MBP for VMware fusion

[charlien]

I really like the size of the 13" MBP but the most powerful processor available is a dual core i7. I need to run a small Win 7 vm and a win 8.1 vm at the same time. The win8.1 vm must be fluid and appear to not be virtualized. The applications running will be fairly standard office desktop applications. On the OS X side I will need to record the running win 8.1 vm.

Do you think I can use a 13" i7 dual core or do I need the 15" with quad core?

 

[JHUFrank]

Ideally you would want to run a quad core 15. I run a couple of linux vms, and a windows vm at the same time on my rMBP without any issues. However, I chose the 13 for portability reasons, as I am an in the field IT guy. If you wont be too mobile, go for the 15.

 

[yjchua95]

I really like the size of the 13" MBP but the most powerful processor available is a dual core i7. I need to run a small Win 7 vm and a win 8.1 vm at the same time. The win8.1 vm must be fluid and appear to not be virtualized. The applications running will be fairly standard office desktop applications. On the OS X side I will need to record the running win 8.1 vm.

Do you think I can use a 13" i7 dual core or do I need the 15" with quad core?

You're going to need a 15" with quad core, assuming you'll be assigning one physical core (2 virtual cores) to each VM.

Besides, the Iris graphics on the rMBP are pathetic for running Windows 8.1 on the internal display. I get a lot of frame drops from just basic UI animations like showing Charms, switching between desktop and metro...etc.

 

[leman]

The dual core will certainly be able to do it, but the quad core will have an easier job. It depends on how heavy applications you will run in your instances. If you want smooth operation, you should assign at least 2 cores to an instance BTW. And contrary to what yjchua95 says, you can even run 10 VMs with 2 cores assigned to each on a dual core CPU without any performance problems, as long as the VMs are mostly idle. If you want to run numerical simulations on all of them — that is a different story.

 

[steveyo]

the more ram the better too

 

[Steve121178]

I really like the size of the 13" MBP but the most powerful processor available is a dual core i7. I need to run a small Win 7 vm and a win 8.1 vm at the same time. The win8.1 vm must be fluid and appear to not be virtualized. The applications running will be fairly standard office desktop applications. On the OS X side I will need to record the running win 8.1 vm.

Do you think I can use a 13" i7 dual core or do I need the 15" with quad core?

I can run 2 VM's on my 13" rMBP with an i5 Haswell CPU and 16GB RAM (I allocate 4GB to each VM, with two cores each). Works like a charm.

If you are simply running regular everyday desktop applications on each VM that are not stressing the CPU on each VM then you can easily get by with 2GB RAM and just 1 CPU.

I would recommend binning the Windows 7 VM though and add a second Windows 8 machine. Windows 8 works amazing when virtualized, Windows 7 is a pig and not optimised for virtualization, despite what Microsoft/VMware will tell you. Windows 7 simply wasn't designed for virtualization.

 

[charlien]

Thanks for the feedback. I'm still kind of on the fence. My VM needs are not that great - Outlook and another program we develop.

I never thought that Win 8 would be more efficient than Win 7. I built the Win 7 vm because I assumed the opposite. More to think about

 

[maflynn]

I never thought that Win 8 would be more efficient than Win 7. I built the Win 7 vm because I assumed the opposite. More to think about

Windows 8.1 is a solid OS at this point, stable fast. I'm very happy with it. Throw in some utilities like start8 to hide the metro interface and it increases the usefulness imo.

 

[Steve121178]

Thanks for the feedback. I'm still kind of on the fence. My VM needs are not that great - Outlook and another program we develop.

I never thought that Win 8 would be more efficient than Win 7. I built the Win 7 vm because I assumed the opposite. More to think about

Windows 8 is just far better optimised for Virtualization, that's all. Your needs sound very minimal so if you have a Windows 7 VM ready just use that as you are not doing any resource heavy work. If you have time then build a Win 8.1 to replace the Win 7 VM for a better experience.

 

[snaky69]

I really like the size of the 13" MBP but the most powerful processor available is a dual core i7. I need to run a small Win 7 vm and a win 8.1 vm at the same time. The win8.1 vm must be fluid and appear to not be virtualized. The applications running will be fairly standard office desktop applications. On the OS X side I will need to record the running win 8.1 vm.

Do you think I can use a 13" i7 dual core or do I need the 15" with quad core?

VM's are a lot more RAM hungry than they are processor hungry. The processor choice in a 13" machine should not affect performance of a VM all that much.