Virtual Machine Benchmarks?

From my experience of Parallels and VMware (on the PC and more extensively on the Mac) the difference between any 2 competing versions of the software is usually quite small and often 'reversed' in the next releases I never found Parallels to be much faster (or slower) than VMware - it often would be a case of the state of the VM I was running, the host machine itself and the app(s) I was running within the VM. If VMWare brought out a new release which did something faster, you could be sure that Parallels would improve their performance in that area in the next release, too In the end I settled on VMWare Fusion and the key reason for this was just that it played nicely with VMware Workstation on the PC. I have trouble taking Parallels VMs from the Mac to the PC and back again, and this worked fine on VMware.

Finally, though this is less of a concern, I was unhappy that sometimes it felt as if Parallels would release a version without proper regression testing - you'd get the up-to-date version and find that networking was suddenly unexplicably broken until they released another patch a few days later. I doubt this is still the case but VMware always felt a little more 'in control' and professional to me I'd go for a solution that you can get running in a stable fashion on your PC, that is compatible with your other requirements (such as your co-workers' platforms and your overall budget). You can waste your lifetime trying to measure which one is faster at any given task!

One other thing - it's worth checking the documentation that comes with the software, and any forums etc, before making judgements about performance For instance, in my experience throwing huge amounts of ram at your VM (at the expense of free ram in the host system) does NOT automatically make it faster better to split the ram up evenly, and certainly keep an eye on any recommended figure. In VMware, that recommended figure is a good guide.

From my experience of Parallels and VMware (on the PC and more extensively on the Mac) the difference between any 2 competing versions of the software is usually quite small and often 'reversed' in the next releases. I never found Parallels to be much faster (or slower) than VMware - it often would be a case of the state of the VM I was running, the host machine itself and the app(s) I was running within the VM. If VMWare brought out a new release which did something faster, you could be sure that Parallels would improve their performance in that area in the next release, too.In the end I settled on VMWare Fusion and the key reason for this was just that it played nicely with VMware Workstation on the PC.

I have trouble taking Parallels VMs from the Mac to the PC and back again, and this worked fine on VMware. Finally, though this is less of a concern, I was unhappy that sometimes it felt as if Parallels would release a version without proper regression testing - you'd get the up-to-date version and find that networking was suddenly unexplicably broken until they released another patch a few days later. I doubt this is still the case but VMware always felt a little more 'in control' and professional to me.

I'd go for a solution that you can get running in a stable fashion on your PC, that is compatible with your other requirements (such as your co-workers' platforms and your overall budget). You can waste your lifetime trying to measure which one is faster at any given task! One other thing - it's worth checking the documentation that comes with the software, and any forums etc, before making judgements about performance.

For instance, in my experience throwing huge amounts of ram at your VM (at the expense of free ram in the host system) does NOT automatically make it faster; better to split the ram up evenly, and certainly keep an eye on any recommended figure. In VMware, that recommended figure is a good guide.

You'll get best performance if your hardware supports hardware virtualization, such as AMD's AMD-V or Intel's VT, and you enable this feature on the computer and in your virtualization software. For Microsoft solutions, you need at least Virtual PC 2007 or Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1, or Hyper-V on Windows Server 2008 (I don't expect you'll rebuild your system just to run Hyper-V, but I thought I'd mention it). Subjectively I haven't noticed any difference between Virtual PC and VMware Workstation performance; I'm using VMware now as it supports USB virtualization, which Virtual PC doesn't.

You also generally need to install appropriate custom, virtualization-aware, drivers in the guest OS, as the standard drivers are expecting to talk to real hardware. In Virtual PC and Server these are called Additions, in VMware they are VMware Tools.

Anandtech has some great info on virtualization. Although they are not any benchmarks, it provides a great insight on why it is so difficult to do proper virtualization benchmarks. I cannot suggest you a specific product, because it depends very much on your requirements.

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