Why do people say VMware runs fast?

[Tragedies]

I installed VMWare fusion and I currently use Parallels. After I installed it, the cursor was VERY slow so I installed the tools as advised and the cursor went faster, however VmWare remains EXTREMELY slow. It takes like one whole minute from clicking the Start button for it to respond, while for Parallels it was super fast as soon as it ran for the first time.

Why is this? Parallels uses around 2gb ram as thats the max it can allow while VMWare is using 3GB (the amount I currently have on my Mac) yet it remains extremtly slow.

Any help?

 

[eddietr]

So you are giving a single VM 3GB and your machine has 3GB? I don't think that will work very well.

Did you try giving it 2GB? What was the result there?

I have both parallels and VMWare on my MP. My impression is that Parallels and VMWare are basically the same speed with Windows. But VMWare has much better performance with Linux and Solaris guests.

But I'm surprised you're seeing such bad performance with Windows.

 

[Evader]

I have 3.3GB ram, 1GB allocated to vmware and it runs at near native speeds. You'd never know it's a virtual OS if I didn't tell you. So something is very wrong on your end.

 

[Mac In School]

Strange. I give Fusion/XP 1 (out of 4) core, and 512 MB of RAM, and it runs faster than any Windows machine I've ever owned. Especially on things that usually take a while to process, like EAC/lame rips.

 

[Markleshark]

VMWare runs very well for me. I don't like the idea of having to boot back into Windows, so Bootcamp is out.

Parallels runs well for me as well, but I wasn't a fan of the menus, so I tried VMWare and liked it. Not much speed difference that I could notice though.

 

[Nermal]

Allocating all of your memory to a VM will be totally disastrous. Stick with the defaults unless you actually need more RAM.

 

[pjrobertson]

Yep, I've given mine ~ 700MB RAM out of my 4GB, and it runs near perfect.

 

[TheStu]

Heck, I gave Vista 1 core and 512MB RAM (of 1GB) and so long as I wasn't doing more than 2 things in Vista, it ran just about as fast as native.

Never, ever, ever, let anything use all your RAM, and furthermore, do NOT willingly GIVE it all your RAM.

 

[lugesm]

Just loaded Fusion 1.1 and Windows XP yesterday using defaults.

I am really impressed with the operation and speed. Couldn't be happier.

 

[RainCityMacFan]

Yeah giving more RAM then you should will destroy your system, not even in terms of lag but beyond.

I give my WinXP 510MB of RAM out of 3GB and it runs damn fine.

So yeah giving all your memory is a problem, unless VMware behaves like that when you're running on a Mac Pro with 32GB of RAM. Then you need to whoop that female-dog-in heat to shape. Or you're just running Vmware on Apple II. Then you're asking for trouble.

 

[Mac.]

I give Vista 1.836 GB out of 4GB (3.676 GB)

Half and half. It runs perfect for me.

 

[fusionrocks]

VMWare is using 3GB (the amount I currently have on my Mac) yet it remains extremtly slow.

Any help?

The other users are 100% right. Allocating all of your host machine's memory to virtual machine will cause disk swapping, which will cause slowness like you're experiencing.

In the future, I would recommend posting questions like this at the VMware Fusion user forums here: http://www.vmware.com/go/fusionforums

The VMware Fusion engineers and users hang out there helping each other out, and any technical question you have will have the best bet of being answered there.

~VMware Fusion Team