VMWare vs. Virtualbox performance

[Jacob Bednarz]

Hey,
I do a fair bit of work where I am between VM's and at the moment I am using Virtualbox with Vagrant. After talking with some colleagues last week they mentioned they have seen performance increases swapping to VMWare.

What I am looking to find out is:
- Is there a noticable difference for other users?
- If there is, where are you seeing the performance gains and what type of scenarios?

I'm more than happy to pay should there be a significant increase in performance but just wanted to get the wider community feedback first.

Thanks.

[Seth Vargo]

I think you'll find this article of interest: http://mitchellh.com/comparing-filesystem-performance-in-virtual-machines

Best,

Seth

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[dragon788]

I can definitely support Mitchell's findings. There are some quirks about permissions in shared folders etc but overall VMware is WAY faster than Virtualbox in almost every case. We did some benchmarks around compiling software and performance in Virtualbox actually decreased when going beyond 4 cores, in VMware on an 8 core system we got improvements all the way up to using all 8 cores, and the host OS was still fairly usable. I/O is really a big help on either system, running from SSDs makes life so much better. In VMware there are additional things you can do like putting all VM memory into actual memory and now allowing it to swap to disk, this also keeps things snappy.

[Paul Davidson]

Dragon:

Can you expand on putting all VM memory into actual memory?

Do you mean allocating enough RAM to the VM so that it never needs to disk swap?

Or is there a specific setting in VMware that tells the VM box to never use disk swap space?

I have noticed  that if I don't allocate enough ram to the VM, that performance is dead slow.

Better with an SDD but even flash ram is nowhere near as fast as bus ram.

Thanks

[Ethan S.]

In Workstation, under Edit> Preferences> Memory, change the setting from "Allows VMs to use some swap" to "Fit all VM memory into reserved space". This prevents VM memory from ever getting swapped to disk, which increases performance especially if you have "slow" standard HDDs.

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[Alvaro Miranda Aguilera]

Hi Paul,

I think OP used swap to mean "replace virtualbox with vmware" and not
the actual swap at os level.

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[Alvaro Miranda Aguilera]

Hi Jacob

On top of the link that Seth did share, I can do this.

The performance issue is on virtualbox fs under certain use cases,

if you use the shared folder , /vagrant or any other virtualbox fs
just a staging area, and move your dev work to github/native fs, you
should not have any performance issues.

For somepeople, use vmware is becuase they have/know the product.. the
vmware fs works better.. or they use some feature like symlink on the
host that work transparently on the guest..

whatever its, As for the vmware.. its double cost.. Vmware product
plus vagrant vmware plugin..

Hashicorp does 30 days no question asked if you want to try the
plugin, and then you can ask a refund.

Hope this helps.

Alvaro.

[Jacob Bednarz]

Thanks to everyone for the feedback! The links and comments have convinced me to give it a go. 

Regards,

Jacob

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