On top of all the goodness Workstation 6.0 has to offer, we now have a revised performance document as well. You can find it here. We've tried our best to provide tips not only about things that you could tune with Workstation and its features, but things you could tweak on your host operating system and within the guest, and even what to look out for on the hardware level. The reorganization of the document makes it easy to find what you need to achieve the best possible experience.

We ran a set of workloads to measure the CPU, memory, disk and network performance of the VM. Vista host performance is on par with XP, except that Vista itself consumes more memory than XP. This means that Vista leaves less memory for the use of VM's than XP. ...
While Vista guest performance is on par with XP in most of our workloads, we did find a few cases that perform worse on the Vista VM than on the XP VM. To understand why Vista was slower in those particular cases, we conducted the same measurements on native physical systems, rather than on virtual machines. We found that Vista is slower than XP on native hardware almost to the same degree as on virtual hardware. This made it clear that VMware Workstation 6.0 wasn't introducing any Vista-specific overheads, and that the relative performance on Vista is as good as on XP.



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