CNET Labs recently reviewed VMware's Fusion and Parallels Desktop for Mac to test Windows virtual machine performance on a Mac computer.

SWsoft recently commented about this benchmarking test on one of their blog sites, and said that their benchmark suffered from "unrealistic scenarios and vendor bias".

To bring their opinion on the benchmarking process home, they list out reasons why the test seemed upside down:

• It does not make sense to use an exclusive monster 8-core desktop for benchmarking Windows on Mac. Most people use laptops with 2 CPU cores and 2GB of RAM at most.
  
• Since Mac OS is the primary OS, it does not make sense to give both cores to a Windows VM that runs Word, Excel and Outlook. Office applications don't benefit from multiple CPUs. Perhaps that's why default configuration of Fusion is a single-CPU VM. Come on – most of the VMmark (server benchmark) workloads run in a single-core VM. Yet, desktop benchmark is run with dual cores – does not make much sense to me.
  
• It does not make sense to use Vista inside a VM. Most people run XP because Vista license only allows the most expensive Vista SKUs to run inside VM, not to mention application compatibility issues.
  
• It does not make sense to run QuickTime and Photoshop inside Windows VM. Why use Mac OS in the first place if not for running Mac OS-native multimedia apps?
  

You can read the rest of Ilya Baimetov's post, here.