For many web applications and databases, common access patterns either require hundreds or thousands of small file reads, or many concurrent small write operations, so this is a decent proxy of how a filesystem will perform under the most severe load (e.g. Since most filesystems (and even the slowest of slow microSD cards) are fast enough for large file operations (reading or writing large files in large chunks), I decided to benchmark one of the most brutal metrics of file I/O, 4k random read/write performance. media streaming, small file reads, small file writes, or database access patterns) benefits from different types of file read/write performance. Virtual Machines use virtual filesystems, or connect to folders on the host system via some sort of mounted share, to provide a filesystem the guest OS uses.įilesystem I/O perfomance is impossible to measure simply and universally, because every use case (e.g. One of the largest performance differentiators-and one of the most difficult components to measure-is filesystem performance.
Tests such as file copies can have irregular results due to filesystem performance bottlenecks. iperf is an excellent tool for measuring raw bandwidth, as no non-interface I/O operations are performed. To measure raw virtual network interface bandwidth, I used iperf, and set the VM as the server ( iperf -s), then connected to it and ran the benchmark from my host machine ( iperf -c v). Having 40% more bandwidth available means VMware should be able to perform certain tasks, like moving files between host/VM, or your network connection (if it's fast enough) and the VM, or serving hundreds or thousands of concurrent requests, with much more celerity than VirtualBox-and we'll see proof of this fact with a Varnish load test, later in the post. It makes some sense, as VMware (the company) spends a lot of time optimizing VM-to-VM and VM-to-network-interface throughput since their products are more often used in production environments where bandwidth matters a lot, whereas VirtualBox is much more commonly used for single-user or single-machine purposes.
This is one of the few tests in which VMware really took VirtualBox to the cleaners. A few hundred megabits should serve web projects in a local environment quickly. More bandwidth is always better, though most development work doesn't rely on a ton of bandwidth being available.
I used Memory Bandwidth Benchmark (mbw) for the RAM benchmark, with the command mbw -n 2 256 | grep AVG, and I used the MEMCPY result as a proxy for general RAM performance. I used sysbench for the CPU benchmark, with the command sysbench -test=cpu -cpu-max-prime=20000 -num-threads=2 run. VMware and VirtualBox are neck-in-neck when it comes to raw memory and CPU performance, and that's to be expected these days, as both solutions (as well as most other virtualization solutions) are able to use features in modern Intel processors and modern chipsets (like those in my MacBook Air) to their fullest potential.ĬPU or RAM-heavy workloads should perform similarly, though VMware Fusion has a slight edge. I wanted to make sure VirtualBox and VMWare could both do basic operations (like copying memory and performing raw number crunching in the CPU) at similar rates both should pass through as much of this performance as possible to the underlying system, so numbers should be similar:
The key question I wanted to answer: Is purchasing VMware Fusion and the required Vagrant plugin ($140 total!) worth it, or is VirtualBox 5.0 good enough? Baseline Performance: Memory and CPU I'll present each benchmark, some initial conclusions based on the result, and the methodology I used for each benchmark. I benchmarked the raw performance bits (CPU, memory, disk access) as well as some 'full stack' scenarios (load testing and per-page load performance for some CMS-driven websites). Since VirtualBox 5.0 was released earlier this year, I decided to re-evaluate the two VM solutions for local web development (specifically, LAMP/LEMP-based Drupal development, but most of these benchmarks apply to any dev workflow). I switched from VirtualBox to VMware Fusion (which requires a for-pay plugin) a year ago, as a few benchmarks I ran at the time showed VMware was 10-30% faster.
#Vmware fusion vs virtualbox software#
Since I use build and rebuild dozens of VMs per day, and maintain a popular Vagrant configuration for Drupal development ( Drupal VM), as well as dozens of other VMs (like Ansible Vagrant Examples), I am highly motivated to find the fastest and most reliable virtualization software for local development.
#Vmware fusion vs virtualbox code#
I do all my development (besides iOS or Mac dev) running code inside VMs, and for many years I used VirtualBox, a free virtualization tool, along with Vagrant and Ansible, to build and manage all these VMs. My Mac spends the majority of the day running at between one and a dozen VMs.
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