Re: LUNI: source for cheap used computers

On Wed, Apr 20, 2011 at 19:01, John Bundy <[email protected]> wrote:

> Jared,
>
> Those were interesting links on virtualization.  Your comment
>
>  "As was suggested, you can run a full virtualization hypervisor, i.e.
> VirtualBox, which is basically a layer of software that acts like hardware
> with or without a CPU that has Intel VT-x or AMD-V CPU virtualization
> extensions. "
> would seem to be true for VirtualBox and VMWare per the the link
>     http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full_virtualization
>
> My question is if I am using VirtualBox aor VMWare player, would there be a
> performance advantage to upgrading to a machine which specifically supports
> Intel VT-x or AMD-V CPU virtualization extensions?
>
> John
>


Yes, there will be performance advantages to using a CPU that supports
VT-x/AMD-V. A lot of the performance gains come from the ability of the
virtual OS to execute privileged instructions directly on the CPU rather
than having those instructions get trapped by the hypervisor, translated,
and executed/emulated by the hypervisor on the CPU.

How much performance will be gained is tough to say without benchmarking and
whatnot, but I can say anecdotally that I've seen big performance
differences between VMware ESX running on older servers with single core
Xeons versus ESX running on newer quad-core Xeons with VT-x extensions.
Unfortunatly, on the desktop side I'm still running on old P4s, so frankly
any newer CPU with or without virtualization extensions would be a step up
for me.

Jared

-- 
Linux Users Of Northern Illinois (Chicago) - Technical Discussion 
http://luni.org/mailman/listinfo/luni