I've been experimenting with using the VMWare provider for Vagrant, and I've gathered some stats on relative performance.
General comments: - VMware consistently performs *slightly* better, but provisioning is slower. - VMware appears to be more resilient in the face of configuration errors. For example, if you assign the same IP address to two virtual machines, VirtualBox will sometimes hang with a lost lock, and require the machine to be rebooted. VMware appears to have no trouble with this issue. - Overall, it's probably not worth the $200 it takes to purchase the necessary licenses to use VMware. The different just isn't big enough. Both work well. Statistics: Using the current 2-slave tests. Machine is mostly idle. Memory use was indistinguishable between the two alternatives. Timings were gathered from the command-line, using "time", with real time reported. CPU percentage was gathered with "top -c a", run for five minutes in an idle state, with the 6 VM processes averaged. VMWare: - Vagrant up, with no prebuilt vms: 13m 54s - Vagrant halt: 0m30.557s - Vagrant up, with prebuilt vms: 2m34.104s - Vagrant reload: 3m10.957s - Test run: 2m57.714s - Machine load percentage idle: 1.0-2.9, ave 2.0 VirtualBox: - Vagrant up, with no prebuilt vms: 10m 22s - Vagrant halt: 0m28.255s - Vagrant up, with prebuilt vms: 2m44.747s - Vagrant reload: 3m12.084s - Test run: 3m9.324s - Machine load percentage idle: 1.9-3.7, ave 2.6
