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Software or hardware virtualization?
hello.
A basic question about virtualizing in a desktop system:
Witch is better, with an AMD-v capable processor and motherboard, to gain maximum performance to guest vm? Hardware (enabling AMD-v in bios) or software virtualization?
As hypervisor I am using virtualbox in a lubuntu installation.
The guest machine will run windows 7.
If I understand well what I have read, is that software virtualization will produce less overhead from the host machine, but you can use only one core in each vm. Is this wright?
Comments
you can easily do it with software virtualization, but when it melts down to performance, my friend, the -v capable processors or hardware virtualization will give you the best performance...
I thought that so, but I read in virtualbox site that hardware virtualization is more flexible (can work in any environment) but eats more power from the host machine. Has anyone tried that in a desktop computer for daily usage?
(I want to setup a ready-to-go windows guest vm to be instantly deployed in any of my pc's, at no time)
Are you taking about barebone vhd booting?
No. I want to create a vm under virtualbox that can be run to several machines (maybe linux or windows hosts) with different hardware. So, it should be virtualized. VHD booting requires similar hardware to work (e.g. you cannot boot an image from AMD to intel and vice versa)
I am only using a portable virtualbox to host XP & Vista but it works on other pc as well under software virtualization.
I wanted to drop a windows installation on my pendrive but then I realised from online tutorials what I guess you're talking about that windows needs similar hardware to work because of windows detecting hardware and adjusting its drivers to the hardware it was installed on at installation.
Plus I don't have usb3 on my laptop, so having windows on a pendrive would be a miserable experience.
Are you saying that you can make a virtualbox windows machine and it can be redeployed easily on totally different hardware without "licence" issues?
I have tested the pendrive native boot and pendrive virtualbox, so far no problem with the virtualbox, but in case of pendrive/external hdd native boot, you need to have enterprise version of windows that capable of KMS activation from your local domain.
This is the virtualbox version I use http://www.vbox.me, and this one is a good software to play around http://sourceforge.net/projects/phpvirtualbox/
@vRozenSch00n Thanks. I don't mind about portability much, as I will only use it for moving a working purposes vm instance to home/office1/office2 witch I will have installed virtualbox.
I didn't have yet tested this for stretching the vm, so, I am seeking of what will give me less overhead, aka, most of the host power: software or hardware virtualization.
Good luck with the test.
In theory, installing windows in a virtualized environment is illegal. You have to buy server editions with according licensing for this. But, I do not think that it is so bad to use the same installation in different computers at once (not clone it to several machines but avoiding carry the same pc to each different location for continuing the work left to the middle).
Entirely wrong.
Pure software virtualization will give you hideous performance for host and guest (you'll use way more cycles to do everything). Try disabling Hardware acceleration in VirtualBox and see how long it takes you just to boot!
If you wanted to do a bunch of sums with floating-point numbers, would you disable the FPU? If your CPU supports it, use it!