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I'm planning to run a few (<10) Windows VM guests on my workstation (HP Z400, Xeon with 8G Ram). I got 2 options, 1. Hyper-V server (free) 2. Windows 7 + VirtualBox

Are there any benchmark results comparing these 2 VM servers?

p.s. It would be nice if you can let me know any reasonable benchmark suite. Maybe I can run a rough benchmark on my own hardware.

woodings
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1 Answers1

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Those two options that you list will give you very different user experiences. I suspect your satisfaction with the results will have more to do with how you intend to use the machine after you accomplish your virtualization.

If you intend to use the workstation as an interactive computer that you sit in front of, perhaps with a couple of monitors, you're going to want a hosted virtualization platform, of which VirtualBox is a good example.

If, however, you're going to put the machine in a closet and forget about it, never interacting with it directly, you'll probably be happy with a bare-metal hypervisor, of which Hyper-V Server is a good example.

Performance, in either case, is going to be mostly dependent on making sure you have the right paravirtualized drivers installed in your guest OSes and you have sufficient storage IOPS to serve all those OSes.

Jake Oshins
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  • Thank you! Let me rephrase my question. I'm a developer. For example, I'll run Sql server + my application on those VMs. I won't use the VM or host as an interactive computer. Most of my work can be done with remote desktop. – woodings Dec 06 '11 at 19:52
  • Unless *all* of your work can be done with remote desktop, I suspect that Hyper-V Server (which has no desktop) won't make you happy. Performance (which is what your question was about) is still a matter of getting the right drivers installed and making sure you have enough I/O capacity in the physical machine. – Jake Oshins Dec 06 '11 at 22:26