Virtual Machines

Lately I've been playing with virtual machines a bit. I've installed VMware Server on both my laptop and desktop, and VirtualBox just on my laptop. Both these products are easy to use, and haven't given me any problems with the host OS so far. I'm running XP on the laptop, Vista 64bit on the desktop. I must admit I favor VirtualBox a bit though, mainly because it seems to work also when I'm not on the network. In that case VMware refuses to start my virtual machines. But maybe that's also my fault. Also VirtualBox seems to be a bit faster on my laptop. Also, the shared folder feature in VirtualBox is a big plus to me, this is something VMware doesn't want to give us for free. The OS installed in the VMs is Oracle Enterprise Linux.
I did some benchmarking this week using some old unix benchmark tool, Unixbench . It was fast to download and easy to run, you see. These are the results:

As you can see, VirtualBox ran 15~20% faster on my laptop. Also, hardware virtualization did help this benchmark. Quite a bit!

The drawback of VirtualBox is that it doesn't support shared disks. I'm setting up a virtual Oracle RAC cluster on my desktop, so the two VMs need to be able to share disks. So that's the main reason I'm using VMware. I guess I could use VirtualBox and add a third VM running FreeNAS. Hmmm, that might be fun! After all, I do have a quad core :-)

One thing I noticed on my laptop, with hardware virtualization enabled (in the bios), XP hangs when I try to put it into hibernation. This works fine when I turn it off.

Btw, I just ran unixbench in both my VMs at the same time, and the final scores were 224.2 and 228.0! Not bad!