Best performance for accessing VM?

[sbussinger]

I wanted to get everyone's thoughts on the best way to access a VM using VirtualBox. I've only recently started using it and there appears to be several ways to access the VM, but no guidance I've found as to which method generally works best. My best configuration is a Win7 host with WinXP VM's. The VM's are used for software development and have typical developer-type applications in them (i.e. Microsoft Office, Visual Studio, Delphi, etc.) but in particular I do work on WPF applications if that makes any difference. I'm assuming the execution performance will be roughly the same in all cases, so I'm asking about visual performance in particular here (i.e. quality of display, latency, etc.).

Which of these VM access methods will give best performance?
1) Run the VM using the standard VirtualBox GUI
2) Run the VM using VBoxSDL GUI
3) Run the VM headless and access the VM via RDP to the VirtualBox VRDP server
4) Access the VM via RDP by connecting to the client's built-in Windows Remote Desktop functionality
5) Accessing the VM via Seamless Windows
6) Some other method I didn't think of

Would the answer change if the VM's were running Win7 instead of WinXP?



I'm assuming most people use method 1 (this one's similar to Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 use). But I'm kind of thinking that method 4 might be the best, particularily with the enhancements to RDP in Vista and Win7 (this one's similar to Microsoft Virtual Server 2005). But are there perhaps advantages to the VirtualBox VRDP server vs. Remote Desktop? Does the new Hardware accelerated 3D stuff play into this at all?

Thanks for your advice!

MOD edit: moved to Windows 7 host

[TerryE]

If I take this as a generic rather than W7 Q, there is very little difference as to whether you start VM from the GUI or the command line, however the Headless, Default and VBoxSDL VM connect to different virtualised displays so there will be perceptible difference in response and performance for high bandwidth graphics apps. Headless / RDP / Non display is best for servers and appliances. For best graphics performance, you should run the VMs locally and install GA. Trade-offs on W7 specifically are a little premature since it is still beta S/W and not even supported by its own vendor yet.