Basic questions re suitability of virtualbox

[hangerglide]

I've been a light duty user of virtual box for a year or two. Generally the experience has been quite positive.

I am a software developer and have a litter of approx 4-6 year old pcs around my primary workstation. These boxes are used for testing and some are used for development. For example I have oracle 11g on one box and I use it to build apex applications. Oracle uses a lot of system resources and I have wanted to keep it on a separate box, ie not my primary workstation.

I am wondering if I might be able to get rid of most of them at this point and replace them with virtual box on a new workstation with 64 bit windows 7. My current primary workstation is windows xp pro 32 bit, so the ram is limited to ~3gb. I've not pushed my existing box into heavy use with virtual box because I figured it'd become overtaxed, running oracle in a vm etc. I'd be very interested in hearing whether it's realistic to hope for decent performance with virtual box vms running oracle (not production use!) on a more robust, 64 bit windows 7 machine.

Also, it didn't really look like there is a 64 bit version of virtual box?

[Perryg]

I have Oracle 10g working in an XPpro SP3 VM both 32 and 64 bit versions and aside for the rather long boot-up process it appears to be very responsive.
But the only way you will know is to try it and see if it will fit your needs.
Windows VirtualBox is now downloaded as combined 32/64 bit app. It determines which you have and installs accordingly.
Just make sure that when you decide to update your PC that it supports hardware-v in the bios as well as the motherboard. Get as much RAM as you can afford because that is one of the determining factors in the performance.

Disclaimer: The 64 bit is hosted with Ubuntu 9.04 64 bit and 32 bit XPpro using hyper-threading I have not tried Oracle yet on my 64 bit XPpro.

[hangerglide]

Thanks Perry that's just the kind of reply I was hoping to see. Oracle machines seem to take a long time to boot in any case...anyways what you've reported is encouraging and I'll give it a whirl.

[mpack]

How many of those old PCs do you need to run at once? If you are just running one or maybe two at a time then you don't need vast resources from the host PC: it has to have a good spec to be a good VM host, but it doesn't have to be that much higher specced to host several VMs (the kind of spec you've mentioned sounds good). The biggest thing you should add IMHO is plenty of disk space (you can never have too much!): so if I were you I would plan on buying a humungous second HDD to put in the new PC. By which I mean at least 1TB, in addition to a pretty big primary drive.

[hangerglide]

Hi mpack

I normally run just one or two extras boxes, as you guessed.

Disk space, I'll sure have a 1tb disk in there. CPU on my current workstation is an Intel Core 2 Duo E6600, which is ok but not a lot by current standards. And the OS is 32 bit xp, ram at 4gb.

The current ws might become my sole spare box. The new workstation and vbox host machine would probably be 64 bit windows 7, 8 gb of ram, 1 tb drive, and cpu a notch or two down from the current top of the line. I'd hope that the speedier cpu, 64 bit OS, and extra ram would help keep the guest OSs performant?

[BillG]

A big speed improvement for vms with standard disk drives on the host is to have multiple spindles and store each virtual disk on its own spindle, not have them all on on big drive along with the host OS. Disk contention is a major bottleneck. USB2 or eSATA external drives can be used for this purpose. Or use some sort of RAID array.

[mpack]

Disk contention is a major bottleneck. USB2 or eSATA external drives can be used for this purpose. Or use some sort of RAID array.

Um, how is disk contention a major bottleneck? That can only be true if all VMs are thrashing the drive at once (otherwise there is no contention), which also requires that they are all running at once. In normal use a VM stresses the disk no more than any other app does. External drives can be used, though peformance with a USB2 drive will not be very good, plus some users have problems with forgetfully unplugging a portable drive while a VM is still active.

[mpack]

I'd hope that the speedier cpu, 64 bit OS, and extra ram would help keep the guest OSs performant?

I've been pondering this, and frankly, I doubt you will see a huge difference in speed. Ok, the PC will have a bit more RAM, a respectable chunk of which will be gobbled by Win7 (I understand you have an XP host at present). Being 64bit will allow you to run an extra VM or two at the same time - if that is important to you. The biggest improvement IMHO will be that big second drive, meaning you can stop worrying about disk space for a while, and VMs are certainly disk space hogs!

None of which is intended to discourage you from buying a new PC: we all enjoy having new toys to play with from time to time!

[hangerglide]

New toys - you seem to know me quite well!

I was thinking that addtl ram would be a factor, but even more so that faster cpu. Unless disk speed is the typical limiting factor, wouldn't basic processing speed help with vm performance, rather directly? IE if the new cpu benchmarks 3 times as fast as the current workstation, I'd have guessed that vbox would see a significant performance boost...surely running a vm is a cpu intensive task?

[mpack]

I was thinking that addtl ram would be a factor, but even more so that faster cpu. Unless disk speed is the typical limiting factor, wouldn't basic processing speed help with vm performance, rather directly? IE if the new cpu benchmarks 3 times as fast as the current workstation, I'd have guessed that vbox would see a significant performance boost

Well, adding RAM typically speeds up a PC if the PC was using the pagefile a lot. VMs do not use host pagefile memory, but they may use guest pagefile memory less if you are able to give more memory to each guest, so it's hard to predict this factor. As you will know from your current workstation PC, an XP Pro installation runs fine in 512MB, but runs really well in 1GB or 2GB of memory.

Will CPU speed help? Well you don't give the speed of your old Core 2 Duo, but I doubt it was horribly slow, hence I wouldn't expect a big speedup here. More cores should let you run more VMs more smoothly.

surely running a vm is a cpu intensive task?

VMs for a typically modern guest OS (meaning little or no 16bit code), with guest additions installed, use surprisingly little CPU. You can check for yourself using the hosts task monitor.

[rmonical]

This is a great thread. I am in a similar situation.
I already got the 64 Bit box and I started with OpenSolaris as the host OS. I immediately ran into a known problem with the CD when I tried to install the XP guest.

I wonder if there is a preferred host OS in terms of stability and support? I have XP 32 and 64 bit, Windows 2003 32 bit and OpenSolaris in now. All my other Linux flavors are quite old.

I'll be primarily doing Java/Oracle Database development using Eclipse and NetBeans. I have some well behaved Windows games that I play.

[hangerglide]

My existing workstation is an Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 (as I noted before), not sure if that gets you the 'speed' of the cpu or not. I bought it 3 years ago, and it was not anything like the fastest cpu at that time. Looking at cpu charts, where they rank performance of cpus, it's way down the pack.

But if cpu is not utilized by most modern vms, and ram is maybe or maybe not a factor, that leaves only extra cores are the best chance of improving speed? Surprising...anyways thanks for the input. I'll experiment on my current ws and see how oracle 11g does in a vbox there.

[mpack]

My existing workstation is an Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 (as I noted before), not sure if that gets you the 'speed' of the cpu or not.

Not. However "My Computer|Properties" will tell you the clock speed.

[hangerglide]

OK - 2.4HGz. At http://www.cpubenchmark.net/common_cpus.html the E6600 cpu rates 1451; the new box would probably contain a cpu in the 4000 range.

[trevieze]

Make sure that the new conputer supports virtulization in hardware. The laptop I run has a T7500 that supports VT-X in the bios. Some of the less expensive Intel Processors don't.