Monday, April 7, 2008

vmware 6.0 vs. 5.5

Too bad I waited so long to upgrade. vmware 6.0 is such an awesome upgrade in performance compared to vmware 5.5. I run a pretty intensive development enviornment (many virtual servers with many intensive services). And at the very minimum, my xeon 2.66 ghz processor is being used 12-30% all the time. That was the case with vmware 5.5.

vmware 6.0 on the other hand, it runs at 0 to 3%. That is pretty shocking to me.

Other differences:
-vmware 5.5 only supported up to 4GB of ram. Whereas 6.0 supports all of my 8 gigs of ram provided you run a x64 OS.
-wmware 5.5 would bluescreen half the time when I started vmware after I installed 8 gigs of ram (from 4 gigs of ram) and would give a page fault error. 6.0 no longer has this problem.
-vmware supports 1920 x 1200 without any tweaks. The new standard these days for a high resolution monitor.
-64bit OS virtualization works perfect with 6.0. With 5.5, it seemed like for some reason, the 64bit OS would run really sluggish. I would literally launch the 64bit OS, then shut it down because my host computer would run too sluggish when I had more than one vmware guest OS's running.
-And again, I want to mention the performance difference. Since I need to run a dev evnironment all the time, my computer always seemed a little laggy to respond, a lot of disc access, sound would be choppy, but now it feels like my computer is running load free. Its simply amazing. My computer feels new.

1 comment:

  1. Hey Michael, What is your core OS that your running VMWare on?

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