The VMware Fusion team has been following David Alison’s ongoing blog series about using VMware Fusion and Visual Studio in a Windows XP VM to run Visual Studio on a Mac.
Well, clearly David spends his weekends like I do: working on cool stuff that there’s not quite time for during the week. How do I know?
On Saturday, he posted some benchmarks comparing his custom physical Visual Studio development box to the performance he gets out of his virtual Windows XP VM running on VMware Fusion on his MacBook, which he uses mainly for mobile Visual Studio development.
The results? Well, the title of his post might give you a hint: “How fast does VMware Fusion run my development environment? Very.“
Hailing from Palo Alto, in the blue corner, weighing in at…
Just to set the stage a little, David’s physical development workstation is a quad-core, 2.66 GHz beast of a desktop, with 2GB of matched Corsair dominator RAM, running fully-patched Windows XP SP2.
His Windows XP Visual Studio development VM is running on VMware Fusion 1.1.1, on a 2.2 GHz MacBook, with 4 GB of RAM (1 GB of which he has assigned to the VM).
The results of his comparison of his Visual Studio development VMware Fusion VM to his physical dev box? As he puts it, ” I was able to load my current project up, which included a local SQL Express database and tens of thousands of lines of code. It loaded fine the first time in, compiled clean and allowed me to see my application in IE (all within my VM). I could trace through code in the debugger, set breakpoints, modify data in the tables dynamically, etc.”
And the performance? “From a performance standpoint everything ran very smoothly – I didn’t see any big gaps in performance, even though this is a little MacBook.”
Here are the results of some of the benchmarks he ran, with times in the VM running on VMware Fusion with his MacBook versus times on the physical dev box:
Those look to be some pretty impressive results. We’re looking forward to seeing more of David’s experience running Visual Studio for Mac, but it looks like he’s off to a speedy start.
