I'm getting ready to do some serious MOSS 2007 architecture and development work. In the past, I've used Virtual PC 2007 to host a virtual development environment running a Windows server operating system, SQL Server, MOSS and Visual Studio all running in the same virtual machine. And I've never been very happy with the performance of that virtual machine.
So today I decided to give VMWare a try and downloaded VMWare Workstation 6.5. I installed Windows Server 2008 Standard x86 (full install) on a new virtual machine with the same disk space and memory as I had allocated for the same operating system install using Virtual PC 2007. I gave both virtual machines 30GB of disk space and 1GB of RAM. I'm running on a Core 2 Duo 6600 on an ASUS P5B at factory default speed with 4GB of RAM with virtualization support enabled. Both virtual machines virtual drives live on the same drive.
The major advantage of VMWare is its ability to utilize both cores where Virtual PC is stuck with using just one. I'm sure there are additional reasons for the differences in performance. I used PerformanceTest 6.1 from PassMark. I'm sure there are other ways to test virtual machine performance, but this seemed to be a reasonable though unscientific approach. I made sure my machine was running the same processes and completely idle except for the virtual machine host application.
I only ran the tests that mattered to me: CPU, 2D, memory, and disk. I don't care about 3D and CD performance for the virtual machine. Here's the results:
| vmware |
|
test 1 |
test 2 |
avg |
ratio |
|
cpu: |
326.6 |
344.4 |
335.5 |
2.2x |
|
2D: |
28.7 |
32.2 |
30.45 |
3.3x |
|
Memory: |
96.7 |
96.2 |
96.45 |
1.2x |
|
Disk: |
469.1 |
454.5 |
461.8 |
6.4x |
|
Total: |
921.1 |
927.3 |
924.2 |
2.9x |
|
|
|
|
|
|
| vpc 2007 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
cpu: |
150.7 |
154.1 |
152.4 |
|
|
2D: |
9.2 |
9.3 |
9.25 |
|
|
Memory: |
83.3 |
83.2 |
83.25 |
|
|
Disk: |
69.6 |
73.8 |
71.7 |
|
|
Total: |
312.8 |
320.4 |
316.6 |
|
I was amazed to see that overall, the VMWare virtual machine ran 2.9 times faster than the Virtual PC machine. Even more amazing was the performance improvement of the 2D and disk tests, 3.3 and 6.4 times faster respectively.
I am now completely sold on the value of the VMWare Workstation license. The best price I found after a quick search was $161. For all the saved frustration in working with a slow virtual machine development image for MOSS, the product is well worth the price. But don't take my word for it, run your own tests if you don't believe me. Of course, if you aren't running a multicore machine, and what self respecting developer isn't, you probably won't see any improvement. On the other hand, if you have at least two cores, choosing save a few bucks seems to penny wise but pound foolish!