I know that's a bit away from what you were asking, but thought it might be relevant. I've run off both large capacity 7200rpm drives and small 5400rpm passport drives with no problems. Running VMs off of a local drive can really kill performance as you can end with contention with the main OS. My work VMs tend to have 1GB to 1.5GB allocated, and again, they run well with VMware Fusion.Īlso, if you're going to run VMs, put them on an external hard drive, as Jeff Atwood has suggested previously, since that'll help with drive access. I run a simple Windows XP VM with 512MB and that runs great. Also, as brendanjerwin mentions, memory is important. In terms of performance, I'd say the VM's tend to run slightly faster on Mac than on PC. The vmware install path will still be retrieved from the registry, but you can change it if you need to The option to download the tools can be disabled and a custom path where you already have the tools downloaded can be chosen. I use VMware Fusion daily at home and I picked it mainly because at work I use Windows hardware running VMware Workstation and any virtual machines it uses, I can easily use in VMWare Fusion. I've not had a great deal of experience with Parallels so can't really compare it with VMware Fusion.

Vmware viewer mac