xen discuss - Feb 2008 - Performance of xVM / VirtualBox with Windows guest

I am getting a little confused with all the different virtualization software
out there, but I that is a different question for a different day

I got my hands on a Sun Ultra 24 Quad CPU machine and I thought I would give the
above a go, but was a little disappointed with the performance of running MS
Windows as a guest. I have not yet compared xVM and VirtualBox since still
having problems with the networking side of VirtualBox, but my gut feeling is
that there may not be a lot in it!

Has any one obtained real performance data for running Windows? My initial
feelings is that in the Single CPU (Desktop) area I will not get very good
performance, since the windows guest will only run on a single thread/core.

Any thoughts

Andrew
 
 
This message posted from opensolaris.org

I did something similar with a Ultra 40, which would be similar to the 
24 (2 CPU x 2 Core on the 40 vs. 1 CPU x 4 Core on the 24). I was 
impressed with the speed at which XP installed in VirtualBox, probably 
the fastest XP install I''ve ever done.

The Host OS was SXDE.

The Virtual Display performance wasn''t incredible, I definitely
wouldn''t
want to run animations or movies inside it, but it was definitely 
adequate for "Office Productivity" type applications.

  --joe

Andrew Watkins wrote:
> I am getting a little confused with all the different virtualization
software out there, but I that is a different question for a different day
>
> I got my hands on a Sun Ultra 24 Quad CPU machine and I thought I would
give the above a go, but was a little disappointed with the performance of
running MS Windows as a guest. I have not yet compared xVM and VirtualBox since
still having problems with the networking side of VirtualBox, but my gut feeling
is that there may not be a lot in it!
>
> Has any one obtained real performance data for running Windows? My initial
feelings is that in the Single CPU (Desktop) area I will not get very good
performance, since the windows guest will only run on a single thread/core.
>
> Any thoughts
>
> Andrew
>  
>  
> This message posted from opensolaris.org
> _______________________________________________
> xen-discuss mailing list
> xen-discuss@opensolaris.org
>

Joseph Mocker wrote:
> I did something similar with a Ultra 40, which would be similar to the 
> 24 (2 CPU x 2 Core on the 40 vs. 1 CPU x 4 Core on the 24). I was 
> impressed with the speed at which XP installed in VirtualBox, probably 
> the fastest XP install I''ve ever done.
>
> The Host OS was SXDE.
>
> The Virtual Display performance wasn''t incredible, I definitely
wouldn''t
> want to run animations or movies inside it, but it was definitely 
> adequate for "Office Productivity" type applications.
>
>   --joe
>
> Andrew Watkins wrote:
>   
>> I am getting a little confused with all the different virtualization
software out there, but I that is a different question for a different day
>>
>> I got my hands on a Sun Ultra 24 Quad CPU machine and I thought I would
give the above a go, but was a little disappointed with the performance of
running MS Windows as a guest. I have not yet compared xVM and VirtualBox since
still having problems with the networking side of VirtualBox, but my gut feeling
is that there may not be a lot in it!
>>
>> Has any one obtained real performance data for running Windows? My
initial feelings is that in the Single CPU (Desktop) area I will not get very
good performance, since the windows guest will only run on a single thread/core.
>>
>> Any thoughts
>>
>> Andrew
>>  
>>  
>> This message posted from opensolaris.org
>> _______________________________________________
>> xen-discuss mailing list
>> xen-discuss@opensolaris.org
>>   
>>     
>
> _______________________________________________
> xen-discuss mailing list
> xen-discuss@opensolaris.org
>   
The like on my Ultra-20, now if I actually had 4GB of ram it would
definitely be usable in the same circumstances.  At times it can be dog
slow from emulated disks, but once the OS is cached into memory it
actually fairs quite well, considering just how long Xen has been ported
to OpenSolaris.  Extra sockets or cores really doesn''t help Windows
under xVM, it''s not optimized to benefit from SMP (Specifically to
Xen).  Isolating one of my cores was enough to get it to run right, but
due to my usage of zfs and the amount of ram I have, it can easily
crawl.  The performance is only better by a smudge with Xen 3.1 on
Linux, not really noticable.  With a real FB driver, animations and
videos still won''t play that well, they don''t do too well in
VMware
considering, but at least then will most of the glitches that we see day
to day will be less obvious. In due time, hopefully it can be marginally
comparable to VMware on the same hardware, but for now, you can''t get
any real work done with HVM domains.

James

Andrew Watkins wrote:
> I am getting a little confused with all the different virtualization
software out there, but I that is a different question for a different day
>
> I got my hands on a Sun Ultra 24 Quad CPU machine and I thought I would
give the above a go, but was a little disappointed with the performance of
running MS Windows as a guest. I have not yet compared xVM and VirtualBox since
still having problems with the networking side of VirtualBox, but my gut feeling
is that there may not be a lot in it!
>
> Has any one obtained real performance data for running Windows? My initial
feelings is that in the Single CPU (Desktop) area I will not get very good
performance, since the windows guest will only run on a single thread/core.
>
> Any thoughts
>
> Andrew
>  
>  
> This message posted from opensolaris.org
> _______________________________________________
> xen-discuss mailing list
> xen-discuss@opensolaris.org
>   
Windows XP was aimed for single socket machines originally, with
optional SMP support available as part of the OS, but in 2001 not
commonly used.  When dual cores started becoming cost effective and
common, a slew of patches made the SMP performance better, but
architecturally it isn''t different than Windows 2000 Server, which
probably has better SMP performance than XP as XP is essentially gimped
when it comes to optimization for multiple CPU''s.

VirtualBox on Mac OS X and Linux seems to have better performance
currently than Xen on RHEL5 (CentOS) and OpenSolaris.  It also doesn''t
have so many glitches with HVM guest operation.  xVM from what I can see
doesn''t actually bridge a virtualized ethernet adapter, none shows up
in
network connections yet it can connect to the network.  I would say Xen
is more general purpose in a sense, and VirtualBox is probably tuned
specifically for Windows.  Both are open-source, but only the commercial
version of VirtualBox has USB-host bridging and some other
less-important features like native RFB provisioning.
>From my experience neither of the two are suitable for business-oriented
use of Windows as a guest.  I''m not sure exactly what could be done to
improve the efficiency of xVM running on a single thread, but one thing
is for certain, the main bottleneck isn''t the CPU, it''s
actually the
virtual disks.

James

remember that the "commercial version" is free for personal and
evaluation use
 
 
This message posted from opensolaris.org