Macbook Pro running VMWare Fusion 4 on Native apple partition or Bootcamp partition?

Question

I've been experimenting quite a bit with my new macbook pro and have run into significant performance issues with VMWare fusion as well as running natively from bootcamp.

My three scenarios are:

1) Native booting from bootcamp (16gig, SSD)

2) Native booting OSX, VMWARE fusion running from bootcamp partition (8 gig ram for vmware plus 4 of out processors)

3) Native booting OSX, VMWARE fusion running from files on native OSX partition (SSD) (8 gig ram for vmware plus 4 of out processors)

I don't have enough space to try all these at the same time but I'm suspicious that number three is significantly faster than either 1 or 2.

I've found that in both 1 and 2 (which is what I have loaded now on my computer), doing things like building large projects with visual studio 2010 boggs down, where as on my Lenovo W520 running on the same type of SSD, I don't get bogged down. I am surprised native bootcamp is any slower, but it seems to be.

Any thoughts appreciated.

Answer 1

Native boot has always been faster for me (understandably, with no abstraction layers)

As for the other two, there shouldn't be much difference. Windows is still running through the same abstraction layer, so if the same amount of computing power is available then they should be comparable. If one is on an SSD, that would explain some of the speed difference.

On the one running on top of OSX, does it slow down when you do a lot of processor-intensive tasks under OSX? If so, it's the SSD making the difference there - but it still shouldn't be faster than VMWare.

Answer 2

I've found that 3 is faster than option 2, and option 1 was by far the fastest. Natively booting to windows with bootcamp was much quicker and felt more like a normal native windows laptop. When I run vmware with a clean image (non bootcamp) it seems to run ok, however I've found the best option is as follows.

vmware settings (best option for me considering my system specs)

2 processors for windows VM 4gb RAM allocated within vmware

My system specs: 2.4ghz i7 (oct 2011 model MBP). 8gb total ram

I've found that bootcamp was slightly faster than vmware (non bootcamp image), but I still use vmware the majority of the time because I like using the host OS for things like mail/chat/browsing.

I'm running visual studio 2010 SP1 on a .net 4.0 WPF project. I use Telerik control suite, Entity framework and Oracle data access components. Our project is pretty small still but it builds in about 6 seconds after a "clean". (1 solution with 3 projects).