Comments on: Tips for VMware Fusion Performance

By: deo

deo — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 10:44:15 +0000

Do you find that VMWare is using almost no “real memory” – I have what I would consider to be a pretty normal Vista 64-bit system that is just a pig on VMWare Fusion (host is 2.8GHz Macbook Pro with 4GB RAM) – but there is almost no real memory being consumed. If my VM is only getting virtual (disk) memory, that would explain the performance hit.

By: Punsons

Punsons — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 13:52:25 +0000

I think Vista is too sluggish…

By: Andrew

Andrew — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 23:03:43 +0000

I’m not to sure about the difference with 32/64-bit XP, but the compatibility issues would make me think twice. For Vista 64-bit though I’d say go for it!

By: Eric Hutzelman

Eric Hutzelman — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 06:19:25 +0000

Another reference point: Vmware Fusion 2 on my 2.4GHz Desktop with 4GB RAM running Windows XP SP3 (1.5GB alotted) with no programs, Activity Monitor shows around constant 1.5% CPU time being used.

By: Jeremy

Jeremy — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 20:01:49 +0000

Is the performance improvement using XP 64-bit vs XP 32-bit substantial? There seems to be some backwards compatibility issues for applications on XP 64-bit as detailed in this Microsoft article: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/64bit/russel_exploringx64.mspx

If the performance improvement isn’t substantial, I’d rather stick with 32-bit XP for maximum versatility and flexibility.

By: Michael

Michael — Mon, 11 May 2009 06:59:05 +0000

Thanks for the tips. My XP box recently encountered some fatal hardware failures (never trust cheap PSUs!), so I decided to try virtualization on OSX. I’m currently evaluating VMware Fusion, but I’m still not sure if I should drop the money one it.

Concerning point two, are you giving the VM only one virtual core to keep CPU usage down on the host, or is there a performance decrease with two virtual cores?