virtualbox.org

Hi all,

Quick question. I use VirtualBox on production servers and it has performed perfectly for a few years for me, very happy with it.

I am having to set up a new service and it is likely to have very high bandwidth requirements and I'm not sure that using a VM is the best thing to do. The throughput is likely to be constantly 200M (upload) peaking at 700M at times.

My question is, should I use a VM (which allows me to easily backup the whole VM and transfer it to another machine if I need to) or should I really be dealing with this throughput on a bare metal server and not use a VM?

Thank you in advance for any comments on this.

Some many kinds of hardware for Virtualbox to run on... It's hard to say. I would say, just try it. Set up a throw-away Virtualbox guest with a real network connection to the host OS, and copy a large file into the guest through the network, meanwhile monitoring transfer speed on the host OS using something like Process Explorer for Windows host or the Linux Equivalent (Process I/O read bytes, write bytes, other bytes, & delta total bytes are columns I would watch for such bandwidth considerations.) see what throughput you get.

Thanks.

I have tested on a Windows Host with Ubuntu Guest (likely to be the config I wanted). And had the following results.

Windows Host 930Mbit/s
Ubuntu Guest 477Mbit/s

I have tried changing the network type on the guest, but it mainly remains the same.

Based on this, I would assume that I would not be able to get the 700Mbit/s that I was looking for on a VM and would therefore need to use the actual host for the intended tasks.

I guess I've answered my own question unless anyone suggests I can get closer to the 930M the host can achieve.

Thank you.