Short answer: Boot camp is the champ (obviously) and Parallels 8 is second. Fusion is third, but not by much, and VirtualBox is a distant fourth ("you get what you pay for").
First each product has its own rainbow color, then everything is blue, then BootCamp changes to VirtualBox's purple, then Parallels8 takes Parallels7's blue and BootCamp takes Parallels8's green?
Please, please, please use consistent mappings of colors-to-products throughout your graphs.
I'll make future graphs with Excel.
Thanks for the feedback!
I also tried grabbing the site with "wget -p" on a linux box, but I didn't end up with anything I could view as an entire page. Too dynamic, I guess. I did go through and open all the image files inside Opera without a BSOD, so I can rule those out at least.
[edit: just poking around on the 'net, reading any benchmarks i can find, the differences don't seem to be that great between the two - seems to depend on the particular benchmark with the general view (my impression) being that virtualbox is easier to use but vmware being slightly faster on average.]
Some background: I use Parallels for local testing of build-scripts that I use to turn up Rails hosting infrastructure. A "full stack" build script turns up some basic compile tools and utilities, Ruby 1.9.3, Apache, Passenger, and MySQL. All of this is built from a base snapshot: a Debian netinst installation with nothing but root and a non-superuser account. No other packages added or configured at install.
My scripts write timestamps at the beginning and end of the process. With "nothing" running on my host MacBook Pro, Parallels and VirtualBox both take within seconds of each other (around 14m45s) to build an app server, so for my usage, Parallels doesn't represent much of an advantage. I use Parallels for my hosts mostly because I'm familiar with it's configuration tools and supporting application config. I wouldn't spent the money on it unless you use one of the operating systems for tasks they demonstrated will run much faster.
So it seems like Vbox isn't as good at I/O and graphics. Like you said, vbox installs easily and works well.
I don't plan on switching even after reading this article.
On my space-constrained system, a VM often ended up feeling more of a parasite than a useful convenience. Initially I was just using a VM for running Office, but I eventually moved onto Visual C++ and running games from Steam. In the end, for my typical use case (developing windows software) performance in all areas paled in comparison to a real system. There was no real advantage to not using a real system.
Benchmarking virtualized solutions against native boot is a good numbers show but proves nothing for virtualization customers except, potentially, that their virtualization software of choice is "finally approaching near-native performance."
All of these benchmarks factor in time somehow (mb per _seconds_). Its like time slows down & speeds up at random in a VM. And heaven forbid you run some tests with Intel VT-x on & some off (In some cases I got VTx off = 100x faster - lol).
Overall, I quite like Fusion and really see no reason to switch. Any comments from people who have used both maybe?
