Fusion 3 performance on EFI32 mac w/ SL 32bit kernel vs EFI64 mac w/ SL 64bit kerenel

[roybfr]

I have an older 2006 Mac Pro that is EFI32, so in SL it boots the 32bit kernel. What I am trying to find out is what all is gained by going to a system that has 64EFI such as a new Mac Pro or a 2008 Pro and booting SL with the 64 bit kernel.

The new specs for Fusion 3 list

• New 64-bit native core engine leverages power of 64-bit Snow Leopard

• Leverage K64 kernel performance improvements for reduced overhead

Can someone put this in a performance perspective? Have people noticed increased performance when moving from Fusion 2 on SL in 32bit kernel to Fusion 3 on SL with 64 bit kerenel?

I am looking at upgrading my Pro, buying a used 2008 or getting a new 2009. Money is an object so I am trying to put a performance increase to the cost of the different options. I do a lot of POC items for work at home on my Mac, while the POC tests are usually about getting things to work vs perfromaing fast (work on that post POC at work on ESX 3.5/4 clusters), would still like to know what is gained running Fusion 3 under SL under 64bt kernel vs under SL with a 32bit kerenl.

[Atmos4 · Accepted solution]

I think your best bet on improving performance would be to invest in more RAM and faster disks (RAID) in your current Mac Pro instead of buying a new one.

That said I use a Mac Pro 2009 8core 2.26GHz w/16GB RAM and a 4-drive Hardware RAID5 (Areca 4port SAS controller) and it is a terrific performer for virtualisation.

I found that WD Velociraptor drives perform best, though they're a bit noisy for seeks. If you have regular backups of your system, Mac OS X Software RAID0 should provide great performance. If you use Hardware RAID and space is not an issue, RAID1+0 is strongly preferred over RAID5/6 for much better performance.

I use some super quiet Samsung F3 single platter 500GB drives, so I settled for RAID5 instead to gain some more disk space.

I can recommend Areca RAID cards if you're looking for a Hardware RAID solution, but you might need a backplane from maxupgrades.com.

I've been running 8 VMs in parallel and haven't even noticed an impact on system performance. Note that until today I've been running Fusion 2.0.6 on the 32-Bit kernel and it has performed really well. I just switched to Fusion 3 and 64-Bit kernel which seems to work fine aswell.

I don't think you will see a significant difference between running VMware Fusion on the 32-Bit vs. running it on a 64-Bit Kernel, unless your virtual machines have more than 4GB RAM.

[roybfr]

Thanks for the answer, that is really helpful. I picked up SL tonight and will probably upgrade my Fusion to 3 this week. I plan on order more ram (at 9GB going to go to 16GB) and was thinking of getting an Intel SSD to use for some of my VM's as I have heard good things about them speed wise.

[Atmos4]

SSDs of corse are an option, albeit a pricey one. If you need more space the velociraptor drives should be cheaper and also offer very high iops for random i/o (about 4 times that of a standard 7200 upm sata drive).