——— UPDATE ———
For a while I ran VirtualBox, but after an upgrade at some point, it had a strange memory leak that I couldn’t bother to track down. Eventually, I got tired of having to reboot my Server every 2 days, and uninstalled virtualbox and went back to vmware server (free edition). I have been very happy with the performance using the server as both a desktop and a VM host. I run 2 –3 Guest VM’s continually and the host and VM’s all seem very reasonable.
My Server stats:
OS Name: Microsoft® Windows Server® 2008 Enterprise
OS Version: 6.0.6002 Service Pack 2 Build 6002
OS Manufacturer: Microsoft Corporation
System Manufacturer: Gigabyte Technology Co., Ltd.
System Model: EX58-UD4P
System Type: x64-based PC
Processor(s): 1 Processor(s) Installed.
[01]: Intel64 Family 6 Model 26 Stepping 4 GenuineIntel ~2261 Mhz
Total Physical Memory: 12,285 MB
——— /UPDATE ———
Well, quite a flame inducing title I am sure.
I was running Hyper-V as a feature on Server 2008 (GUIfied), switched to VMWare Server, and finally am now using VirtualBox. These are some of my thoughts on the process that brought me here.
Hyper-V:
Out of the box support for my hardware, even though the hardware was assembled by me. This is what won me over vs. VMWare ESX. ESX didn’t support the i7 CPU + my Mobo, consequently if I wanted to do lower level virtualization, Hyper-V was my only choice (at the time). I ran Hyper-V for a number of years, and while the VM’s ran fine, the OS as a desktop was dog slow. Trying to play Ghost Recon on this setup was masochistic. The other annoyance was lack of support for access to devices attached to the host OS (like printers and USB devices). Finally, I didn’t have the ability to copy textual data from one VM into another (a very important part of my work). I could remotely access the VM’s via RDP, but because I have to run VPN’s within the VM’s RDP wouldn’t work.
Finally, while I started installing Hyper-V based VM’s at work, and running Virtual Server for those on non-64 bit hardware, my company decided to run in the other direction choosing VMWare Server, after trying it out at work, I switched.
VMWare Server:
I converted some of my VM HD’s from Hyper-V (.vhd) to VMWare HD’s (.vmdk), uninstalled the Hyper-V feature and installed the free to use product VMWare Server. Suddenly, my Host machine was blazingly FAST. Did I say FAST? Man, what a night and day difference. I installed Splinter Cell, Medal of Honor, Fallout and Crysis, and realized why I choose that i7 in the first place!
My VM’s were just as fast – at least without doing any fancy measurements, just by the good old eyeball. I now had back my desktop performance, but features of the management utility to manage the VM’s was still fairly minimal. Also, the USB support was lacking still. I visited a coworker in California, and he was running VirtualBox. Once I saw him copying between the two VM’s, I decided to dig a bit deeper.
VirtualBox:
I started reading up on VirtualBox, and most of the reviews were good. Also, I didn’t have to convert my VM’s to test it out, VirtualBox reads .vmdk and .vhd files natively, and is supported on many platforms (including OpenBSD). I installed the app, created a new VM, pointed it to my stopped virtual HD’s from the other MV’s, and BAM, it was working.
So far I am pleased with VirtualBox, I ran into a bit of a snag recently with the update to VirtualBox (vs. the additions software + extension pack versions). And for some reason, after the upgrade the virtual Audio hardware was doing a RAPID click sound (resolved by changing to a different virtual Audio hardware). The other item I notice is that if I try to run multiple CPU’s in these VM’s, I get a hang about every 5 min or so for about 3 sec. When I reduce to 1 CPU, and remove any integration with the virtualization components of the Host, it actually runs smoother (but a bit less speedy).
The management app (VirtualBox Manger) is pretty minimal, and not extremely intuitive. Here are some notes on the cmd line interface which is much more robust:
WINDOWS:
While the online manual is pretty good, it actually leaves out the usage of vboxheadless, while pointing out that vboxheadless is the “preferred” method of starting a headless vm. Since the options are a bit different than “vboxmanage modifyvm –vrdeport ”, which is the described method of defining alternate ports on which to run the headless server (not the preferred method).
C:\Program Files\Oracle\VirtualBox>vboxheadless
Oracle VM VirtualBox Headless Interface 4.0.4
(C) 2008-2011 Oracle Corporation
All rights reserved.Usage:
-s, -startvm, –startvm <name|uuid> Start given VM (required argument)
-v, -vrde, –vrde on|off|config Enable (default) or disable the VRDE
server or don’t change the setting
-e, -vrdeproperty, –vrdeproperty <name=[value]> Set a VRDE property:
"TCP/Ports" – comma-separated list of ports
the VRDE server can bind to. Use a dash between
two port numbers to specify a range
"TCP/Address" – interface IP the VRDE server
will bind to
-c, -capture, –capture Record the VM screen output to a file
-w, –width Frame width when recording
-h, –height Frame height when recording
-r, –bitrate Recording bit rate when recording
-f, –filename File name when recording. The codec
used will be chosen based on the
file extension
To create a “headless” vm running without a GUI (so you can RDP into it):
START->RUN->CMD
cd “C:\Program Files\Oracle\VirtualBox”
vboxheadless –startvm “VM NAME” –vrdeproperty TCP/Ports=5000-5010
Also, while I was able to get vboxmanage metrics collect to work, vboxmanage metrics setup wouldn’t work for me at all. Maybe I will give it a try again at some point…
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One Comment
Finally someone who also wants to use the Hyper-V machine as a desktop OS and noticed how slow it is! I have a 2×8 core, 32 GB memory Asus G34 server with 2 SSD drives. I am using Visual Studio on the server to write some code and found it to be very slow, with 4 virtual machines running but also with just one. But not until I got a new laptop at work, that – while quite high-end – on paper should perform at most similar to my server but in fact was about 5 times faster compiling/debugging code than my server, did I realize something was wrong. I switched to Windows 7, used the existing .VHD images in VirtualBox, and now the server is blazingly fast. Perhaps the virtual machines themselves are a bit slower, but I don’t mind.