I found that most of these programs were component-oriented (measuring the performance of e.g., CPU or RAM), but PCMark10 provided a nice alternative, with a set of eight practical elements (e.g., spreadsheets, photo editing).

Nonetheless, I did go ahead, download and install the full supply of Windows updates, and run a variety of benchmarking programs. That could work: I only needed these VMs to run programs like Adobe Premiere Elements and Microsoft Office. It seemed that I might avoid the need for antivirus software by keeping my VMs offline. Windows updates could have a performance impact by imposing clutter by increasing exposure to Windows 7 instabilities, introduced by Microsoft starting in 2016, to push users toward Windows 10 and by requiring antivirus software, which itself could impose a major performance hit. So there was a choice of whether to install a lot of updates, which might themselves affect performance, or just settle for the relatively limited benchmarkers that would run without Windows updates. It turned out that the best benchmarkers required unspecified Windows updates. This post explores benchmarking programs, to find the best way of comparing VirtualBox and VMware. Another post does update some aspects of VM benchmarking. As with other long posts in this blog, I may write a more concise version at some point in the future, if I revisit this question. This was a rough, first-cut exploration of numerous factors related to that question.

The question considered in this post is whether one had visibly better performance than the other. As described in ( 1 2) other posts, I was looking at VirtualBox 5.2.6 and VMware Workstation Player 14.1.1 as possible ways to run certain software in a Windows 7 guest virtual machine (VM) on a Windows 10 host computer.

Vmware vs virtualbox stability