VMware Fusion Stuns VirtualBox In CPU Tests

Written by Michael Larabel in Software on 10 August 2012 at 09:15 AM EDT. Page 1 of 4. 11 Comments.

Aside from VMware virtualization smacking Oracle VirtualBox when it comes to the OpenGL support that's passed through to VM guests, VMware Fusion 4 also does a nice job at outperforming VirtualBox when it comes to computational-focused workloads.

From the same Retina MacBook Pro running OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion as the earlier OpenGL VM benchmarks, here's the remainder of the non-graphics virtualization benchmarks between VirtualBox 4.1.18 and VMware Fusion 4.1.3. Most of these tests are CPU focused for hitting on this 2.3GHz Intel Ivy Bridge processor with each VM having the same settings of 6GB of RAM access, eight cores (all available physical cores of the 2.3GHz Core i7 plus Hyper Threading) and 30GB of disk space on the Apple solid-state drive. While the host was OS X 10.8 (due to the rMBP Linux compatibility issues), the guests were clean installs of stock Ubuntu 12.04 LTS.

VirtualBox vs. VMware Fusion - OS X Mountain Lion

The remainder of the settings for VMware Fusion 4.1.3 and VirtualBox 4.1.18 were left with their stock values. All benchmarking under both VMs were handled in a fully automated manner using the Phoronix Test Suite with OpenBenchmarking.org. The bare metal results for the Retina MacBook Pro should be published next week.


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