More bandwidth is always better, though most development work doesn't rely on a ton of bandwidth being available. I used Memory Bandwidth Benchmark (mbw) for the RAM benchmark, with the command mbw -n 2 256 | grep AVG, and I used the MEMCPY result as a proxy for general RAM performance.

I used sysbench for the CPU benchmark, with the command sysbench -test=cpu -cpu-max-prime=20000 -num-threads=2 run. VMware and VirtualBox are neck-in-neck when it comes to raw memory and CPU performance, and that's to be expected these days, as both solutions (as well as most other virtualization solutions) are able to use features in modern Intel processors and modern chipsets (like those in my MacBook Air) to their fullest potential.ĬPU or RAM-heavy workloads should perform similarly, though VMware Fusion has a slight edge. I wanted to make sure VirtualBox and VMWare could both do basic operations (like copying memory and performing raw number crunching in the CPU) at similar rates both should pass through as much of this performance as possible to the underlying system, so numbers should be similar: The key question I wanted to answer: Is purchasing VMware Fusion and the required Vagrant plugin ($140 total!) worth it, or is VirtualBox 5.0 good enough? Baseline Performance: Memory and CPU I'll present each benchmark, some initial conclusions based on the result, and the methodology I used for each benchmark. I benchmarked the raw performance bits (CPU, memory, disk access) as well as some 'full stack' scenarios (load testing and per-page load performance for some CMS-driven websites). Since VirtualBox 5.0 was released earlier this year, I decided to re-evaluate the two VM solutions for local web development (specifically, LAMP/LEMP-based Drupal development, but most of these benchmarks apply to any dev workflow). I switched from VirtualBox to VMware Fusion (which requires a for-pay plugin) a year ago, as a few benchmarks I ran at the time showed VMware was 10-30% faster. Since I use build and rebuild dozens of VMs per day, and maintain a popular Vagrant configuration for Drupal development ( Drupal VM), as well as dozens of other VMs (like Ansible Vagrant Examples), I am highly motivated to find the fastest and most reliable virtualization software for local development. I do all my development (besides iOS or Mac dev) running code inside VMs, and for many years I used VirtualBox, a free virtualization tool, along with Vagrant and Ansible, to build and manage all these VMs. My Mac spends the majority of the day running at between one and a dozen VMs.

Virtualbox vs vmware fusion performance