What are your Windows boot times and Mac idle CPU hits with Fusion?

[noetus]

I just ran an experiment and I'm intrigued what others might find with their setups.

I have a MacBook Pro 2.33 GHz 3GB with a Windows 2000 installation. It has 768MB RAM allocated (though could be less as it only uses a third of it) and is configured to use both cores. For the test I had it connected to a Host only network with the Mac (I have a Bridged network as well but disconnected for the test). The W2K VM is fully loaded with software, viruscan, anti-spyware, and a firewall.

With the VM OFF I recorded the idle CPU cycles to be 0-3% User and 0-5% System on the MBP.

With the VM ON and idling at 2% (on Windows Task Manager) I recorded the MBP at 1-4% User and 4-9% System.

A complete shutdown of the Windows VM (to the large 'Play' icon) takes 8-9 seconds.

A boot of Windows, from 'Play' to Desktop, takes 36 seconds.

I repeated the tests three times and the values seem pretty consistent. It's not exactly scientific but I'm pretty happy with this performance.

[admin]

Those numbers sound about right, though of course it depends on the guest configuration. My boot/halt times are longer because I'm logging into a domain. CPU usage of vmware-vmx (the part that does all the work) is under 5%. These numbers are from a Mac Pro 2.66 GHz, XP Pro SP2 guest with 256 MB RAM out of 2 GB total.

There are a couple known causes of higher idle CPU utilization, including USB devices, anything which raises the guest timer interrupt rate, and multiple virtual processors.

[pstudios]

I was blown away by my boot times with a new 8-core 2.8Ghz 8Gb RAM Mac Pro, my XP SP2 VM boots from scratch in well under 10 secs - probably 8 sec including the startup items. It makes running XP virtually alot more fun for me than natively

[noetus]

That's impressive! How many cores is the XP VM utilizing? Max is two, right, or can that be changed in the configuration file?

I'm also experimenting to see if Windows 2003 Server, with all eye candy off etc and minimal services, can best my times on Windows 2000. Bear in mind I am using a little MBP C2D 2.33 GHz, nothing like as powerful as the Mac Pro. It's also limited to 3GB which is not much to play with.

My experience with Vista is that it is significantly more sluggish. Overall I did not like my Vista experience on Fusion. It feels bloated and inefficient, even with SP1, which effects a major improvement on my Thinkpad.

[pstudios]

I was just using the defaults of Fusion's setup - I checked and it says 1 proc - though the option to make it be up to 2 procs (per VM I assume?) is there. I have not yet used Vista in Fusion - I have Vista x64 as a boot camp partition and althought the partition shows up as listed in Fusion without me doing anything, the artcle I read on this site on the pros and cons of VMing a boot camp partition scared me away. I use that bootcamp partition to run my audio gear (firewire audio interface) and Sonar x64 and Lightwave x64 and I'd rather not have it get corrupted as I hear a boot camp setup is a bit of a hassle (I had my vendor do it for me). Besides with XP (and 2000 if I need it as a sandbox or something to test out apps), I have all I need in Leopard and it sure makes the transition to Mac a heck of a lot less painful.

But Vista x64 booting on this new Mac also seems great - I haven't installed SP1 yet (was waiting for it to go to Windows Update), I'm sure Vista has its problems, but so far with the 8-cores and the NVIDIA 8800gt Aero is cool and I've had 0 problems with it once I've turned off the (annoying) UAC. So with my setup, unfortunately I can't help you with Vista in Fusion and I too am loathe to try it in a VM and so far I have no need to...

[pstudios]

oh yeah, I forgot to mention, coming back from a suspended session into a VM is like 2-3sec tops to a working, ready-for-input operating system, exactly where I was before. This VM stuff is too cool for words - I really can't understand the OS fanboys (on either side) anymore - OS's are basically irrelavent now thanks to VMWare... Ahh no flying car, but the future seems cool so far. :smileysilly:

[noetus]

I tried running a Vista Bootcamp partition at one point and found it to be very messy... subsequently I read on these forums that it is not really intended to be a solution for running a VM permanently - more like you run the Bootcamp partition mostly as a stand-alone and can have occasional access to it via Fusion when you need it. Even then, I wholeheartedly agree with your decision to leave it alone - it just opens a potential can of worms.

One feature I would like to see adopted is the ability of the VM to mount a partition natively - not just the Bootcamp partition, but any partition. At the moment I'm keeping all my data on my Mac on a virtual NTFS volume, which is awkward. Since I still use Windows on another machine I need to be able to sync my data. I tried having all my data on my Mac HFS+ volume and then share to the Windows VM (which has the advantage that I wouldn't have to boot the VM to access my data in Leopard) but this created all kinds of headaches when it came to syncing that partition with a mirror on a Windows machine.

One issue is that file datestamps are not read equivalently on the two different disk partitions, and my sync went into an infinite loop of continually resyncing data it thought was always out of date. Also I discovered what appears to be a bug in the VM shared folders - a '%' sign in a filename gets converted into a string '%0025' over the share which is then read back as '%0025' rather than '%' and this means the sync program was completely unable to sync those files because it couldn't match them. It basically changs the filename of any file with '%' in the filename over the share You can try it for yourself - create a file with '%' in the filename on the Windows side, then grab it on the Mac side and copy it over to the Windows side in another folder. The filename should be identical, of course (all you've done is drag and drop it to another location - but the '%' gets converted to '%0025' on the way. This only happens in a VMware shared folder - if you just use a regular network share, this doesn't happen.

