Although I use a MacBook & OSX there are several Windows programs that I can’t do without and thus have VMware Fusion running almost constantly. In the year or so that I’ve been using Fusion I’ve discovered a lot of things that can improve performance, some obvious and some not so.
This will be the post I wish I could have found when I began using Fusion 
Like everyone with both Windows Home Server and Windows Media Center boxes I’d pay a good chunk of cash to have both in a single box featuring shared storage, cablecard support, and a small and eco-friendly footprint. A very good chunk.
A few people have (somewhat) successfully virtualized Windows Home Server on their Windows Media Center box but while I admire their cunning there’s potentially a rather ugly problem. If the OS drive for WMC should ever fail you have a chicken-and-egg situation. No WMC = No WHS = No restore from backup.
I think a better scenario then is to have Windows Media Center running as a service on the Home Server box with all output being through one or more extenders. With a few constraints I couldn’t think of any reason why this wouldn’t work so I decided to give it a go
Note the following were required;
This is a screenshot of using Live Mesh on my work machine to login to Vista (running under VMWare fusion) on my MacBook at home, which is logged into my Windows Home Server development box, which is installing a copy of Vista Home Premium under VMWare Server.
It looked neat and kind of trippy so I thought I’d post. Everything is fairly responsive too which is nice.
And yes, there is a reason for this hall-of-mirrors type madness. More later
For as long as I’ve been using OSX I’ve been running XP under VMware Fusion for those can’t-do-without programs, but now that I have my shiny new Macbook with 4GB of RAM I wanted to see whether it’d be possible to run Vista – and preferably Vista 64-bit.
I’m going to be doing a lot of Windows development over the next few months (WHS, Silverlight, ASP.NET) and would much prefer Vista so on Friday I spent some time doing a few benchmarks with both XP 32-bit and Vista 64-bit.
(Originally I also planned to test the 32-bit version of Vista, but I couldn’t face an additional two hours of installs and service packs. Plus I decided to do Vista 64-bit after XP incase of any problems).
Note that this is very rough testing using three averaged runs of GeekBench. The OSX timings are included to measure the impact of running the VM, not to draw any comparisons between OSX / Windows performance. I don’t know how Geekbench compares across platforms.
Details:
