Windows 7 performance in Virtualbox 4.0.2?

[linuxguy0481]

I want to make the move to a Linux distribution. Not sure which one yet though. Still deciding. Anyways I still require some applications that need Windows. I have tried Wine but no good results. What I care about the most right now is the speed of Windows 7 in Virtualbox. If I can get the speed of Windows 7 natively on my desktop computer I am sold. I do run a few high end programs on my computer Adobe Photoshop, Premier and the Microsoft Office 2010 suite. I just want it to be really smooth as possible not choppy.

I have a HP Pavilion desktop dual core running at 2.9 Ghz and with 4 gigs of DDR3 SDRAM. With a integrated ATI Radeon HD 4200 graphics card. I know I can install Windows XP virtually but Windows XP is nearly ten years old and I don't like the looks of it. I just prefer the look of Windows 7 and the under the hood features it has.

Should I waiting for Virtualbox 5? I was also looking into getting VMWare Player 3 or VMWare Workstation. I do know it costs money but willing to pay for it if it fits my needs.

By the way when I mean speed I mean boot up, quick start of programs and overall general usage. I hope someone here can help. Thank you.

[linuxguy0481]

no replies yet? *bump*

[BillG]

If you want maximum performance you need to run the OS on bare metal. There is always a trade-off running in a vm, no matter what virtualization software you use. In particular, video performance in a vm will never match performance directly on hardware. The OS in a vm sees the emulated hardware of the vm, not the hardware of the host.

[linuxguy0481]

I understand that it will be slower than running natively. What I want to know if it will be okay to run programs like Office 2010 and Itunes. I don't want it to be unbearably slow. I just wanted to know other people's experiences.

[ewa8949]

I would love to know this as well. I am pretty much stuck using iTunes because I have an iPhone and my work laptop which I use for everything is windows 7. I really only want to run iTunes 10 64 bit and can't get it to work on my Fedora 14 installation. I can put either Windows 7 or WinXP on it (32 or 64 bit) but want to know how usable the experience is.

I have not found any good way to use iTunes on my work laptop to manage my music (which is on a network share btw) and manage my iPhone but still be able to use my iTunes playlists in Linux. If anyone has suggestions please send them to me. I have google'd the hell out of this and no luck. I've tried DAAP, banshee, rhythmbox and nothing can really let me use my windows iTunes playlists

[kebabbert]

I use OpenSolaris and run WinXP in VirtualBox v3.1.6 and notice no differences in speed compared to running native WindowsXP. But I mainly do some simple tasks: surf the web, MS Office, smaller programming tasks in Eclipse, etc. I have not tried 3D graphics (which will be very slow) or used heavy software, such as CAD, or whatever. But for every day work, I think you can not tell if you run virtual or on bare metal.

[ToddAndMargo]

You should be about 80% of native (or so). Make sure you can give W7 about 4 GB of ram. Your system will need about 8 GB of ram to do this. But, I do get away with 2 gb on my 32 bit linux host.

Tip: use the VirtIO network drivers. The other drivers are hosed (my network bumped up by 512 times when I switched to the VirtIO driver).

Also, bear in mind that W7 is awful. If you need to get some windows work done on a guest VM, consider XP instead.

-T

[squall leonhart]

You should be about 80% of native (or so). Make sure you can give W7 about 4 GB of ram. Your system will need about 8 GB of ram to do this. But, I do get away with 2 gb on my 32 bit linux host.

Tip: use the VirtIO network drivers. The other drivers are hosed (my network bumped up by 512 times when I switched to the VirtIO driver).

Also, bear in mind that W7 is awful. If you need to get some windows work done on a guest VM, consider XP instead.

-T

Even if you have 8GB ram, you probably won't be able to allocate 4GB.

[MarkKnecht]

I want to make the move to a Linux distribution. Not sure which one yet though. Still deciding. Anyways I still require some applications that need Windows. I have tried Wine but no good results. What I care about the most right now is the speed of Windows 7 in Virtualbox. If I can get the speed of Windows 7 natively on my desktop computer I am sold. I do run a few high end programs on my computer Adobe Photoshop, Premier and the Microsoft Office 2010 suite. I just want it to be really smooth as possible not choppy.

I have a HP Pavilion desktop dual core running at 2.9 Ghz and with 4 gigs of DDR3 SDRAM. With a integrated ATI Radeon HD 4200 graphics card. I know I can install Windows XP virtually but Windows XP is nearly ten years old and I don't like the looks of it. I just prefer the look of Windows 7 and the under the hood features it has.

