Virtual OS Test/Showdown (Parallels, VMWare, VirtualBox)

[Carter]

I've decided to do a test with the 3 major Virtual OS Products (Parallels, VMWare, VirtualBox) and I'm looking for suggestions for tasks to run. I will be using three iMac i5's each with 12GB of memory, each will be setup with the same specs for the Virtual host (ex. 2 processors, 6GB memory). I already have Windows 7 all these desktops installed and fully updated with not extra software installed unless it's requested for testing. I will do Windows 8 after I do the Windows 7 test.


I will have all three desktop no camera at the same time so we can see the actions on all three at the exact same time.


What would you like to see tested?


- Cold Boot
- Restart
- File Transfer
- GeekBecnh Test 32Bit (have no license for 64bit)

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[Steve21]

Graphicy (Yes it's a word) based things, whether videos or simple game. See how they each respond to moving graphics.

Anything that's processor intensive within the VM, e.g. movie conversion, or rendering etc

Even silly things like load times on programs, whether it's office, or photoshop etc (If you can install demo?)

Things like that would be cool

Steve

[Carter]

Graphicy (Yes it's a word) based things, whether videos or simple game. See how they each respond to moving graphics.

Anything that's processor intensive within the VM, e.g. movie conversion, or rendering etc

Even silly things like load times on programs, whether it's office, or photoshop etc (If you can install demo?)

Things like that would be cool

Steve

Install Demo is a little harder as it's mostly just waiting and the Windows Updates take forever. The install interface for Parallels is the best looking but out of the three I found VirtualBox was the quickest for install.

As for Graphics I will put a large HD movie on the VM and play that to have a look. I will also install Office 2010 & Adobe CS 6 to show application load times. Not sure about rendering tests. Anyone know of a good render test application? One I found I needed to pay for.

[Steve21]

Sorry, I meant if you can install office/photoshop etc "in advance" and just show boot up times of individual pieces of software that normally take a little to load Rather than installing installing hehe.

In terms of rendering, doesn't need to be that, just something that normally uses a fair bit of CPU, even something like converting video from wmv to avi, or something silly

Steve

[Arthur]

Anyone know of a good render test application?

CineBench is free.

Also, OpenGL performance in VirtualBox looks like it might be quite bad.

Edit. The Tech Report have a good list of benchmarking programs that you could use in Windows.

[GrumbleDook]

File Transfer needs to cover VM to host, VM to external storage (USB 2, USB 3, FW, etc) VM to another iMac via BlueTooth, VM to another device via LAN and VM to another device via WLAN.

[Carter]

File Transfer needs to cover VM to host, VM to external storage (USB 2, USB 3, FW, etc) VM to another iMac via BlueTooth, VM to another device via LAN and VM to another device via WLAN.

I'll see what I can do with the file transfers. USB 2, FW 800 & Networking is possible but no USB 3.0 on these iMacs. I will mount a network SAN and transfer a large file there as well.

I'm going to try and do all of this at the same time on all three iMacs so it should give us a good comparison. identical computers, Memory, speed, network everything.

Thank you everyone for your suggestions!!!



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[Carter]

Quick heads up on this project .... I have not forgot about it and I'm still doing this test. We've ordered a bunch of new iMacs so I'm holding off until they arrive. This way I can show this test with the latest hardware from Apple with computers right out of the box.