Pure Virtual Machine Vs Boot Camp

Today I embarked on creating a pure virtual machine with Fusion and Windows XP Professional, to use as a testing platform for my software applications and to see the performance difference between a Boot Camp partition and a pure virtual machine.

Firstly, I noticed that Fusion seems to work better off of the pure virtual machine. It booted quicker and feels snappy. The boot camp partition works very well too under Fusion.

Second, with a pure virtual machine, Fusion allows snapshots to be taken while running off of a boot camp partition it disables this feature. I understand why it disables it though, so I'm not bothered by this. (Reason is that the Boot Camp partition is not a true virtual machine in a sense. It actually uses the boot camp partition on the hard drive rather than a single disk image file, which can easily be copied for snapshots.)

I'll post more information as I play around with Fusion. So far, this is an excellent buy!

 

Thanks for your thoughts on VMware Fusion, dbam .

Did you get Fusion at the pre-order price? Just wondering...

Keep us posted!

 

I got the pre-order pricing. I went for it immediately because I had a good experience with using VMWare Server for Windows to run various flavors of Linux. It couldn't have been released at a better time.

By the way, I'm liking Mac OSX more and more with each day.

 

Sounds great, dbam. You discover new things in OS X quite a lot, and most of the time you're dazzled by it that you go, "whoa, that was so fancy!" . By the way, have I given you those two coveted switcher links yet?

 

lol, yeah you did give me those links. those posts plus numerous others, gave me a huge boost in getting comfortable with Mac OSX. I'm wondering why I didn't do the switch sooner.

 

One more note, I am not planning on abandoning Windows XP or Vista either. All have their pluses, and when used in tandem you get a super powerful array of functionality.

Edit: Woohoo! 500th post!

 

Of course. I love OS X and I do most of my tasks in OS X, but for gaming and Windows-only applications I'm still on my desktop PC. And now with Boot Camp and Parallels and VMware Fusion, the Mac really does offer a huge opportunity for potential switchers to "feel right at home" (a.k.a. Windows) and still explore a "new land" (a.k.a. OS X) .

Speaking of, and its pretty related to your thread, I'm quite surprised at the shift to VMware Fusion. Parallels generated most of the buzz in terms of running Windows virtually on the Mac, but now more and more users are going for Fusion over Parallels.

And of course, congrats on your 500th post .

 

Which one is better/faster?

 

Well, I'm not supposed to take sides , as I don't want to look like I'm "endorsing" any one of them in the sticky, but in performance it looks like VMware Fusion is faster. As for features, both Fusion and Parallels have "exclusive" features. The sticky has more info on that.

 

Yea, I found it after I submitted a reply (of course). Looks like Fusion would fit the bill for me. Thanks.

 

CNET has a review on both of them. According to the tests they ran against each of them, Fusion won by a landslide.