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Is there a specific difference in performance between an OS installed on a Virtual Box and an OS installed locally on a computer?
Is there any formula so that I could know what is lost when you install an OS in a virtual box.
For example, if you assigned 512Mb of memory in a virtual box os. But it is actually 256Mb when compared to its performance when it is installed locally.
Please, I need the information because we're making a comparative analysis on operating systems. And I can't just install Sabayon Linux, it might ruin the 3 other os that I have already installed.
ahh, this is not very accurate. CPU, RAM, hard disk is all very REAL, network controllers, graphics and sound are emulated. – None – 2010-02-20T03:31:43.183
hard disk is definitely not real, actually; while some VMs can present raw disk access to their guest OS, running a guest on a virtual HDD (eg /my/VMs/foo.vdi) is very common. – quack quixote – 2010-02-20T03:50:18.060
while a container is used, the action certainly happens for real on your HDD and if your disk is noisy enough might be able to hear it actually :P – None – 2010-02-20T03:59:18.743
1one could say the same about any emulation -- even though the graphics is emulated, the VM desktop still shows up on my monitor; even though the sound is emulated, the VM media player still plays thru my speakers. doesn't change the fact that my guest OS thinks it has a VBOX HDD and is displaying to an "Innotek ...VirtualBox Graphics Adapter". – quack quixote – 2010-02-20T04:24:35.817
@brice - i'm sorry, my comment was not using "emulation" in the technical sense described by those documents, and you're right, by that definition VirtualBox is not an emulator. i was referring to the fact that the guest OS sees virtual hardware instead of real hardware in most places. yes, the CPU runs the guest OS code natively (though even CPU features available to the guest can be restricted, eg number of cores). on my testbed VirtualBox guest, the CPU (and possibly RAM, not sure) is the only real hardware the guest knows about -- everything else is virtual/emulated/fake. – quack quixote – 2010-02-20T12:34:47.643
(actually, i blame Molly for that; her first comment introduced the term "emulated".) – quack quixote – 2010-02-20T13:47:49.727
It's clear that this leaves room for a very interesting question on VHD performance! – Ivo Flipse – 2010-02-22T07:58:33.137