Visual Studio Performance on VM

I would say every programmer is a bit impatient. If you're not impatient, you're probably not a good programmer

Multiple instances is hard to guess.

Basically a large program like Visual Studio will always "lag" a bit. Even on my i7-4770k it lags in large menus with dynamic content etc.

It's not at all gonna be perfect. But I believe you can get some of the best performance by enabling:
"Adaptive Hypervisor" in Parallels.

I can't talk for VMware Fusion since I haven't tried it yet - so I don't know whether people experience snappier Windows Environment or not. Alot of these performance statistics change with both major and minor versions - so it's hard to tell.

One thing I can recommend for Visual Studio in particular is disabling:
"Rich Client Experience"

Described in detail here:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/zainnab/arc...nging-the-visual-experience-vstipenv0017.aspx

The whole software-team at my old work noticed a difference straight away But let me say also, that the previous version before VS2012 was indeed alot faster - I noticed lots of slowdowns when I upgraded at my old work.