Should I waiting for Virtualbox 5? I was also looking into getting VMWare Player 3 or VMWare Workstation. I do know it costs money but willing to pay for it if it fits my needs.

By the way when I mean speed I mean boot up, quick start of programs and overall general usage. I hope someone here can help. Thank you.

It's a pretty limited amount of data I can give you. I have a Gentoo-based compute server that runs 4-5 copies of Windows at the same time. I'm using a i7 980X Extreme processor and a 5 disk RAID 6 setup with a 3 disk RAID1 backup. I run both VMPlayer as well as Virttualbox-4.0.2, and I run 32-bit Win XP and 64-bit Win 7 in both. Both work very well for me. The one thing I'd tell you to watch out for Virtualbox & Win 7 is make sure you turn off all forms of power management in Win7 as well as choosing the 'performance' level of operation. It seem VBox can do bad things when a Win 7 VM tries to reduce power.

While it might seem logical that an application would run faster in Win 7 native on the hardware, my experience with my hardware is Windows cannot do software RAID as well as Linux, and all of the underlying hardware management is being done outside of Windows which frees up Windows to just run the app.

My processor is 6 core, 12 threads, so I give 2 CPU threads to each of the 5 VMs and save 2 for Gentoo running underneath. Get lots of memory. I have 24GB and give 4GB to each VM and 4 to Gentoo.

Hope this helps,
Mark

[borgerlouie]

Also, bear in mind that W7 is awful. If you need to get some windows work done on a guest VM, consider XP instead.

Sorry for hijack:
I also have performance problems trying to run 5 VMs with Win7 on a host also with Win7. I have 8GB RAM and each VM now has 1GB. My processor is an i5-2400.
I guess the first thing to do is to add more RAM, Im thinking 4GB to each VM. But Im wondering if I should change to WinXP, if this would increase the performance? and if I do should it be x86 or x64? What exactly do you mean that W7 is awful?
Also can I do anything with processor to increase the performance? its a quad core but I have 5 VMs so I cant allocate 1 core to each VM.

[MarkKnecht]

According to Intel that processor is 4 core, 4 threads:

http://ark.intel.com/Product.aspx?id=52 ... i5-2400%29

In my experience you really couldn't go above 3 VMs and expect even moderate performance. At that point you have essentially 3 single CPU Windows VMs running on a system that uses 1 CPU. When I've done that (in my case running 11VMs) I saw a noticeable speed decreases, but it did work.) For my work I've decided that 2 CPU VMs allows Windows to use one and the app I Care about, which is singl threaded anyway, to use the other. Following my rules I wouldn't run more than 1 VM on that class machine. I own an i5-661 which is 2 core, 4 thread and I don't like more than 1 VM on that box.

Good luck,
Mark

[borgerlouie]

Which processor do you have?
I would need one with 6 cores to run 5 VMs, right?
Ive created a few VMs with WinXP x64. Do you think 2GB RAM is enough for each or should I invest and go for 4?

[mpack]

If you want maximum performance you need to run the OS on bare metal

Or run XP as a guest instead of Win7. Most of Win7's improvements are wasted in a VM, particularly graphically, but they still have a CPU cost. I see your comments about not liking the look of XP, but - search the web for "XP themes" and you'll find that it can be made to look an awful lot like Win7, i.e. make it as pretty as you like.

[nuun]

The one thing I'd tell you to watch out for Virtualbox & Win 7 is make sure you turn off all forms of power management in Win7 as well as choosing the 'performance' level of operation. It seem VBox can do bad things when a Win 7 VM tries to reduce power.

That seems to confirm my suspicions that power management is causing my crashes. Can anyone elaborate on how to find all the Windows 7 Power options? I turned off sleep hibernation screen and hard drive in the usual way but that's not enough. What else can I turn off?
thanks,
-nuun

[ewa8949]

Can I rune WINE applications and virtualbox at the same time? When I ran iTunes in virtualbox on a Win 7 VM and then tried to run a wines newsreader program it crashed wine and crashed my audio subsystem to the point I had to reboot my machine to get rid of the constantly repeating click

As far as performance goes I tried Win 7 64-bit with about 1.5 gigs of memory allocated to it and only one processor on my core I7. I really just want to have iTunes work and maybe carbonite. Neither of those work with my Wine setup. iTunes was super dog slow on Win 7 in virtualbox to the point that it took each song about 8 seconds to even start. I think I will give WinXP a try with 2 cores allocated to it. I never did get the 3d visualization to work of iTunes but I might be able to live without that.

thanks!
Eric