So my data does need to be on an NTFS partition. Ideally I would like to have a physical NTFS partition on my Mac startup disk for that (I use MacFUSE and NTFS-3g so no problem getting the Mac to read and write to the partition). But then the VM wouldn't be able to see it, because mounting physical partitions is not supported (except bootcamp partitions). So it has to be an virtual NTFS partition, which means (a) I have to startup the VM just to access my data on the Mac, even if I'm not going to use any Windows programs, which apart from an annoyance hurts my battery life when on the road, (b) I can't have two simultaneously VMs see the data at the same time, since just one will lock the data volume when it mounts it, (c) it adds fragemntation problems, firstly because I have to degfrag twice, in fact three times, once inside Windows, once using the VMware degragger, and then one final time on the Mac side with iDefrag, a LOT of extra work, and secondly the Mac degragger (iDefrag) sees my data as one HUGE file (or lots of 2GB files), which is more difficult to defragment and requires as much free space as the file takes up, (d) it's just inelegant.

I agree with you up to a point about OS fanboys. Bear in mind though that it is much less easy (not to mention in violation of Apple's EULA) to do what we're doing on a Wintel machine.

I am excited about the future as well - basically as Fusion and Parallels mature (and it's great we have two competing products, both excellent) we will see more and more conversion. Eventually, I hope, Windows will basically disappear as an OS underneath Mac OS (unless you want it to be visible). We're already quite far along that road with Unity.

[pstudios]

Thanks for the tip on filenames with percent signs in them. I'll try to avoid that for now. I'm still not too clear on the whole file exchange format between OSX and Windows NTFS (either through boot camp or Fusion VMs). I'm still figuring out my workflow between all my Win and Mac apps - I've been slow going deciding what to install in Vista boot camp and what in my Fusion XP VM, trying to figure out what will work best.

Although this thread isn't probably the best place to talk about it, I need to figure out too, how best to share files and folders between my Fusion VM, boot camp Vista & Mac OSX operating systems. I have a boot drive which is half Mac OSX and half NTFS for Vista bootcamp, and 2 other individual drives in my mac one of which is formatted NTFS (for my win media) and the other in Mac format (whatever that is - I'm still a mac noob at the moment). I also have a number of other Windows NTFS computers on my network that I'd like to share back and forth seamlessly between all 3 of those OSes.

I haven't yet delved into Fusion's networking - though at the moment I cannot see my Windows Workgroup network in my XP Fusion VM, and I'm sharing files with it by copying them to my user folder and then to my XP VM. Ideally, it would be good if I could let the VM see the Win drive on the mac as well as the other shares on the Win computers in the workgroup. It's probably a bit more important for me that the sharing is seamless, because I'm not sharing just the occasional Word doc, but rather lots of media files and videos as I create and edit them - large amounts of data potentially so it would be good if it was fast too.

I don't know much about the MacFUSE you mention, though I'll search about it. After a little searching (and perhaps also too little Mac knowledge yet), I am considering getting the Paragon NTFS for Mac OSX program: Paragon Software NTFS for Mac OSX

but I'm not sure if I even need that with Fusion, and or if it would cause any problems? Do you know anything about it, and or how it fits in with MacFUSE, Fusion, and a seamless workflow for a content creator using VMs, bootcamp, and Mac apps? Thanks for any pointers or links with information if you know of any...

[admin]

Thanks for reporting the % filename issue, I've filed a bug internally.

[admin]

Our shared folder guru explained that "%" is the escape character we use to mark characters that Windows can't recognize. "%" must itself be escaped, which causes the behavior you see. The suggestion is to not use "%" with Shared Folders; if you do need them, use a network share instead.

[admin · Accepted solution]

One feature I would like to see adopted is the ability of the VM to mount a partition natively - not just the Bootcamp partition, but any partition.

Actually, you can do that, there's just no GUI. You want to use vmware-rawdiskCreator, search the forums for "rawdisk-creator". Another possible solution would be to use a USB drive.

(b) I can't have two simultaneously VMs see the data at the same time, since just one will lock the data volume when it mounts it

The only way you can do this is with a Shared Folder or network share. Raw partitions or USB drives won't help in this case.

[noetus]

This thread is now way off topic! My fault probably. So anyway...

@pstudios

I would be wary of using the Paragon NTFS driver for now. I have it and it is buggy. It corrupts files. Look on their forums and you will see posts about it. They are working on it and so I assume there will be a fully working version sometime, but in the meantime, that's why I went to MacFUSE and NTFS-3g, which is slower (though free and open-source) but I haven't seen any reports of it corrupting anyone's files!

@etung

thanks for this - all very helpful. I had suspected that the '%' sign was being used as an escape character, as I had noticed that 0025 is the escape sequence for the % sign. If it's working correctly, though, shouldn't it escape BACK to a '%' sign when copied back to the Windows side, rather than remaining as '%0025'? Other sequences of '%xxxx' found on the shared volume will escape back, so why not '%0025'? Surely that was the whole point of escaping the '%' sign in the first place, which wouldn't otherwise require to be escaped, since it IS allowed in Windows filenames?

As for using vmware-rawdiskCreator, this is exactly what I am looking for! Thanks. I had noticed the command but didn't investigate what it does - wish I had, as I'm now going to have to re-mirror my disks! I suspect HDD performance will be much improved when reading/writing to a physical disk partition rather than to a gigantic fragmented file.

[admin]

I'm not sure about why %0025 isn't escaped back, but it's probably better just not to use % in the first place.

One thing to remember with disks created by vmware-rawdiskCreator is to not use suspend or snapshots with them, since that can cause corruption if you change their contents out from under Fusion.

[noetus]

Unfortunately, for me, that's impossible - I have over 1,000 files in a database that use '%' in the filename as a special signifier, and I need to sync these files from Mac to PC. I will use the network share rather than the shared folders for this, of course. Still, if it doesn't escape the '%' back and it should, that's still a bug, unless it was intended for some reason.

Thanks for the advice on not using suspend with rawDiskCreator.