VMware Fusion 6.0.0 Linux Virtualization Benchmarks

Are you curious about the performance of the recent release of VMware Fusion 6.0? Here's some early tests though more are on the way.

Earlier this month VMware Workstation 10 and VMware Fusion 6 was released. As mentioned in that article, among the improvements were support for Microsoft Windows 8.1, a new virtual SATA disk controller, USB3 Streams support, SSD pass-through support, OS X 10.9 Mavericks support, performance improvements, Retina Display optimizations, etc.

I have a few new VMware performance benchmarks being planned at the moment, but this weekend I did some early quick tests from my main workstation. My main workstation is an Apple Retina MacBook Pro with Intel Core i7 3615QM CPU, 8GB of DDR3-1600MHz memory, 250GB Apple SSD, Intel HD 4000 + NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M graphics, and it's connected to an Apple Thunderbolt Display when in the office.

On the host side is Apple OS X 10.8.4 but most of my work happens from a virtual machine that's running Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. For the past few years when using MacBook Pros I've been running Ubuntu Linux virtualized on OS X as it's a much more sane experience in terms of hardware support, longer battery life, and other advantages I've written about in numerous other Phoronix articles.

I was running VMware Fusion 5.0.3 but then this weekend I upgraded to VMware Fusion 6.0.0. The experience was smooth and I didn't encounter any issues at all. Everything was smooth with VMware Fusion 6 on my OS X 10.8 Retina MacBook Pro and virtualizing Ubuntu 12.04 LTS 64-bit. Aside from upgrading VMware Fusion, no other changes were made as I did carry out some before-and-after benchmarks.

These VMware Fusion 5.0 vs. 6.0 benchmarks can be found on OpenBenchmarking.org within 1309162-SO-VMWAREFUS02. Overall though, the results really aren't exciting: there were no performance improvements for the Linux VM on the Retina MacBook Pro, while on the plus side there also weren't any performance regressions with the new VMware release.

So these benchmark results really weren't exciting from the Apple Retina MacBook Pro but coming up will be more extensive VMware virtualization benchmarks from the Haswell MacBook Air that should lead to more interesting results from the VMware Fusion 6 upgrade. Via the Phoronix Test Suite you can also easily run your own Linux / OS X / Solaris / Windows virtualization performance benchmarks in a fully automated and comparable manner.