Windows Vista Performance in VMware Workstation 6.0
One of the great new features in VMware Workstation 6.0 is its Windows Vista support. Vista can be used as the host operating system (HOS) and the guest operating system (GOS) for VMware Virtual Machines (VM). The question to us is how well Vista performs in VMware Workstation 6.0. This actually contains two sub-questions. (1) What is the performance of Vista as the HOS? (2) What is the performance of Vista as the GOS? To answer these two questions, we did a comparison of Windows Vista and Windows XP performance.
To answer Question (1), we ran experiments using the same virtual machine on the two different HOS's (Vista and XP) and compared the results. We ran a set of workloads to measure the CPU, memory, disk and network performance of the VM. Vista host performance is on par with XP, except that Vista itself consumes more memory than XP. This means that Vista leaves less memory for the use of VM's than XP.
To answer Question (2), we compared a Vista VM against an XP VM both on an XP host. We ran the same set of workloads as for the Vista host experiments described above. While Vista guest performance is on par with XP in most of our workloads, we did find a few cases that perform worse on the Vista VM than on the XP VM. To understand why Vista was slower in those particular cases, we conducted the same measurements on native physical systems, rather than on virtual machines. We found that Vista is slower than XP on native hardware almost to the same degree as on virtual hardware. This made it clear that VMware Workstation 6.0 wasn't introducing any Vista-specific overheads, and that the relative performance on Vista is as good as on XP.
The chart below shows some representative results from our experiments. The bars represent the ratio of Vista to XP performance when comparing the Host OS, the Guest OS and native. The benchmarks shown are: gzip from the SPEC CPU2000 suite, PassMark PerformanceTest, Iometer disk workloads, Netperf networking send/receive, and boot/halt (time taken to boot and immediately halt the OS). The workloads had minimal variations from run to run, e.g. around 3% in performance.
In conclusion, Windows Vista works great with VMware Workstation 6.0! Go ahead and have fun with our cool virtualization technology!
VMware Workstation 6.0 supports both 32-bit and 64-bit Vista. Our conclusion here holds for both 32-bit and 64-bit.
Please refer to "Performance Tuning and Benchmarking Guidelines for VMware Workstation 6" for more information about Workstation 6.0 performance.
Posted by Zhelong Pan on May 18, 2007 in Web/Tech
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A great comparison, I have just recently purchased a CPU with Intel VT technology, now I will be seriously looking at VMWare on a Vista host.
Ben
http://exchangeis.com
Posted by: Ben Hoffman | May 24, 2007 at 07:21 AM
When I try to Import Vista (Local or Remote) into VMware 6, I get the following error:
"Unable to determine guest operating system"
What can I do to succeed ?
Posted by: hornung | June 19, 2007 at 01:52 AM
Regarding Hornung's question, VMware Workstation 6.0 does not support importing Vista into a VM.
Posted by: Zhelong Pan | June 19, 2007 at 10:13 AM
How can you say Vista is on a par with XP as the guest. I cannot get Vista to run without 100% cpu utilization, and I noticed many other people are having the same problem. I have a bare bones trial implementation with only Vista and Office 2007 and the performance is horrid without a clear indication of where the problem lies.
Posted by: MikeG | July 10, 2007 at 05:38 AM
Performance depends on the workload you run. It is possible that some workload favors XP over Vista. For most of our tested workloads, Vista guest performance is on par with XP. We would like to hear from you about the kind of workload that creates trouble to virtual machine performance, so that we can improve our product.
On the other hand, we tried to reproduce Mike's measurement using the same configuration as his environment. We did not find any problem. If you do face some performance issue, please use VMTN at http://www.vmware.com/vmtn/. We would like to answer your questions there.
Posted by: Zhelong Pan | July 11, 2007 at 04:02 PM
I created a Vista VM using VMWare Workstation 6.0 (Host Win XP Pro). Moved the just created Vista VM to another machine with different hardware configuration and running VMWare Workstation 6.0 (Host Win Server 2003). Now VMWare fails to convert the configuration of the machine. How to overcome this issue?
Posted by: AshokH | July 23, 2007 at 05:52 PM
vi un articulo que se puede instalar wvware worksatation en windows vista, lo vi en www.misecretito.com.ar
Posted by: Daniel Vitto | September 09, 2007 at 06:28 PM
I created a VM for Vista utilizing VM Workstation 6.0 and it works great with only 512 MB. No problems so far.
