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I am a Windows/Web developer by profession and I have been considering a MacBook Pro as a replacement for my current development machine. I am impressed by the build quality, the uni-body construction and performance specs of the MacBook Pro. I am specifically interested in the 13.3" MacBook Pro running Core 2 Duo 2.4 GHz processor with 4 GB RAM.

What I am wondering is this ... what performance can I expect running SQL Server 2008, IIS, and Visual Studio 2010 within a virtual environment (VMWare Fusion and Windows 7) on the above mentioned MacBook Pro?

I like the 13.3" model as the size is more portable, but am I expecting to much from a core 2 duo processor? Would I need to look at the next step up in MacBook Pro using the core i5 processor?

Thanks!

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up vote 8 down vote accepted

I'm a longtime Windows admin/developer/gamer who recently purchased a MacBook Pro - 13", 4GB RAM. Only difference between what I have and what you're looking at is the CPU (mine's 2.2GHz). I've had no issues running VMWare or anything I throw at it. I'm actually VMing my Bootcamp partition. So essentially I have one Windows Bootcamp partition that I've wrapped up in VMWare. That way I can run it when I'm in OSX or boot to it, and I only have one instance of Windows and one set of Windows apps to manage. And to be perfectly honest, the only time I ever need to boot into it directly is for gaming (3D support).

As for performance, Win7 and VS are hogs, so I might consider going with more than 4gb of ram just so you can assign 2-3 to your Windows VM and still have an adequate supply for OSX. Otherwise I see no reason why what you're intending to do won't work. Rebooting back and forth between OSes is a pain in the ass - I definitely wouldn't go 100% bootcamp unless it's absolutely necessary.

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I wouldn't. I wouldn't touch that setup with a ten foot pole.

If you want to develop like that, partition the hard drive and use Boot Camp. I wouldn't be satisfied with the performance hit you're taking by running, essentially an operating system, an IDE, a web server, and a SQL server, all wrapped up inside VMWare Fusion.

Since you're buying the licences for everything to run, why not install and get the full performance from it?

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I have a 2009 13" mac, and I have used it for windows-based web development using Virtualbox for almost a year now. It works perfectly. In fact it works so well that it has triggered a paradigm shift for me - I do almost all my work in virtual machines now, even on the windows machine at work.

I often run more than one virtual machine at the same time, and my main development VM has several SQL server instances running. I develop fairly heavy enterprise web applications in VS2008 and I have no problems with the performance. There is a penalty, but I honestly don't feel it is noticeable for web development. I'm sure I could measure it, but in my daily work I never even think about it. What I do think about is that when windowsupdate wants to reboot the VM, I just pop out of it and do something else for a minute. When the corporate antivirus bogs down my main VM, I minimise it and carry on wih something else.

The same VM's I run on the mac run just fine on my windows machine at work too. The convenience of having isolated, portable, easily-cloned machines for different tasks and different setups is just awesome. I would sacrifice a lot more performance than I actually do, just to have that.

The main performance killer is heavy IO, so keep your VM's on a separate physical disk from the host OS if you can and don't let Time Machine or Spotlight do anything on that disk.

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I have a MacBook Pro 15" Late 2010. Running an i7, 8GB of RAM and a 500GB 7200rpm drive the performance running Parallels in Coherence is outstanding. My Windows 7 VM reports a Windows Experience Index of 5.1 and I use Visual Studio 2010, SQL Server 2008 R2, and SharePoint 2010 on this machine every day.

I never shutdown the VM unless I am going to be gaming. I can highly recommend a virtual environment on a Mac for day to day development. I even play most Steam games on my VM with reasonable results, so overall I am extremely satisfied with my setup.

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I'm surprised that nobody mentioned this, i have a macbook pro 13inch, it's able to handle the vmware just fine.

the only thing that i've notice that goes down really fast is the battery life, so when you're running VM don't expect to get the long battery life that macbook can typically provide.

from my system, i can see that the battery life was cut down by half...

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