A lot of the activity in virtualisation is focused around the datacentre. That's all well and good, but there's a whole world of virtualisation for workstations, where competition for the best suite is red-hot and constantly improving.
Previously we examined the bare-metal hypervisors that are favoured in datacentres. Here we look at Type 2 virtualisation — where one operating system needs to be running to host another operating system.
The line-up for this round-up is: VMware Workstation, Virtualbox, Parallels Workstation and KVM. Wine is also tested to provide some control to the test and because it can achieve some of the benefits of a hypervisor for running Windows applications.
Hardware
The workstation we used for testing was an HP Z800 workstation; this system features dual 3.2GHz Xeon W5580 processors, 2GB of RAM and a 1TB hard drive. A monstrous Nvidia Quadro FX 5800 graphics adapter with 4GB RAM is also part of the mix.
Ubuntu 9.04 was chosen as the base operating system as it provided the widest range of hypervisors to examine and allowed for testing of KVM and Wine, which are not available on any Windows operating systems.
Windows XP SP2 was installed under each hypervisor, and the following tests performed:
- Cinebench single CPU
- Cinebench multiple CPU
- Cinebench openGL
- Start-up time
Windows XP was chosen over Windows Vista or Windows 7 as it is stable, lighter and a well-known quantity. We felt that this would allow each of the hypervisors to show off their potential with the additional extra packages and tools included for XP. KVM was the only hypervisor to not provide an additional package to install to accelerate Windows XP's performance.
Talkback
Hello,
Really enjoyed this article, I have used VirtualBox for a few months and really like it, I use Ubuntu desktop and have 3 virtual machines a vista64, WinXP64 and a Ubuntu server which I use as a download and FTP server. So far this has been working great.
I have used VMware at work and out of the 2 is definitely more enterprised based, we have not had any problems with it so far and i have not used it much. It just works perfectly and the only problems we do have are OS based.
As for the KVM and Parrallels that you have looked at I think I will give them a miss, wine I use on a regular basis and does quite a good job of running programs, and like you said in the article if it isnt platinum you are going to have oddoties, if anyone is thinking of going to Ubuntu but wants to play there favourite game, definitely check WineHQ first.
I would just like to add that on Ubuntu I Installed VirtualBox via the Synaptic package manager 1st time with no problems what so ever, it installed and added itself to the menu and worked straight away out of the box.
Thanks again for a good article though.
Wolfie.
Another comment removed? (no reason given just gone.)
Either way I thought this was a good article, and one that I found to be of some help.
That is rather odd.... i did read your previous comment, nothing wrong with it, no swearing, no slating..... not quite sure why it was removed....
I've started to notice now more & more over time I've written up some extensive postings on some of the story's across the site as a whole with no bad mouthing what so ever, and they have just vanished the next day. :s
I suspect that ZDUK have some over zealous author's/admin staff on board, and I would recommend that editor of the site screen their actions.