I benchmarked the raw performance bits (CPU, memory, disk access) as well as some 'full stack' scenarios (load testing and per-page load performance for some CMS-driven websites). Since VirtualBox 5.0 was released earlier this year, I decided to re-evaluate the two VM solutions for local web development (specifically, LAMP/LEMP-based Drupal development, but most of these benchmarks apply to any dev workflow). I switched from VirtualBox to VMware Fusion (which requires a for-pay plugin) a year ago, as a few benchmarks I ran at the time showed VMware was 10-30% faster. Since I use build and rebuild dozens of VMs per day, and maintain a popular Vagrant configuration for Drupal development ( Drupal VM), as well as dozens of other VMs (like Ansible Vagrant Examples), I am highly motivated to find the fastest and most reliable virtualization software for local development. I do all my development (besides iOS or Mac dev) running code inside VMs, and for many years I used VirtualBox, a free virtualization tool, along with Vagrant and Ansible, to build and manage all these VMs. My Mac spends the majority of the day running at between one and a dozen VMs.
