Virtualbox 7 so slooowwwwww.

cereberus · Jan 31, 2023

Just done a comparison of Hyper-V with Virtualbox 7 (VB7 was in installation with no Hyper-V enabled), and also KVM from Linux Host

CPU - similar, worse for KVM
2D - VB awful but KVM slightly better
Memory - similar in all 3
Diskmark - VB awful, KVM much better but still 50% of Hyper-V

In my opinion, this shows how much more efficient a type 1 hypervisor is when it directly shares video and disk resources rather than type 2 emulation. On balance hard to say which is a better type 2 VB or KVM but not much in it.

Hyper-V on left, VB7 on right

Edit - results from KVM (Linux as Host OS) - weird results CPU worse, graphics marginally better, disk much better.
Still nowhere up to Hyper-V.

hajen · Feb 8, 2023

I agree with your opinion, this is indeed one of the differences between type-1 and type-2 hypervisors. Hyper-V FTW! But I know some people don't like it. VMware is cool too.

jimbo45 · Feb 16, 2023

cereberus said:
Just done a comparison of Hyper-V with Virtualbox 7 (VB7 was in installation with no Hyper-V enabled)

CPU - similar
2D - VB awful
Memory - similar
Diskmark - VB awful

In my opinion, this shows how much more efficient a type 1 hypervisor is when it directly shares video and disk resources rather than type 2 emulation.

Hyper-V on left, VB7 on right

View attachment 51453 View attachment 51454

Hyper-V is far better than VBox or VMware -- significantly better -- no question -- but you can improve most VM's by using "Native I/O" rather than the default VM I/O which although more compatible is a cost on performance. Disk I/O performance these days on modern machines with decent CPU and RAM (and usually graphics too) is far more likely to degrade performance than almost anything else.

Most VM systems have facilities for attaching "physical disks" rather than having to create Virtual disks and store your program and data there.

cheers
jimbo

cereberus · Feb 16, 2023

jimbo45 said:
Hyper-V is far better than VBox or VMware -- significantly better -- no question -- but you can improve most VM's by using "Native I/O" rather than the default VM I/O which although more compatible is a cost on performance. Disk I/O performance these days on modern machines with decent CPU and RAM (and usually graphics too) is far more likely to degrade performance than almost anything else.

Most VM systems have facilities for attaching "physical disks" rather than having to create Virtual disks and store your program and data there.

cheers
jimbo

Sure - this would probably help a bit but I do not like attaching physical disks directly to vm.

As an aside, I thought I should be able to attach an existing vhdx file though but vb7 STILL does not support vhdx files but does fully support .vhd files (allegedly).

I cannot believe after all these years .vhdx files are still not supported (they can be read from but not written to)!

Poor show for VB7.

Haydon · Feb 16, 2023

cereberus said:
Just done a comparison of Hyper-V with Virtualbox

My only experience with Hyper-V and VirtualBox is in conjunction with Macrium Reflect's viBoot. After trying out both for a while, I used the latter for some time because it performed somewhat better on my machine. Then, out of curiosity, I tried the former again and it outperformed the latter by some margin, so I switched to the latter until today.

Heavens know why the performance changes happened.

cereberus · Feb 16, 2023

Haydon said:
My only experience with Hyper-V and VirtualBox is in conjunction with Macrium Reflect's viBoot. After trying out both for a while, I used the latter for some time because it performed somewhat better on my machine. Then, out of curiosity, I tried the former again and it outperformed the latter by some margin, so I switched to the latter until today.

Heavens know why the performance changes happened.

Yeah - that is a bit odd. Something must have been slowing Hyper-V down though.

The only thing I can immediately think of is perhaps you less RAM to Hyper-V than to VB. The default in Viboot is only 2 GB, and maybe you assigned 2GB to Hyper-V but more to VB. In this case the Hyper-V instance may have been doing a lot of pagefiling?

I guess we will probably never know, but I am glad Hyper-V is now performing better (or I suppose VB worse), but like for like, I would always expect Hyper-V to be more efficient in general.

The one big weakness with Hyper-V is the limitations when in basic mode (no sound, hard to share drives etc) rather than enhanced mode.

The reason for this is historic - Hyper-V was originally designed for Windows Server versions, designed to run multiple Windows vms in an Azure type environment. It was later ported to Windows 8/10 for the domestic market, but no real attempt was made to make it more non-Windows OS flexible.

Now this would be a major feature improvement rather than emoji 15 (I never even used emoji 1 - 14 lol).

As a minimum, you would think they could make Windows 10 Home work in enhanced mode (actually you can by installing an RDP server but not strictly allowed).

jimbo45 · Feb 16, 2023

cereberus said:
Yeah - that is a bit odd. Something must have been slowing Hyper-V down though.

The only thing I can immediately think of is perhaps you less RAM to Hyper-V than to VB. The default in Viboot is only 2 GB, and maybe you assigned 2GB to Hyper-V but more to VB. In this case the Hyper-V instance may have been doing a lot of pagefiling?

