experiment with look elsewhere. Find a company who will let you evaluate their software before spending your cash. I hope to one day Veertu offers a true 30-days evaluation version.