monline

I've done a little performance test of these two virtualization solutions for Mac OS X using a Windows XP SP3 for the guest OS. My conclusion is that they're pretty close in most aspects ... or at least in the aspects that are relevant to me. And VirtualBox being free for personal use makes it a clear winner for my needs (at home).

My goal was not to do a "scentific" (where I mean a precisely repeatable) and objective comparison, but to see if in my typical use case the free alternative (VirtualBox) can match the performance of the commercial VMware Fusion. I've set up the two virtual machines with as much identical settings as possible without going to any extra length. The virtual machine settings/parameters are:

• 1 CPU
• 512 MB RAM
• 64MB video memory
• one 10 GB IDE virtual disk (using a disk image file)
• a pass through optical drive (ie. the virtual drive uses the physical drive of the host machine)
• virtual sound enabled
• 3D support for video enabled
• USB device support enabled
• 2 shared folders set up

As for the guest OS:

• Windows XP with integrated SP3
• all OS updates applied (that were available at the time of testing through windowsupdate.microsoft.com)
• the VM support tools installed (both VMware and VirtualBox provide support tools that one can install in the guest VM to improve VM usability and performance)
• Kaspersky Internet Security installed (but firewall component was disabled since incoming connections are not too much of a threat in case of a NAT'ed network connection)

In my test I've measured duration of various stages of the boot process and the time needed for a shutdown from an idle state.
In case of VMware Fusion I got the following timings (each value represents a duration from the start of the boot process til the given stage):

1. BIOS screen appears: 5.51s
2. Windows boot logo/animation disappears: 45.72s
3. Kaspersky Internet Security icon appears in system tray: 116.08s
4. System enters an idle state (CPU load goes down): 149.52s

And the time for a shutdown from an idle (no load at all) state: 21.67s

The same values for VirtualBox are:

1. BIOS screen appears: 4.78s
2. Windows boot logo/animation disappears: 48.48s
3. Kaspersky Internet Security icon appears in system tray: 106.52s
4. System enters an idle state (CPU load goes down): 167.81s

And the time for a shutdown from an idle state: 18.15s

The point of this test was to confirm if there's significant speed difference between the two VMs and it appears there's not. I've not run any performance test tools (CPU, memory, disk benchmarks), because my previous experience with VMs shows that in those areas (mainly CPU and memory) the difference used to be subtle. Disk benchmarks might be another matter (since VirtualBox does not provide support for paravirtualized storage drivers yet), but for my home use this is not of much significance. There's one more point that is much discussed in typical VM comparisons (especially when considering home use): 3D performance. I'm not going to play any games in a VM so this is not a real aspect for me either.

P.S.: the host machine was a MacBook Pro (late 2006 edition) with 2 GB RAM and Mac OS X 10.5.8.