Virtualization environments have been hot commodities for the Mac user ever since Apple started using Intel processors in its computers. Even before Intel arrived, emulation software was available that allowed Mac users to run Windows and Linux.
But emulation was slow, using an abstraction layer to translate x86 programming code to the code used by the PowerPC architecture of earlier Macs. This abstraction layer not only had to translate for CPU type, but also all of the hardware components. In essence, the abstraction layer had to create software equivalents of video cards, hard drives, serial ports, etc. The result was an emulation environment that could run Windows or Linux, but was severely restricted in both performance and the operating systems that could be used.
With the advent of Apple’s decision to use Intel processors, the entire need for emulation was swept away. In its place came the ability to run other OSes directly on an Intel Mac. In fact, if you want to run Windows directly on a Mac as an option at bootup, you can use Boot Camp, an application that Apple provides as a handy way to install Windows in a multi-boot environment.
But many users need a way to run the Mac OS and a second OS simultaneously. Parallels, and later VMWare and Sun, brought this capability to the Mac with virtualization technology. Virtualization is similar in concept to emulation, but because Intel-based Macs use the same hardware as standard PCs, there’s no need to create a hardware abstraction layer in software. Instead, the Windows or Linux software can run directly on the hardware, producing speeds that can be nearly as fast as if the guest OS was running natively on a PC.
And that’s the question our benchmarks tests seek to answer. Do the three major players in virtualization on the Mac - Parallels Desktop for Mac, VMWare Fusion, and Sun VirtualBox - live up to the promise of near-native performance?
We say ‘near native’ because all virtualization environments have some overhead that can’t be avoided. Since the virtual environment is running at the same time as the native OS (OS X), there has to be sharing of hardware resources. In addition, OS X has to provide some services to the virtualization environment, such as windowing and core services. The combination of these services and resource sharing tends to limit how well the virtualized OS can run.
To answer the question, we are going to perform benchmark tests to see how well the three major virtualization environments fare running Windows.
