

Benchmarking Parallels, Fusion, and VirtualBox vs Boot Camp - The Mac Observer - tanousjm
http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/benchmarking-parallels-fusion-and-virtualbox-against-boot-camp

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tanousjm
We got some feedback on our last virtualization benchmark. Lots of people
wanted to know how Parallels 7 compared to 8 and Fusion 4 to 5. They were also
curious about how well the free VirtualBox performs and how they all stack up
to Boot Camp.

Short answer: Boot camp is the champ (obviously) and Parallels 8 is second.
Fusion is third, but not by much, and VirtualBox is a distant fourth ("you get
what you pay for").

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gojomo
As a MacOS virtualizatiion user, I appreciate the value of these comparisons.
But the graph coloring is crazy-making.

First each product has its own rainbow color, then everything is blue, then
BootCamp changes to VirtualBox's purple, then Parallels8 takes Parallels7's
blue and BootCamp takes Parallels8's green?

Please, please, please use consistent mappings of colors-to-products
throughout your graphs.

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tanousjm
Good point, gojomo. Sorry about that! I used Apple's Numbers app to make the
graphs and it doesn't do too well at offering color customization. It's often
an all or nothing approach.

I'll make future graphs with Excel.

Thanks for the feedback!

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amirmansour
Hey man don't blame Numbers. Changing those colors is a simple task.

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jamesu
After years of using VM's to virtualize Windows I finally broke down and got a
real, physical Windows box.

On my space-constrained system, a VM often ended up feeling more of a parasite
than a useful convenience. Initially I was just using a VM for running Office,
but I eventually moved onto Visual C++ and running games from Steam. In the
end, for my typical use case (developing windows software) performance in all
areas paled in comparison to a real system. There was no real advantage to not
using a real system.

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wslh
I feel comfortable running Windows as host and Linux as guest with VMWare Free
Player.

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DHowett
With regards to the title: once you stop sugar-coating it, this is just a
comparison of virtualization and native execution. Boot Camp does not apply
any/many restrictions to the system and is just a thin BIOS wrapper over EFI
for bare metal use.

Benchmarking virtualized solutions against native boot is a good numbers show
but proves nothing for virtualization customers except, potentially, that
their virtualization software of choice is "finally approaching near-native
performance."

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Havoc
I really don't trust benchmarks running inside VMs. Toyed around with that for
a bit & concluded that the results are entirely useless.

All of these benchmarks factor in time somehow (mb per _seconds_). Its like
time slows down & speeds up at random in a VM. And heaven forbid you run some
tests with Intel VT-x on & some off (In some cases I got VTx off = 100x faster
- lol).

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Derbasti
The only thing that bugs me about Fusion is that it is usually one hell of a
buggy mess right after release. They are usually very quick and thorough to
fix that though.

Overall, I quite like Fusion and really see no reason to switch. Any comments
from people who have used both maybe?

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joe_bleau
Weird: clinking the link reliably BSODs my box. Win2k, Opera 12.02 or Firefox
11.0! I remember seeing the same thing last week with the original article,
and wrote it off as a fluke. First hard crash I've had in months.

~~~
FreeFull
Could it be some plugin?

~~~
joe_bleau
I doubt it. I tried again under Opera, with plugins, javascript, animated
images, cookies, and pop-ups all disabled. Yet another BSOD and reboot.

I also tried grabbing the site with "wget -p" on a linux box, but I didn't end
up with anything I could view as an entire page. Too dynamic, I guess. I did
go through and open all the image files inside Opera without a BSOD, so I can
rule those out at least.

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soldermont001
I've found Parallels (7) to be unstable, and I didn't appreciate how it
installed crap all over the place with no easy uninstall. Fusion may not be
quite as fast, but it is a more robust and professional product. My 2c.

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andrewcooke
why is vb so slow, and does anyone know if it is slow on all hosts? i use it
on linux because it's free and (very) easy and reliable. but maybe i should be
switching?

[edit: just poking around on the 'net, reading any benchmarks i can find, the
differences don't seem to be that great between the two - seems to depend on
the particular benchmark with the general view (my impression) being that
virtualbox is easier to use but vmware being slightly faster on average.]

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bradleyland
I can't answer your question about why it's slow in these tests, but I do own
Parallels (7), and have used VirtualBox extensively.

Some background: I use Parallels for local testing of build-scripts that I use
to turn up Rails hosting infrastructure. A "full stack" build script turns up
some basic compile tools and utilities, Ruby 1.9.3, Apache, Passenger, and
MySQL. All of this is built from a base snapshot: a Debian netinst
installation with nothing but root and a non-superuser account. No other
packages added or configured at install.

My scripts write timestamps at the beginning and end of the process. With
"nothing" running on my host MacBook Pro, Parallels and VirtualBox both take
within seconds of each other (around 14m45s) to build an app server, so for my
usage, Parallels doesn't represent much of an advantage. I use Parallels for
my hosts mostly because I'm familiar with it's configuration tools and
supporting application config. I wouldn't spent the money on it unless you use
one of the operating systems for tasks they demonstrated will run much faster.

