Please tell me, if you know, how much
faster is Windows/Linux on BootCamp
than on Parallels/Fusion
virtualization software?
It's hard to quantify without any kind of benchmarks to definitively answer your question. In my experience with both bootcamp and vmware fusion (or parallels/virtualbox) for me it was a convenience issue more than anything so I use vmware fusion on a regular basis. Performance was noticeable between dual-boot and virtualization but it depends on how you use your computer.
Software development (Visual Studio,
Eclipse, Notepad++, Total Commander,
Git Bash etc.)
I use Visual Studio 2008/2010 on Windows 7 Pro (64-bit) and KomodoEdit on Ubuntu. I don't see any real development issues other than a slightly longer build time. If I'm building an ASP.NET site, getting IIS to start up is a little longer than normal but nothing that is noticeably worse than usual.
I can't speak for VSS/TFS/Git/CVS/source version control, etc. etc. Basically, software development would be nearly identical but depending on the complexity of the code, libraries/assemblies, dependencies and such, the compilation process may take a little longer than normal. Again, benchmarks will really show the difference but in my experience it's close enough to non-virtual environments.
Live TV (Windows Media Center with my
USB DVB-T TV Stick)
I've never watched live TV via USB or in a virtual machine so I can't say anything for sure. But even watching streaming video or video files over network share, the lag at times was noticeable. Anything I/O heavy you will notice more so using any virtual environment.
Games (Quake III, Dragon Age, Unreal
Tournament etc.)
Unless you plan on playing solitaire, I would stay away from virtualized games. I tried playing Civ4 on Windows 7 with 2GB of RAM and it was too damn slow. I can't imagine Quake, Unreal Tournament being much better. Granted those games are relatively old, I just don't think serious gamers can expect virtual machines to perform on par to native hardware.
Utility Software (Nokia Ovi Suite for
my cell, Lingvo dictionary etc.)
I think this will run as expected like a non-virtual machine.
Linux (Ubuntu 10.04 for testing and
debugging software I develop)
It'll be close to non-virtual machine speed.
There's a way to virtualize a bootcamp partition which may be what you're looking for. If you create a bootcamp partition, install windows, and boot into OSX, VMWare Fusion has an option to treat the bootcamp partition as a VM so you could in fact run either native dual boot OR virtual machine instance. This might be the better way to go if performance is of the utmost priority.
Install all the software and games you want. If they perform poorly in a VM, then at the least it's on your bootcamp partition. If games/apps/tv run fine then you have the flexibility to use OSX and switch to Windows 7 whenever you need it. I do not know if this can work for Linux but it wouldn't surprise me if there was a way to do it. Here's a link to VMWare's info on doing such a configuration.
1Thank you. So far this is the most detailed and clear answer. Also I didn't know that I can run Windows from BootCamp partition under Parallels/Fusion. I will definitely give it a try. This may basically solve my problem of combining the possibility for side-by-side usage during software development and running efficient games on native. – Sergiy Belozorov – 2010-08-06T05:33:19.037
As for Software Development I am currently involved in huge solutions (e.g. Chromium), which consists of over 300 projects and takes about 40-50 minutes to build on a quad-core processor. Even smallest change in the code requires the rebuild of about 3-4 minutes. Therefore building times could be an issue. Can you please quantify how longer building times actually are, please? – Sergiy Belozorov – 2010-08-06T05:36:06.763
My build times are usually for .NET based projects so I don't know how well that will translate into your work. I also don't have numerous projects within a build (at most maybe 5?) so when I say it seems a little longer than normal, I'm estimating around 30 sec - 1 min. I'd have to say for Chromium, my best guess is to add about 10-15% more in terms of build time. Now, I am guessing so I could be very wrong about this estimate. That's why I think the bootcamp partition is the way to go. You can try it out as if it was a VM and see the performance in both VM and non-VM situations. – osij2is – 2010-08-06T13:31:38.600
As it turns out Parallels Desktop does not let you install Windows 7 from Boot Camp (not legally at least). The problem arises when one tries to activate Windows. BootCamp and Parallels are two different hardware configurations and therefore after every reboot Windows will ask for activation. After call to Microsoft they said that even if I have two licenses I can't install two of them onto single Windows installation. Therefore booting Windows 7 from BootCamp is fake and can not be done legally. I have ended up with two systems installed: virtual (Parallels Desktop) and physical (BootCamp). – Sergiy Belozorov – 2010-08-25T21:53:02.107
Sorry to hear that. I never tried using bootcamp with Parallels, but I've done successfully with VMWare fusion. – osij2is – 2010-08-31T00:37:52.247