Re: [tlug] Assigning Multiple CPU Cores to a VirtualBox

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

Travis Cardwell writes:

 > If you are serious about improving performance, do not use VirtualBox.
 > From my experience, VirtualBox is considerably slower than the
 > alternatives, such as VMware and Xen.

Xen is a completely different, rather more complex, soluttion, though,
as it runs under, rather than on top of, the native OS, and (at least
last I looked years ago) requires different versions of the kernel
(even if it's the same OS!) for the host OS (fully privileged) and the
guests.

AFAICS Virtual Box is really mostly about a quick way to provision
"student" boxes with turnkey systems.  I find GUI Linuces (Ubuntu,
Fedora) too painful to use when running in Virtual Box on my MacBook
Pro, although the command line is acceptable.  I don't know about
compute-bound processes, though.

I'm not sure about VMware's architecture (which I haven't looked at in
many years, but when I tried it it was a much smoother experience for
the admin new to virtual machines.  If you can pass on the cost to
your client, I would lean in that direction myself.  Even if you
can't, it might well be worth the ease of operation and support from
the vendor.