I guess we will probably never know, but I am glad Hyper-V is now performing better (or I suppose VB worse), but like for like, I would always expect Hyper-V to be more efficient in general.

The one big weakness with Hyper-V is the limitations when in basic mode (no sound, hard to share drives etc) rather than enhanced mode.

The reason for this is historic - Hyper-V was originally designed for Windows Server versions, designed to run multiple Windows vms in an Azure type environment. It was later ported to Windows 8/10 for the domestic market, but no real attempt was made to make it more non-Windows OS flexible.

Now this would be a major feature improvement rather than emoji 15 (I never even used emoji 1 - 14 lol).

As a minimum, you would think they could make Windows 10 Home work in enhanced mode (actually you can by installing an RDP server but not strictly allowed).

Hi there
Confirms it runs like "Greased lightning" on Windows server 2022. Even the standard edition with desktop GUI. If you want to try it you can get free 180 day evaluation -- (and you can via slmgr rearm get another 5 extensions of the 180 day period !!!!)

Note though things like Macrium etc won't run on Server (unless you buy server edition) --Office LTSC 2021 runs OK on it. However for simply testing HYPER-V and comparing performance with the same VM running on W11 could be an interesting exercise.

Cheers
jimbo

JesseRBassett · Feb 19, 2023

I use Virtualbox on Windows11 and have no problem. But then again I have 16gb Ram too.

Hopachi · Feb 20, 2023

Interesting results.
Some were expected but others were a complete surprise.
Thanks for adding KVM!
Those are indeed pretty low scores for VBox.

@cereberus
What are the VM specs?
I assume you used default - (disk) formats - vm settings - same cpu count / ram - per hypervisor.

cereberus · Feb 20, 2023

Just tested

Hopachi said:
Interesting results.
Some were expected but others were a complete surprise.
Thanks for adding KVM!
Those are indeed pretty low scores for VBox.

@cereberus
What are the VM specs?
I assume you used default - (disk) formats - vm settings - same cpu count / ram - per hypervisor.

Yep same settings.

jimbo45 · Feb 25, 2023

Hi folks

VBOX is indeed Sloooooooooooooooow - it's slower than a one legged dog stuck on a perfectly smooth icepond or a dragonfly trying to swim through a sea of molasses -- HOST --i7 64G machine -- running W11 pro insider build (dev).

The only advantage I can see of using VBOX is that it's free and seems simple to use.

Is there way to get iso cdrom /optical device to be SATA rather than IDE and to optimise disk I/O -- otherwise any attempts to improve performance on this VM platform will be doomed to failure.

VMware workstation is far superior -- but it's of course a paid for product while HYPER-V is great too there are a number of considerations for running Non Windows Guests on it.

Cheers
jimbo

cereberus · Feb 25, 2023

jimbo45 said:
Hi folks

VBOX is indeed Sloooooooooooooooow - it's slower than a one legged dog stuck on a perfectly smooth icepond or a dragonfly trying to swim through a sea of molasses -- HOST --i7 64G machine -- running W11 pro insider build (dev).

View attachment 53637

The only advantage I can see of using VBOX is that it's free and seems simple to use.

Is there way to get iso cdrom /optical device to be SATA rather than IDE and to optimise disk I/O -- otherwise any attempts to improve performance on this VM platform will be doomed to failure.

VMware workstation is far superior -- but it's of course a paid for product while HYPER-V is great too there are a number of considerations for running Non Windows Guests on it.

Cheers
jimbo

You can use free version of VMWare.

Also turning off Hyper-V hypervisor is recommended if using vmware or virtualbox.

LeLibran · Feb 25, 2023

For performance issues with VirtualBox on a Windows Host System the first check should be to review the VBox.log for the VM affected for the entry "Attempting fall back to NEM: VT-x is not available" for which there is a Tutorial on the VirtualBox Forums at Board index ‹ General ‹ Howtos and Tutorials ‹ Windows Hosts plus some advice in the VirtualBox User Guide.
Some other issues can arise with other 3rd-party software which attempts to control/make exclusive use of VT-x/AMD-V)/hardware acceleration features e.g. some 'security' applications if hardware acceleration enabled, Docker Desktop etc.

Since the release of macOS 13.0 (Ventura) Mac computers also have a native Virtualisation Platform activated which prevents software from directly accessing VT-x, but IME so far this doesn't appear to have the same negative impact on 3rd-party virtualisation software performance that an active Hyper-V system does on Windows, suggesting Apple may have provided a more effective API for developers/users than Microsoft has.

For Linux Hosts a common problem seems to be trying to use VirtualBox with the KVM platform already active, which again blocks access to VT-x/AMD-v.

