Unlike x5315, I have an Intel Mac which means I can run VMware Fusion, which is VMware’s Mac virtualisation software catered in particular to be user friendly for people who want to run Windows apps on their Mac without using Bootcamp. I decided to run some benchmarks - not between VMware Fusion and my MacBook, but between two Linux virtual machines inside Fusion - using different architectures, and came to some surprising results.

Personally, I use it for running Ubuntu Linux, because despite Mac OSX being UNIX compliant, sometimes there are things I just want Linux for because it’s easier; for example the NX Client for Mac OSX doesn’t work very well, the one for Linux is great (it even runs in fullscreen in a fullscreen VM, which means I can have a Space that contains a remote desktop from my server, which I can flick back and forth from), and some things are just easier to compile in Linux (I did my Computer Science programming assessment compiling & testing inside my Linux VM). Also, I found installing Linux natively on my MacBook sucked - hardware didn’t work, performance wasn’t that great, and so on. Performance in VMware Fusion is perfectly adequate - at a glance you wouldn’t realise it was in a virtual machine.

My MacBook is 64-bit. This means that I can run 32-bit and 64-bit guest OSes in VMware Fusion at my choosing. I’ve always chosen to run 32-bit guests because in the back of my mind I seem to recall reading that performance of VMware 64-bit guests wasn’t that great. However it’s been a while since I recall reading that, so I decided to check for myself by performing some benchmarks using Phoronix Test Suite - which is a great selection of benchmarks - and 32-bit and 64-bit Ubuntu 8.04 virtual machines.

I haven’t completed a full set of benchmarks (more are to come), but so far the results are available in the article on my blog about the benchmarks, and so far it looks like 64-bit performance in VMware has been improved, as it beats the 32-bit VM in just about every test. Looks like I need to change which VM I use the most…

Check out tumble*jalada, my tumblelog (with occasionally larger posts such as my VM benchmarks), for more Linux/tech related posts and links from around the web I find interesting and worth sharing.