Running on Boot Camp Volumes

One option users have is to be able to switch back and forth between Boot Camp and virtualization. The way this works is that you install Boot Camp, as you normally would, and then you setup either Parallels Desktop or VMware Fusion to access that volume instead of a virtual hard disk (the default setup).

When running the virtual machines, Parallels outperforms VMware Fusion in performance when they are accessing a Boot Camp volume. While we didn't benchmark it because it's something a user only does once, VMware Fusion's setup time is considerably less than Parallels. Both products, especially when dealing with driver issues for iMacs that come with Bluetooth keyboards, are significantly easier to set up than if running Boot Camp natively.

Virtual Machine Performance running from Boot Camp volume

When it comes to running virtualization solutions off a Boot Camp volume, the virtual machine performance is the most relevant. Across the board, Parallels was again faster here, and in launching the virtual machine with a full Windows boot, it was noticeable from a user experience point of view.

Graphics running on Boot Camp volumes benchmarked as expected with Parallels significantly outperforming VMware Fusion except for the CPU score where Parallels Desktop just edged out VMware Fusion.

Graphics Performance running from Boot Camp volume

3DMark06 scores are not as impacted by running off the Boot Camp volume as other tests. As a result, with the exception of CPU score, we continue to see large margins of speed difference where Parallels Desktop 6 is much faster than VMware Fusion 3.1.

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