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      10-15-2012, 12:02 AM   #31
Grovsnus
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Drives: Le Mans blue X1 35i
Join Date: Sep 2012
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Quote:
Originally Posted by wcinvest View Post
With VMware Fusion or Parallels in Mac OS X environments, virtualization is pretty good for basic tasks like Microsoft Word or web browsing but its too slow IMHO for software development or other tasks that sometime really tax the CPU.
Since VT-x and VT-d, the CPU slowdown is down to a couple of percent - less than the step up to a slightly faster CPU.
The reason why software development works best on bare metal is IO. Especially Microsoft Visual Studio is a huge IO hog, and with mainly random writes, you take performance hits unless you give your VM dedicated hardware storage.

Disclaimer: I'm a senior system administrator, running several dozen servers with both bare metal, paravirtualized and fully virtualized hosts, on four continents. Hard experience, not just classes.
Our measurements of CPU/IO use for VS development in VMs showed an average ratio of 3-5% CPU utiliization and 140-240% IO utilization.

Myself, and several developers have still opted to use Linux as our main OS, with Windows and other OSes running in VMs. If nothing else because we don't have to reboot Linux every first Tuesday of the month, and take all VMs down with it. And because one task memory ballooning or causing a BSOD in Windows won't affect Linux, as it would if the situation was reversed.

That said, and to bring this slightly back into topic, BMW runs development virtualized.
And the X1 (and all other BMWs) use QNX as their OS, not Windows. Windows embedded/CE/mobile has flopped three times so far.
Even giants fall. Remember when all PCs ran OS/2 and Word Perfect? And almost all servers were IBM? Unless you can continue to deliver, the customers will switch to what's better, cheaper or both.
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