VMWare Fusion Users

[mpaquette]

Looking for feedback from anyone that uses VMWare Fusion on their MacBook Air. Does it perform well when running Windows 7 in a VM? I was concerned about running out of memory with only 4GB, but then figured that any paging done to the SSD would be much faster vs. a spindle drive. So in reality, a VM may perform better on an Air with 4GB of RAM vs. a MBP with 4GB of RAM and a spindle drive. Just looking for some real world results.

 

[paulrbeers]

On my MBA, I use fusion with Windows XP so I only need to use a VM with 1GB of RAM (or less). I never notice any slow down. On my MBP, I use Windows 7, but I can a lot 2GB easily (probably 3 if I really wanted to), since it has 8GB of RAM. You could probably get away with a 2GB VM for Windows 7 on the MBA if you wanted to, but since I only use Windows for a handful of programs, windows XP works just fine for me.

However, you are right, due to the SSD the impact of Paging is reduced. I still wish the MBA had an option for 8GB of RAM though.

 

[mpaquette]

Thank you for the info. I only use XP in Fusion as well at this point. I use it to run some old terminal emulation stuff for work. And for that, XP seems to work the best. I just figured at some point in the next year or 2, I'd have to start using Windows 7.

 

[kjlake]

I use vmWare fusion with both Win 7 and Linux virtual machines. The Win 7 vm works fine with 1GB of RAM assigned to it for the tasks that I use that vm for. I have some software that is Win Specific that I need to run on occasion. I don't think that it would work very well if the software you need to run is very RAM intensive though.

The only time I have an issue with performance is if I have multiple virtual machines open at the same time...

Regards

Kevin