Homestead VMWare performance

Well VMWare is always going to be better. There's a license to use it with Vagrant but if you want the best in virtualisation software, that's what you pay.

Is it worth the money? It feels like Virtualbox works fine for me, but maybe VMWare is much faster. Are there some measured differences?

Are you finding VirtualBox restrictively slow?

You can always grab a trial version of VMWare Fusion for yourself and see if it does improve performance significantly enough to purchase a license for it.

It costs to use the plugin for Vagrant/VMWare? https://www.vagrantup.com/vmware

Ouch. You'd be out a minimum of $79 then.

If you're not having any real issues and you don't want to spend the money, stick with VirtualBox then.

I find virtualbox with Homestead pretty fast so... It's a lot of money for something that I already have working on my mac and is pretty fast as well!

Has anyone tried Homestead with VMWare yet? I'm tempted to give it a go.

Workstation 11 at $249.99 or Fusion 7 at $69.99 Plus $79.99 for vagrant

Outside my price range currently, so I'll be sticking with VirtualBox.

I personally have not been having any performance issues with VirtualBox.

I'm more curious to see if Fusion makes it easier to manage multiple VMs.

vagrant-vmware-workstation/fusion should be free for a trial period, IMHO. if performances are remarkable, many developers could choose to switch over to vmware virtualization. any feedback about it?

I'm also interested in any performance gains. Does anyone here use Windows (workstaiton 11) VMWare with Homestead?

I guess the main 'indication' of performance for me would be the speed that unit tests run at?

i.e. is it faster to run unit tests in VMWare vs Virtualbox? If anyone is able to run some tests/comparisons - that would be awesome...

If it's processing speed (CPU/RAM/Disk) it will be down to your host machine. Long as you give it 2/4 CPU cores and enough RAM while allowing it to read/write fast, it will good speeds. An SSD will help loads as well.

@theshiftexchange, Virtualbox's nfs-shares is really slow and inconvenient, even on a localhost.

There's got to be some config issues on certain hosts, or maybe the machine isn't up to the job in some cases?

I haven't done anything fancy, just followed the Homestead installation instructions on my Win 8.1 machine and there's no slowness at all.

Files are synced immediately before I even get the chance to refresh my browser. Composer and Artisan work very quickly.

In fact I have zero issues with VirtualBox myself. Guess I'm just one of the lucky ones.

The performance on my laptop with virtualbox and windows has been very bad for me, on my desktop it's good enough despite both having ssd. Pageloads of 4-5 seconds weren't uncommon with virtualbox/homestead on my laptop. I just reinstalled vagrant and configured it with the vmware provider and all my performance issues are solved. Response times are back in milliseconds.

edit: wasn't using nfs with virtualbox though

@sitesense I must be lucky too, no performance issues at all for me on a MacBook running OS X Yosemite.

I'm super tempted to pump in the $79 and give it a whirl. I'm not having any issues with VirtualBox so it be entirely out of greed. For those with speed issues I noticed switching to an SSD had a dramatic effect on performance. To the point where I don't even think about Homestead performance.

Apparently there is a 30 day money back guarantee on the Vagrant purchase - so I might just buy it and test.

I'll report back here if I do it :)

@theshiftexchange confirmed by HashiCorp by email:

We do offer a 100% no questions asked return policy for 30 days. If you are not satisfied with the product, we will refund 100% of the purchase cost as long as you contact us within 30 days.

on their website too: http://docs.vagrantup.com/v2/vmware/installation.html

Q: Do you offer trial periods for the Vagrant VMware plugins?
We do not offer a trial mechanism at this time, but we do offer a 30-day, no questions asked, 100% money-back guarantee. If you are not satisfied with the product, contact us within 30 days and you will receive a full refund.

So I ended up trying VMWare myself. My page load time is significantly faster (~200ms vs ~800ms)

My unit tests are also slightly quicker.

Totally worth it IMO if you are a daily user of Homestead...

@theshiftexchange Jeez that was slow before... my CodeIgniter app (full site) loads in 240ms on a VM running Vaprobash remotely (Mac mini in the office)

Yeah - I'm using Windows - so that is known for a slow NFS file sync I believe.

So with VMWare the issue is solved - and thus fast page loads - compared to VirtualBox.

So maybe the 'real' answer is the performance gain is best for Windows users...

Hi all,

Happy to report that the speed increase on a MacBook Air with OS X Yosemite is somewhat mighty after switching to VMWare.

So my previous CodeCeption tests which took 5.9s now take 2.1s (64% increase). Loading my home page now takes 80ms as opposed to 1.21s (93% increase). Laravel boot time in my app now takes 47ms as oppose 895ms (95% increase).

Sure, my previous times look to be rather poor, but the delta is very impressive and would be keen to see what change other people on OS X get.

Installation was a breeze too.

Another perspective. 2011 4GB RAM MacBook Air with homestead:

virtualbox: 70-90% CPU, and ~2.0GB RAM usage. High speed fan noise/heat

Switched to vmware:

vmware: 7-10% CPU, ~50MB RAM usage. Fan operation normal.

No more high-speed fan, super fast response on stuff like php artisan migrate/db:seed type operations, and of course page load time. All in all. Wish this would have been available sooner! So much wasted time, waiting during dev.

I'm getting 3-8s load time with homestead on virtualbox, this is with nfs enabled. I don't have fancy SSD's so if you say vm is much faster, I might look into it.

An SSD makes everything faster...

@bashy in that case it might be better to shell out $80 on an SSD and speed up more than the VM :)

I have an SSD in my Windows machine and my Mac. Get to work and I boot my iMac with a HDD in and it's zzzzzzzz

You don't really need all this fancy stuff. I switched over from homestead to @fideloper 's Vaprobash http://fideloper.github.io/Vaprobash/ , it's much faster for me compared to homestead. I just had to port forward the sql and change a few things but other than that, i highly recommend this.

For me it's from 4-8s loading times to 345ms and this with half the RAM and CPU usage. For the lazy people, this is the vagrant file I used with php/composer/laravel/sql enabled and sql port forwarded http://pastebin.com/G6fnSb6x