IT, Technology 
1 Comment Virtual machine performance for software development
I needed a mobile development station in case I needed to jump into code along with my other engineers. My absolute first choice for development is a desktop with a large keyboard, bull sized mouse and a large screen – don’t get me wrong. But now I need mobility. My laptop is a 2008 Aluminum Core2Due MacBook and for the most times it’s quite quick. For development, I loaded Windows 7 professional on it via bootcamp but noticed really poor battery life (40% of Mac OS). Sadly, Apple doesn’t have decent Win7 drivers for that machine due to it’s age. Newer Macbook Pros/Airs don’t have this issue with Windows 7. But if I buy a new machine right now, I’ll need 8GB RAM to run both OSs in parallel. And I don’t want to spend $2700 on a Macbook Pros while constantly resenting it’s size. Not do I want to settle for a MacBook Air with just 4GB RAM (Apple’s top limit right now).
So I thought I’d try running Windows 7 inside a Mac OS virtual machine.Mac OS’s drivers are very well tuned, so battery life would be nice. Not as good as Mac OS X only, because the Windows XP virtual machine loads the processor (=> more electricity => lesser battery life). But as was later confirmed, the battery tradeoff was worth it.
So, what’s the problem?
When I tried that, I noticed a massive slow down in the virtualized Windows 7 running on the laptop. Take a look at the numbers below, the same operations take about 4.25 x longer !!
This was mind boggling since I knew even the humble Core2Duo had some hardware support for virtualization. I tried the same virtual machine on my desktop and there I was getting near native performance.