Posted by: Michael Ganesan | September 17, 2007 at 11:42 AM
Posted by: ashli novak | September 18, 2007 at 03:43 PM
I'm using Vista 32-bit as the Host OS with VMW6 running Win2k3 as the Guest OS. It works well. However I'm wondering how Vista's SuperFetch feature affects VMW. SuperFetch keeps RAM utilization high by pre-caching pages based upon application usage history and heuristics. With a VM, the file Vista sees being used a lot will be one large virtual HDD representing the Guest OS and I doubt that Vista can superfetch the entire file into memory since the virtual HDD file will be several GB in size (depending on the config of the guest oS system). Superfetch is smarter because it makes use of the host system RAM, whereas in XP and earlier OS', a lot memory remains "free" and unutilized efficiently from a cache perspective. Any ideas on how VMW and Vista superfetch play with each other and any tweaks that can help boost VM performance?
Posted by: Sunil Madhu | September 27, 2007 at 06:55 PM
Vista SuperFetch does not necessarily prefetch the entire virtual disk into memory. As you have said, Vista prefetches pages, not the entire file. SuperFetch gathers page usage histories from Vista Memory Manager and decides what to preload. If a large portion of the virtual disk is inactive, those data shall not be SuperFetched.
Posted by: Zhelong Pan | September 28, 2007 at 04:37 PM
thak you
Posted by: fahim | September 30, 2007 at 11:59 AM
i just installed VMware 6.0 on my vista platform and all i get on trying to run the VM is Application failure hr=0x80004003:(null)
could someone eel me sort this out.I need the VM so badly.cant do without it.
Posted by: collins | October 08, 2007 at 07:36 AM
Hi Collins, I have seen a similar question posted on VMTN. You might follow that thread to see whether there will be a good answer. http://communities.vmware.com/thread/106090
Posted by: Zhelong Pan | October 08, 2007 at 09:52 AM
Hi,
I am trying to figure out if it is possible to install VMWare Workstation 5.5 on Windows Vista Business (Host OS). My company has a license for 5.5 but not for VMWare W 6.0. :(
Thanks,
Sarang
Posted by: Sarang | October 25, 2007 at 08:16 AM
This works for me... although the vmware always seems to think the disk is corrupt on reboot. Seen this with other people too.
Posted by: Miles | November 19, 2007 at 02:21 AM
ss
Posted by: al | December 28, 2007 at 04:09 PM
To solve vmware's 0x80004003 error, i used this fix. And it solved.
This fix repairs vmware's registry records with administrator privileges.
Feel free to use it.
http://rapidshare.com/files/83314499/vmware_0x80004003_reg_fix_www.mberkan.info.rar
Posted by: MBERKAN | January 15, 2008 at 05:28 AM
Looking at the graph, it appears that a Vista VM has similar performance to Native (ie. physical hardware) Vista machine? Or am I reading this wrong? how much slower is a Vista VM than a physical machine?
Thank you for any help!
Posted by: Ledge | February 10, 2008 at 08:29 PM
The graph does not show the VM-to-native performance ratio. Typically, virtualization overhead varies for different workloads. For most of the benchmarks we show here, the overhead is very small. But, it is also possible to create a benchmark showing higher overhead.
Posted by: Zhelong Pan | February 11, 2008 at 10:06 AM
VMWare shows the following error :
application failure. hr = 0x80004003:(null)
Posted by: Ravi Gubba | February 16, 2008 at 02:24 PM
VMWare shows the following error :
application failure. hr = 0x80004003:(null)
I can't execute
Posted by: Gabriel | April 09, 2008 at 08:33 AM
Gabriel look 4 comments up, that fix worked for me
Posted by: Greensauce | April 10, 2008 at 01:42 PM
Es muy util la virtualización
Posted by: Carlos Soriano Castro | April 26, 2008 at 10:21 PM
Don't bother with workstation 6 (WS6) or MS virtual PC/Server products.
WS6 has not installed after 4 attempts and many registry hacks.
MS VPC is just poor.
I'm now trying virtualbox, hoping for a better rest.
Posted by: Peter Oleary | May 02, 2008 at 12:57 AM