Personally, I haven't faced any real-world performance issues with VirtualBox, beyond the occasional software bug/regression, but I make sure to de-activate Hyper-V and other known 'blockers' on Windows PCs when using any 3rd-party virtualisation. However, differing use cases can, of course, produce different results.

cereberus · Feb 25, 2023

vmware - better than kvm or virtualbox but still not as good as Hyper-V.

cereberus · Feb 25, 2023

LeLibran said:
For performance issues with VirtualBox on a Windows Host System the first check should be to review the VBox.log for the VM affected for the entry "Attempting fall back to NEM: VT-x is not available" for which there is a Tutorial on the VirtualBox Forums at Board index ‹ General ‹ Howtos and Tutorials ‹ Windows Hosts plus some advice in the VirtualBox User Guide.
Some other issues can arise with other 3rd-party software which attempts to control/make exclusive use of VT-x/AMD-V)/hardware acceleration features e.g. some 'security' applications if hardware acceleration enabled, Docker Desktop etc.

Since the release of macOS 13.0 (Ventura) Mac computers also have a native Virtualisation Platform activated which prevents software from directly accessing VT-x, but IME so far this doesn't appear to have the same negative impact on 3rd-party virtualisation software performance that an active Hyper-V system does on Windows, suggesting Apple may have provided a more effective API for developers/users than Microsoft has.

For Linux Hosts a common problem seems to be trying to use VirtualBox with the KVM platform already active, which again blocks access to VT-x/AMD-v.

Personally, I haven't faced any real-world performance issues with VirtualBox, beyond the occasional software bug/regression, but I make sure to de-activate Hyper-V and other known 'blockers' on Windows PCs when using any 3rd-party virtualisation. However, differing use cases can, of course, produce different results.

All my tests were done on separate host windows without Hyper-V installed (except for Hyper-V test). Linux KVM was a totally separate installation as well. VT-x was available in virtualbox. I am fully aware if hyper-v hypervisor is on it affect performance of type 2 hypervisors. To be fair, the MS APIs that allow coexistance of type 2 vms with hyper-V being installed is not as bad as it used to be.

I have just tested vmware and clearly better than kvm or virtualbox but still not as good as Hyper-V.

These tests all done on fresh Windows 11 installations, same size RAM (4GB), same storage (80 GB), 4 cores.

I have done similar tests before on my older laptop (different cpu, storage, graphics), and I always got similar results - Hyper-V is just so much faster.

JesseRBassett · Feb 25, 2023

I now am using Windows 11 Pro on VMware Professional. For my needs, the speed, accuracy, and overall results are better for Windows 11 using vmware. Rather than Virtualbox.

cereberus · Feb 26, 2023

Here is my earlier Hyper-V and new Host OS results.

It shows clearly Hyper-V performs well when compared with Host.

To me this proves Hyper-V is just far superior as a type 1 hypervisor. If I had to use a type 2 hypervisor, VMWare is far better than Virtualbox 7.

I am unlikely to use KVM but showed it for interest. I have seen people claim it is more efficient than Windows VMs due to lower Linux overheads but the evidence of my tests does not support that.

Of course, these results are based on my setup. Others may get different results of course.

All tests are based on default installations of vm software e.g. I have not tried to use more advanced passthrough techniques or use physical drives rather than virtual drives which may improve performance. Tests for the future.

Hopachi · Feb 27, 2023

@cereberus
That looks like an upgrade.
So the last two screenshots are Hyper-V for two different hosts.
It clearly shows that the better the host, the better the guest in overal performance.
And of course in that case with all those different machines out there people will get different results all across the board.

cereberus · Feb 27, 2023

Hopachi said:
@cereberus
That looks like an upgrade.
So the last two screenshots are Hyper-V for two different hosts.
It clearly shows that the better the host, the better the guest in overal performance.
And of course in that case with all those different machines out there people will get different results all across the board.

No - you misunderstand.

I was just showing running passmark in Hyper-V was close to results of running it on Host OS i e. not in a VM.

It shows Hyper-V vms are very efficient on my pc compared with alternatives.

There is no point in comparing results across different host pcs other than boasting about ones "equipment" lol.

Hopachi · Feb 27, 2023

cereberus said:
No - you misunderstand.

I was just showing running passmark in Hyper-V was close to results of running it on Host OS i e. not in a VM.

It shows Hyper-V vms are very efficient on my pc compared with alternatives.

There is no point in comparing results across different host pcs other than boasting about ones "equipment" lol.

Indeed.
Thanks for the clarification! I missed second paragraph somehow. My bad.

That makes sense since the second screenshot has 3D score, it's the host.

Pretty good result for the VM compared.

The short conclusion is: Windows VM under Hyper-V performs best, excluding 3D tests which are not applicable.

One needs the patience for these kind of tests since all hypervisors need to run on the same machine each on its own optimal run.
Your results are welcome, so thanks again. I didn't tried this yet for practical reasons and time.
It's complicated already to run VirtualBox om my current setup: I have to disable Hyper-V but also memory integrity which makes this less attractive in this case. In the rare case I need to run some exotic VM that doesn't work in Hyper-V I might go with VirtualBox. Then for KVM: you need to install Linux and set it up on same host for conclusive tests, or attempt to run it from live USB, if possible.
I simply run KVM on a separate host and I am very pleased with it there.