Windows 7

brk-lnt · 11-14-2009, 02:49 PM

I've also been a VMWare/virtualization user for years.

VMWare works pretty good overall, the biggest part of the performance seems to be related to how much physical memory you have and how you partition up amongst the virtual machines.

At the base level, all of the machines (real or virtual) are competing for a fixed set of resources (RAM, HDD, CPU), so uses where the overall load is light work best. I wouldn't try to run a processor intensive rendering application in a VM, unless there was no concern for the other machines. Same thing for HDD intensive apps, like maybe a streaming backup server that is going to be chugging a lot of data to disk.

For most normal day-to-day applications, a properly tuned VM is almost indistinguishable from a regular machine. My personal experience is that OS X and Linux host's tend to edge out Windows machines for the host in terms of overall performance and flexibility.

Virtualbox, xen and Parallels are other alternatives to VMWare.

11-14-2009, 02:49 PM	#30
brk-lnt Senior Member Join Date: Aug 2007 Location: South Down Shores Posts: 1,947 Thanks: 545 Thanked 570 Times in 335 Posts	I've also been a VMWare/virtualization user for years. VMWare works pretty good overall, the biggest part of the performance seems to be related to how much physical memory you have and how you partition up amongst the virtual machines. At the base level, all of the machines (real or virtual) are competing for a fixed set of resources (RAM, HDD, CPU), so uses where the overall load is light work best. I wouldn't try to run a processor intensive rendering application in a VM, unless there was no concern for the other machines. Same thing for HDD intensive apps, like maybe a streaming backup server that is going to be chugging a lot of data to disk. For most normal day-to-day applications, a properly tuned VM is almost indistinguishable from a regular machine. My personal experience is that OS X and Linux host's tend to edge out Windows machines for the host in terms of overall performance and flexibility. Virtualbox, xen and Parallels are other alternatives to VMWare. __________________ [insert witty phrase here]