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 > [email protected] > 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 _______________________________________________ xen-discuss mailing list [email protected]
