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VMWare Fusion 3 and fans on 2011 MBP?

Doc69

Doc69

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Dec 21, 2005
653
90
I would appreciate if someone could tell me if the fans in a 2011 Macbook Pro (preferably the 17"), ramp up when using VMWare Fusion 3. Please include if you using 4GB or 8GB of RAM.

On my 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo model with 4GB of RAM, the fans almost constantly run on high when I'm multitasking with a virtual machine that has 1024MB of RAM.
 
Doc69 said:
I would appreciate if someone could tell me if the fans in a 2011 Macbook Pro (preferably the 17"), ramp up when using VMWare Fusion 3. Please include if you using 4GB or 8GB of RAM.
Click to expand...

You will certainly need sufficient RAM for starters otherwise you'll be paging to disk all the time. Check Activity Monitor to see how much RAM your VMs use.

I don't use VMWare but I have have three VirtualBox instances running constantly - 2 x Windows 7 and 1 x WinXP - and the fans rarely kick in. That is almost certainly due to using an SSD though as HDDs generate a huge amount of heat.
 
I run a VM using Fusion on my machine (see signature) And my fans RARELY kick up higher than 2500rpm. This is largely due to the fact I've got 8GB of RAM (6 for OSX, 2 for win7)

I'm sure a 2011 machine will have no problems, or fan issues as long as you have sufficient memory and proper VM configurations

EDIT :: please note I only run quickbooks and another very light windows only program on win7. no gaming
 
Last edited:
2011 Macbook Pro (the 17") with 8GB ram, yes the fans will ramp up when the XP VM (40GB HD and 2GB ram) is playing videos. And OSX will do the same thing. Emailing, surf and itunes (not in the VM) will not ramp up the fans.


Doc69 said:
I would appreciate if someone could tell me if the fans in a 2011 Macbook Pro (preferably the 17"), ramp up when using VMWare Fusion 3. Please include if you using 4GB or 8GB of RAM.

On my 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo model with 4GB of RAM, the fans almost constantly run on high when I'm multitasking with a virtual machine that has 1024MB of RAM.
Click to expand...
 
Virtualization itself has nothing to do with heat, fans, etc. It just depend what apps you're using.
 
That's interesting topic for me too. I have a Early 2008 model with 4 GB ddr2 ram. I'm leaning to the new MBP early 2011 with 6750m. But i need to know how "smooth" is windows 7 in VM on this machines. Mostly i'll use windows for Visual Studio 2010 developing.

I'll be happy with some video with mbp 15" early 2011 running VM.

Thanks.
 
Doc69 said:
I would appreciate if someone could tell me if the fans in a 2011 Macbook Pro (preferably the 17"), ramp up when using VMWare Fusion 3. Please include if you using 4GB or 8GB of RAM.

On my 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo model with 4GB of RAM, the fans almost constantly run on high when I'm multitasking with a virtual machine that has 1024MB of RAM.
Click to expand...

I have the 2011 17" and run XP on Fusion and never noticed anything unusual.
 
I have a 17" 2011 and run one windows 7, two windows server 2008 and one windows server 2003 VMs in fusion simultaneously and haven't noticed any unusual fan activity.
 
I don't hear the fans when I'm running a VM but I do when I run HandBrake.
 
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