virtualbox.org

Hi, I was wondering if there was a way to increase the speed of the virtual NIC in a Host-only network. I've looked up how to just set the speed on the commandline to say 1gbit, and the guest seems to recognize the change, but in the host (win7) the task manager still shows it as a 100mbit connection. I ask because the host-only network is the primary method of I/O between host and guest and I frequently notice it being saturated (99% usage). So I'm basically wondering if the virtual NIC in the host can be changed a speed of 1gbit, or even something higher, like some sort of theoretical virtual device with a speed of, say 100gbit. I mean, as far as the host-only network, it's basically all done in memory, right?

EDIT: Or, of course, if anyone knows of a better way for raw data transfer between guest and host, suggestions are welcome (Guest is Ubuntu 11.04 and currently the data goes from a samba server there to the host-only network, etc, etc)

AFAIK the speed is not artificially constrained by VirtualBox, so changing to a nominal 1Gbps card would be pointless: the transfer speed is as fast as the simulation will allow. You could reduce simulation overhead by switching to a VirtIO-net adapter and using VirtIO-net drivers in the guest.

Apparently it was actually that easy - installed the drivers in the guest, switched to the 'paravirtualized adapter (virtio)' in virtual box, and then testing with some common operations revealed about a 50 to 60% speed increase

thx!