Yesterday, Microsoft announced the availability of IE8 RC1. A release candidate is a version of the software that has been made available to the general public while it undergoes some final testing. You can download IE8 RC1 here.

Been playing around a little bit with VMware’s Fusion 2.0 and Sun’s VirtualBox 2.1.2, two virtualization platforms that are available for Mac users.

I will eventually expand this brief test to include Parallels 4.0, since it seems that Parallels and Fusion are the frontrunners when it comes to virtualization on the Mac platform.

For this initial test, I wanted to understand the differences in which the virtual disks were accessed and how that impacted performance.

Sun’s VirtualBox, although a nice little application for being free, doesn’t allow for the configuration of multiple processors, the network interface binding is a little strange, and merely doesn’t seem to have the flexibility. Fusion (and Parallels for that fact) provides the capabilities to support multiple virtual processors, works great with multiple Ethernet interfaces, and provides better integration into the platform being virtualized.

With that being said, boot time was of particular interest to me. In this scenario, I measured with a stopwatch the time from when I hit the power button on the virtual machine to the time that the GUI was up and the login screen was loaded.

I’m a Windows guy by trade, so naturally I included those numbers, but in the spirit of trying something new, I also loaded Ubuntu 8.10 desktop to see how they compared.

All of the virtual machines were configured for IDE disk access (VirtualBox does offer a SATA option) for the boot time tests. Each virtual machine had the virtualization guest extensions or additions running. Boot time was measured five times each per platform, per virtualization product and then averaged.

When comparing Windows Vista running on Fusion versus Windows Vista running on VirtualBox, Fusion loads Vista 22% (almost 9 seconds) faster than VirtualBox.

Looking at a platform other than Windows, I chose to test Ubuntu, a Linux platform available online for free. In this test, Fusion won again. This time, Ubuntu loaded almost 9% (almost 3 seconds) faster than VirtualBox.

Another interesting point is that VirtualBox supports a virtualized SATA controller. This differs from the standard IDE controller as more of the work (processing) is done by the CPU instead of the controller. I thought it would be interesting to show load times between IDE and SATA.

Using Ubuntu running on VirtualBox as an example, I found that the SATA configuration actually booted slower than that of a virtual hard disk configured to use IDE. There was almost a 3 second difference between the two.

In one of my next posts I can to cover disk file write performance on the these virtualized platforms. Also look for the addition of Parallels to the mix.

Just like about everybody else out there that is a "bleeding edge" technie like myself and doesn't mind running some beta software downloaded the Windows 7 beta last week.  Needless to say, it definitely has a better look and feel to it than Windows Vista, and the performance even though it is a beta seems to be as good as if not better than Vista.  Here are a few other observations from some testing that I did. Every scenario that I ran through was via a MacBook Pro with VMware Fusion 2.0 and Parallels 4.0 loaded on my machine.  Windows 7 was installed into a virtual machine for the test phase. I had the intention of trying to run this virtual machine as my production desktop, but I found that too many of my applications had challenges running correctly under the OS.  Most notably was any Java applet in the web browser.  Trying to do so yielded me a non-responsive virtual machine in which the only way to recover was to power it off and then back on.  It locked it up solid. This really bothered me as I already really like Java and the fact that it would lock up a machine so hard made things worse.  I went through a couple different versions of Java and figured out that running Windows 7 in safe mode would allow me to get a little further, but not all the way.  I kept thing about other factors that could impact this, so I decided to install Windows 7 on a Parallels 4.0 virtual machine, putting VMware Fusion to the side for a bit. Sure enough, Parallels seemed to handle Java without any issues; no lockups.  Parallels did release an update that made an experimental Windows 7 configuration available.  This type of support is not available on Fusion yet.  It would appear that a video driver or something related to the machine tools that get installed on the virtual machine are causing some sort of problem. Secondly, I am a big fan of VisionApp Remote Desktop.  I use this quite a bit at home as well as at work.  So, the next step was to get this app installed on the virtual machine.  I circled back to my Fusion instance nad installed the application.  I imported my configuration and as soon as I attempted to connect to a machine, I would get an application exception indicating a problem the the GDI interface.  More online research and I had figured out that this was because the app maintains thumbnails which it updates periodically.  It seems that the GDI calls are not compatible with Windows 7.  I tried the same process on Parallels with the same result.  I posted to VisionApp's support forum where a few others had the same problem.  VisionApp does not support Windows 7, and their new Remote Desktop 9.0 is going to be released in early February and doesn't contain support for Windows 7 either.  What a bummer. So, needless to say, I had to go back to my Vista virtual machine for my day to day work.  Kind of a bummer, but I am definitely looking forward to Win 7's pending release.

Even though we had a number of technical difficulties, I really enjoyed the interview with Jon and Hal over at the Powerscripting Podcast.  I was excited to listen to the playback to the interview which should've been available a few days after we recorded the live show, but the interview went missing from what I hear, so Episode 54 was MIA.  Our people are working on seeing if we can reschedule the interview for another show to take another run at it.