Fastest encryption configuration for Parallels Desktop 9 running a software development environment

Question

I have a 2.8ghz quad-core 2013 MacBook Pro with 16gb RAM and a 768gb SSD running OSX Mavericks. I run Windows 7 under Parallels Desktop 9 to do Windows development.

I would like to encrypt this data to prevent access if it is lost. However, my concern is that file access performance will be severely impeded (git operations are already very slow under virtualization).

I am considering 3 potential encryption setups.

1) Use native MacOS FileVault to encrypt the VM

2) Use the Parallels Desktop software encryption option on the VM

3) Set up Microsoft Bitlocker on the OS running in the VM

Can anyone share their experience or knowledge of which would be the best for performance under Parallels when developing software (git operations, compiling and editing in Visual Studio, etc)?

Answer 1

The 2013 MBP uses Intel Core i7. That CPU provides hardware-accelerated AES encryption via the AES-NI, which is used by Apple's FileVault 2 (page 5).

As such, your best option would be to use FileVault 2. You may as well encrypt your entire drive rather than just the VM, though Wikipedia notes this incurs a performance penalty of approximately 20-30% vs no encryption. But as it is using native CPU instructions to do this encryption and there's no virtualisation at this step, it's all but certainly going to be your fastest option.

I cannot speak to git, but I found that cvs was horrendously slow on both OSX's HFS+ and on Windows's NTFS. Both file systems were horrendously bad at managing lots of small files. This was not a problem on Linux with reiserfs (now I'm dating myself) or ext3. It's also not a problem with git on my current Linux VM running ext4. My point is that git may be slow because of NTFS rather than because you are virtualising the operating system. Lousy filesystems (NTFS, HFS+) may certainly be one or two orders of magnitude slower for other source control systems.

As an aside, make sure you are allocating enough but not too much RAM for your Windows 7 VM. If you are hitting swap (in the host or the guest VM), you'll kill performance.