VMware Fusion 8 Benchmarks vs. Fusion 7 and Boot Camp

Virtual Machine Management

We’ll end our Fusion 8 benchmarks with a look at virtual machine management. If you plan to use just a single virtual machine and leave it running most of the time, this section probably holds relatively little value for you. However, for those users who frequently run or access lots of virtual machines, we wanted to see what improvement, if any, Fusion 8 brings when it comes to boot, suspend, resume, and shut down times.

As with the previous section for File Transfers, these tests were measured manually with a stop watch and conducted five times each. The numbers in the chart below represent seconds so, again, lower is better.

We’re seeing a similar trend here to the one revealed in our Parallels 11 testing. Fusion 7 will indeed run a Windows 10 virtual machine just fine, albeit without support for many of the new integrated features, but it’s certainly not optimized for Microsoft’s latest operating system. In addition to the performance advantages shown in these Fusion 8 benchmarks, the latest version of Fusion simply handles the basic tasks of booting, suspending, and, especially, resuming Windows 10 virtual machines far better than its predecessor.

We’re not surprised to see Fusion 8 do slightly better in most management categories, but that absolutely cringeworthy resume time for Fusion 7 really surprised us. We verified that everything was configured properly in both the Windows VM and the OS X host, confirmed that no rogue processes were trying to load or surprise background indexing was taking place, and replicated that lengthy result in every test. There’s just something about Windows 10 on our MacBook Pro platform that Fusion 7 really didn’t like. The good news is that Fusion 8 solves that issue completely, and resumes Windows 10 VMs in a snap.

Table of Contents

[one_half padding=”0 5px 20px 0″]
1. Introduction
2. Fusion 8 New Features & Overview
3. Hardware, Software, and Testing Methodology
4. Geekbench
5. 3DMark (2013)
6. 3DMark06
7. FurMark OpenGL Benchmark
8. Cinebench R15
[/one_half]

[one_half_last padding=”0 0px 20px 5px”]
9. PCMark 8
10. Passmark PerformanceTest 8.0
11. x264 Encoding
12. x265 Encoding
13. File Transfers
14. Virtual Machine Management
15. Conclusions
[/one_half_last]