Benchmarks: VPC 2007 SP1 vs. VirtualBox 1.6

Since new versions of Virtual PC 2007 and VirtualBox were released recently, I was curious about which free version had better performance.

Both VMs were configured exactly the same, tested the same, etc. If there is enough interest (and I have the time), I'll run the same tests with VMWare and Parallels and post the results.

I used Passmark Performance Test 6.1 for the benchmarks.

 

Nice work.

It appears, that VB has greater problems namely with graphics and random disk access; the other results do not appear to much impressive to me.

To judge those results, can you please tell something about the the used system specs? (Hardware [CPU, Graphics card and driver version, disks, RAM], host system [which OS, 32/64 Bit], settings of the VM's [how much RAM, disk space associated, OS]. Especially changing the VM settings might lead to quite different results.

 

Cosmo 203,

Here are the specs:

Host OS/System:
- Vista Home Premium SP1 - 32bit
- Q6600 (OC to 2.88 )
- 4GB RAM
- Graphics card is GeForce 8800GT
- 3 hard drives - all SATAII (250GB, 250GB, 750GB - guest OS hard drive files installed on 750GB drive that does not have any programs on it (i.e., used for backup, images, storage, etc.))

Guest OS:
- XP SP3 - 32 bit (all patches and tweaked using Fast XP on VPC - although not all tweaks used in the article but both VMs configured the same).
- 384MB RAM
- Hardware virtualization turned on
- Hard drives set to automatically expand
- Shared folders on
- Virtual machine additions installed
- Remaining settings at default

 

I've recently saw another VM test using virtual pc, virtualbox and vmware. Virtual pc was the slowest overall, virtualbox was the fastest in certain areas but vmware was the fastest overall.

 

Could you run the benchmark on the host machine to give us an idea of what the performance of the virtual machines are compared to reality (no pun intended ) ?

eg (from Arstechnica: http://arstechnica.com/reviews/apps/vm.ars/4):

http://arstechnica.com/reviews/004/software/virtual-machines/benchmarks.png

And what value are the numbers: time, score, performance compared to a benchmark machine ?

 

Also the figures vary depending on what the Virtual OS is - Virtual PC performs more favourable running Windows than Linux for example, whereas VMWare seems to run XP and Linux at very similar performance levels.

 

nickr,

If I have time this weekend, I'll run the benchmarks on the host. However, my goal wasn't to compare the performance of the VMs to the host but to compare the VMs performance versus each other (while using consistent and simple measures).

The numbers are the results of each passmark test and don't necessarily mean anything on their own. Instead, they are used to compare relative performance between tests or computers.