As a life-long FreeBSD user and a laptop owner I have to run my development environment in a VM. FreeBSD is a great piece of software, but it's hardware support is a bit... lacking.
From the article I got the impression that the main bottleneck is sharing files between VM and a host system. Probably, I can't know for sure because I don't do this. Instead I have all my files and software on the VM, including my IDE of choice. I have X server set up on Windows host (Xming) and when I really need to transfer files between a host and guest I do this over s(f|c)p.
It probably helps that my IDE is Emacs :) (Before that - gVIM) And I don't see any problems with it. Moreover, the only development related thing on the host system is Xming and VirtualBox, so when I change the computer I'm working on I just need to copy the image and install these two programs and I'm ready to go - with exactly the same environment everywhere. I used this setup from Linux, too - the only issue I had was that xhost alone didn't work for allowing external X connections, I had to edit startx script and remove the 'no tcp' (or similar) flag from there.
At work, where I have a proper desktop with nvidia graphics, I have FreeBSD installed as a main OS. The difference in speed between my environment in a VM on a laptop (with 1GB RAM allocated) and on a host system on a better hardware (with 8GB RAM available) is not that big, which makes me believe that I found an optimal way of working. I don't know how more costly virtualization makes disk IO, but I think that compared to general slowness of disk IO this difference is negligible (I don't have SSD yet, so my opinion may change in near future!).
From the article I got the impression that the main bottleneck is sharing files between VM and a host system. Probably, I can't know for sure because I don't do this. Instead I have all my files and software on the VM, including my IDE of choice. I have X server set up on Windows host (Xming) and when I really need to transfer files between a host and guest I do this over s(f|c)p.
It probably helps that my IDE is Emacs :) (Before that - gVIM) And I don't see any problems with it. Moreover, the only development related thing on the host system is Xming and VirtualBox, so when I change the computer I'm working on I just need to copy the image and install these two programs and I'm ready to go - with exactly the same environment everywhere. I used this setup from Linux, too - the only issue I had was that xhost alone didn't work for allowing external X connections, I had to edit startx script and remove the 'no tcp' (or similar) flag from there.
At work, where I have a proper desktop with nvidia graphics, I have FreeBSD installed as a main OS. The difference in speed between my environment in a VM on a laptop (with 1GB RAM allocated) and on a host system on a better hardware (with 8GB RAM available) is not that big, which makes me believe that I found an optimal way of working. I don't know how more costly virtualization makes disk IO, but I think that compared to general slowness of disk IO this difference is negligible (I don't have SSD yet, so my opinion may change in near future!).