- #VMWARE FUSION VS VIRTUALBOX PRO#
- #VMWARE FUSION VS VIRTUALBOX SOFTWARE#
- #VMWARE FUSION VS VIRTUALBOX MAC#
When you add more complexity from the Entertainment test, you’re down to just 1 hour and 44 minutes. Here, even Boot Camp only hits an average of 3 hours and 25 minutes, while Fusion 8 takes second place with an average running time of 2 hours and 46 minutes, about 12 percent longer than Parallels 11.Īs for VirtualBox, you shouldn’t expect to get much more than a partial afternoon’s work done, even in lightweight “productivity” scenarios, with the VirtualBox VM only hitting 3 hours and 7 minutes at best. The roles reverse for the more demanding Entertainment test. All VMs fall notably short of the battery life attained by Boot Camp, but Parallels 11 hits an average of 5 hours and 49 minutes on the Productivity test, which is 13 percent shorter than Boot Camp and about 5 percent longer than Fusion 8. That said, Parallels and Fusion again trade places depending on the workload.
#VMWARE FUSION VS VIRTUALBOX PRO#
Therefore, the Boot Camp results here aren’t meant to represent the maximum battery life potential of the MacBook Pro overall, but rather serve only as a baseline for comparing native Windows performance to that of the virtual machines on the same hardware. That’s about 16 percent less than the roughly 8 hours that we could expect from running a similarly demanding test natively in OS X.
For example, we achieved an average time of 6 hours and 43 minutes while running the lightweight productivity test in Boot Camp.
#VMWARE FUSION VS VIRTUALBOX SOFTWARE#
It should first be noted that Windows running in Boot Camp isn’t as energy efficient as OS X natively, due to the fact that Apple, which makes its own hardware, can fine-tune and optimize every aspect of hardware and software to maximize battery life. All tests were performed with the MacBook’s screen set to 50 percent brightness and no other apps open except for the Powermark suite in the Windows VM and our Automator script in OS X. The results reported for each test, below, are measured in minutes, so longer bars are better. The results from this test should give you a good idea of how long your MacBook’s battery will last while running more demanding apps in your virtual machines.
The Entertainment test, on the other hand, is much harder on the battery, with tasks like video playback and entry-level 3D gaming. It should be relatively light on our Mac’s battery and offer usable running time when out and about. The productivity benchmark is likely to be the most common usage scenario for a real user’s virtual machine, and tests activities like Web browsing and office apps. We ran two Powermark benchmarks: Productivity and Entertainment. With this method, which has virtually no impact on battery life, we get a reliable result of total running time that has, at most, a 30-second margin of error.
#VMWARE FUSION VS VIRTUALBOX MAC#
We then ran our Powermark tests until the battery was drained, plugged the Mac back in, booted up, and calculated the total running time based on the difference between the first and last timestamp in the file generated by Automator. Using a basic Automator workflow, we told the script to simply write a timestamp to a text file on the OS X desktop once every 30 seconds. We therefore turned to our old standby for measuring battery life in OS X: Automator. Powermark has its own internal battery life calculator that reports both actual running time and estimated battery life remaining, but we didn’t want to take the chance that the virtualization process could introduce inaccuracies in that counter. Unlike PCMark, however, which runs a particular scenario just three times in order to determine a system’s performance level, Powermark runs the designated usage scenario repeatedly until the battery is drained. To test that question, we turned to Futuremark Powermark, a battery life benchmark for Windows that’s based on tests similar to those conducted by its sister app, PCMark. We obviously expect that our MacBook will experience shorter running times when using a virtual machine in OS X, but the question is how much shorter. Although energy efficiency and battery capacity have improved dramatically in recent years, it still takes a lot of power to run a complex modern operating system, and with any of the virtualization platforms we’re looking at today, we’re asking our MacBook to go even further and run two operating systems (at least!). With the ever increasing use of laptops and mobile computing devices, battery life is one of the most important areas of product development and the customer experience.
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