I recently mentioned how impressed I was with the speed of my MacBook, even when running Windows in Boot Camp. Of course, this was a subjective feeling, so I decided to try timing some events to see if the clock agreed with my brain. Sure enough, the Mac is faster than my Dell XPS M1330 by a good margin. But I was surprised to learn that Vista, even in Ultimate guise, wasn’t half bad, either. The root of my performance gripes seems to be what happens after Vista is booted - after the desktop appears, all OSes spend time doing something in the background, but Vista spends much more time.

My test was simple: I used the iPhone’s stopwatch to time the following key events after startup:

1. The Mac Gong or disappearance of the PC or VMware BIOS screen
2. The appearance of the login box (I paused the timer at this point to give me time to enter my password)
3. The appearance of the desktop
4. I then clicked on the icons to launch my mail and web browser apps, assuming this would be the first thing most people would do on startup, and timed how long it took for each to load and present content
5. Finally, I stopped the clock when the system appeared usable - hourglasses disappeared, the disk stopped chugging like crazy, and all background apps had loaded and were running
6. I also timed how long it took for the system to power down after ordering a shutdown

Not surprisingly, the MacBook with OS X was fastest, though it took a surprisingly longish time to get Mail and Safari launched compared to Firefox and Outlook in Windows. OS X also excels at knocking off the backup tasks and giving a stable, ready-to-use system.

Booting Windows Vista Ultimate in Boot Camp was surprisingly speedy, too, and this was the core of my test. The Mac gave me a working Windows environment in just 2:15, compared to 1:40 for OS X and 3:10 for my Dell XPS M1330. I’m not sure exactly what the Dell is doing, but it churns and chugs for quite a while on bootup, even after I stopped the clock, and it’s got a nice clean install with few apps running.

Finally, I timed my Boot Camp volume in VMware Fusion (1.1.3) and found that, although it was speedy enough when it was running, it took 30 seconds longer to get started than booting natively. But even Fusion was quicker than the Dell.

My feeling is that Microsoft has spent some time optimizing the startup experience in Vista, trimming the time it takes to get a login window and desktop by shifting some work to background tasks that interfere with usability once the system appears to be running. A clever trick, that, but one that frustrates me on a daily basis as I stare at a desktop full of icons that I can’t use quite yet.

Once again, this is not the most scientific test ever, but it helps to show what I feel about the Mac:

• It’s quicker when I want to sit down and start working
• Windows is much quicker on the Mac than the Dell, despite only slightly better specs (2.2/4 GB vs. 2.0/2 GB)

I ran each test a few times, and although they varied by a few seconds they were fairly consistent.

This should not come as a shock to anyone, as it has been proven before, but let me take this moment to say that, yes, despite their rated speeds, 400-megabit FireWire S400 (aka IEEE 1394) is faster than 480-megabit USB 2.0.

While swapping out disk drives (first to upgrade the internal drive in my MacBook Pro and later to give Time Machine more room), I took some quick performance snapshots with xbench and showed that, depending on I/O type, FireWire can be almost twice as fast as USB, but neither really holds a candle to SATA.

I also took the opportunity to compare the highly-integrated USB 2.0 controller in my Maxtor OneTouch 4 Mini with the much more complicated FireWire/USB combo found in the Verbatim SmartDisk, as well as the performance of three popular notebook hard disk models.

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I had two great storage virtualization seminars this week, in New York and Philadelphia.  As usual, audience participation was key, and interest in VMware and Hyper-V remains high.

One of the main questions I always get is which protocol one should use for VMware storage. My recommendation remains that the answer is an organizational one more than a technical one.  There are certainly performance, CPU utilization, and support differences between Fibre Channel, SCSI, iSCSI, and NFS on VMware, all of these can work fine in many situations.  Although this is addressed in my presentation, I thought it wise to point out some of my sources and (concurring) opinions.

First, I point you to the official VMware VI Team blog, where they reiterate that VMware is protocol-agnostic.  They commit to support all storage protocols equally, and promise to add missing support as soon as possible.  See especially their table of support, which shows that iSCSI currently can’t be used for clustering (!), among other insights.

I’d also like to point out three sources for my seminar slides:

• VMware’s Comparison of Storage Protocol Performance paper, which pits Fibre Channel against hardware iSCSI, software iSCSI, and NFS.
• VMware’s Performance Characterization of VMFS and RDM Using a SAN, which shows that there is a negligible performance difference between shared storage and the two varieties of RDM.
• NetApp’s NetApp and VMware Virtual Infrastructure 3 Storage Best Practices (recently updated), which is a wealth of information on shared storage with NFS, even if you’re not a NetApp customer.

One of the hits from my TechTarget storage virtualization seminar this week was a discussion of the relative merits of different storage protocols. Sounds deadly, but this can be quite a religious issue for folks, and it generated lively debate. I’m firmly in the “do what works” camp - there is no always-right protocol, and they all can work.

In the interests of all, I’d like to point out two delicious sources of VMware storage protocol wisdom:

An internal paper from VMware’s performance folks titled Comparison of Storage Protocol Performance shows that, as expected, Fibre Channel has the lowest CPU overhead and best overall throughput. But, no surprise to anyone who’s tested alternatives, iSCSI and NFS also work pretty darn well! And you can knock that extra CPU load right down to the FC level with an iSCSI HBA.

Next up is a best practices paper from Network Appliance that is chock full of VMware storage goodness. If you’re curious about the potentials of NFS storage for VMDKs, this paper is a must-read! I’m pretty impressed with what VMware over NFS has to offer.

By the way, my next seminars are June 24 and 26 in Atlanta and San Francisco, respectively. I’ll also be presenting some related content at Storage Decisions in Chicago in May and Toronto in June.

Update:  Marc Farley talks back - isolate your networks, people!